Decolonial Feminist Thought: A conversation between Françoise Vergès and Edna Bonhomme

““If feminism and feminists are in the service of capital, the state, and empire, is it still possible to breathe life back into them, by reanimating the movement with the objectives of social justice, dignity, respect, and the politics of life against the politics of death?”

Professor Françoise Vergès in A Decolonial Feminism (Pluto, 2021)

Decolonial feminism: a politics, working towards the abolition of capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and the state; a theory, rethinking logics of exploitation, oppression, and the institutions that engender them; a pedagogy, recognizing and understanding difference as a pre-condition for working together across difference. Françoise Vergès and Edna Bonhomme repoliticize feminist thinking and practice, which have been increasingly deployed in the service of the carceral state, neoliberalism, and developmental paternalism. In this conversation, they will think through state violence, climate catastrophe, racial capitalism, and reproductive (in)justice in order to map out a cartography of decolonial feminist thought.

About the speakers:

Professor Françoise Vergès is a franco-Reunionnese activist who has written on decolonial antiracist feminism, slavery as a regime of extraction, racial capitalocene and anti-imperialism. She also curates exhibitions and decolonial workshops and performance with artists, refugees and activists of color, the most recent one was at the Berlin Biennale (12-12/08) entitled « Building Refuges and Sanctuaries: An Antiracist Decolonial Feminist Practice.» Last publication: A Feminist Theory of Violence (2022) and De la violence coloniale dans l’espace public (2021).

Dr Edna Bonhomme is a historian of science, editor, and cultural writer. One of her tasks is to mine through the archives and complicate our understanding of contagion, epidemics, toxicity, and maladies. Through critical storytelling, Edna narrates how people perceive modern plagues and how they try to escape from them. Her essays have appeared in Al Jazeera, The Guardian, The London Review of Books, The Nation and elsewhere. Edna earned a PhD in the History of Science from Princeton University. Edna is currently writing her book, Captive Contagions (One Signal/Simon & Schuster, 2023), which examines the role that confinement has played in fostering and hindering epidemics. Edna lives in Berlin, Germany.

Photo credit: AFP