Françoise Vergès (La Réunion/ France. Ph.D in Political Theory, University of Berkeley, 1995), writes on the racist fabrication of premature death, decolonial feminism, the impossible decolonization of the western museum, climate disaster and decolonial politics of vital needs. She has written films on Maryse Condé and Aimé Césaire, collaborates with artists, and, since 2015, curates L’Atelier which produces public performances with artists and activists. In 2025 (Bannister Fletcher Fellowship), she organized the workshop  “Imagining the Post-Museum,” with the Whitechapel Gallery, Mosaic Room and the Sarah Parker Remond Center for the Study of Racism and Racialization (UCL, London), and Cité internationale des arts and ULIP in Paris. She is editorial consultant for choreographer Benjamin Millepied’s Paris Dance Project.

Françoise Vergès is currently working on a book and a film about communist anti-colonial struggles in Reunion Island through her parents’ personal archives and her own. Recent publications: Making the World Clean. Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment and Racial Capitalism (2024), Program of Absolute Disorder Decolonizing the Museum A Decolonial Feminism (2024), A Decolonial Feminism (2021).

What we wrote when Françoise took part in Episode 11, 2024:

Françoise Vergès is an antiracist feminist activist, a public educator, an independent curator, and the cofounder of the collective Decolonize the Arts and of the free and open university Decolonizing the Arts. She received her political education from her anticolonial communist parents and the people in Réunion Island, an education she pursued in Algeria, Mexico, England, the UAE, the USA, and France, received her Ph.D in Political Theory (University of Berkeley, 1995).

She is the author of A Decolonial Feminism (Pluto), The Wombs of Women: Race, Capital, Feminism (Duke), Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Metissage (Duke), and numerous books in French. Her last book “ Une théorie feministe de la violence: pour une politique antiraciste de la protection” published in France at the end of 2020, sheds light on state-supported institutions such as the justice system and prisons, which paradoxically, by aiming to decrease violence, contribute to enhancing it.