Françoise Vergès Will Discuss Decolonial Feminism

Event Details

Date: Wednesday, September 18, 2019
Time: 7:30 p.m.
Location: Joe Rosenfield ’25 Center, Room 101

• Why, when and how did women’s rights became a trump card for neoliberalism and imperialism?
• How do we understand the counter-offensive to the massive emergence of women movements in the Global South in recent years?
• How do we understand the alliance between authoritarian regimes and neoliberalism and its consequences on women’s lives?
• How do we analyze the ways in which green capitalism and neofascist regimes interact? 

Françoise Vergès, an independent scholar, educator, and decolonial feminist activist, will answer these questions in “A Decolonial Feminism.” She will define what she means by civilizing feminism and why it is important to reclaim a political antiracist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist feminism, a decolonial feminism that is open to queer and indigenous politics and works for the transformation of the current brutal and cruel world. 

Vergès grew upon Reunion Island with anticolonial, communist, and feminist parents and was quite early an activist herself. She has lived in Algeria, France, Mexico, the United States, United Kingdom, and France. In the late 1970s, she was a journalist for a feminist magazine and an editor for a feminist publishing house for which she collected testimonies of women under military dictatorship (Chile, Salvador). She moved to the U.S. in 1983 where she worked before going back to the university. She obtained her doctorate in political theory in 1995 at Berkeley University.

She has taught at Sussex University, Goldsmiths College, Berkeley University, and Brown University. She was chair of Global South(s) in Paris 2008–12. Vergès has written on Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, memories of slavery, the postcolonial museum, colonialism and imperialism, racial capitalism and racial Capitalocene, and decolonial feminism. She is the president of the association Decolonizing the Arts which has opened a free university for artists of color in Paris. She worked in antiracist politics, is an independent curator and the author two films, one on Maryse Condé, the other on Aimé Césaire. She will be speaking about her last book A Decolonial Feminism (forthcoming in English at Pluto Press).

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Institute for Global Engagement.