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Françoise Vergès (Reunion Island) who 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) .
Arriving in France in the 1970s, she was active in antiracist movements and later worked as a feminist journalist and editor and as a freelance writer for anti-imperialist journals. In 1983, she went in the USA where she held menial jobs before entering the university. She got her Ph.D. in Political Theory at the University of Berkeley (1995. Her doctoral thesis Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Métissage was published by Duke University Press in 1999), before holding positions at Sussex University, Goldsmiths College, Brown University and the Africa Institute.
Vergès has always been active in the art/activist world, as a curator for the Memorial of the Abolition of Slavery (Nantes), a co-founder of the collective “Decolonize the Arts” (2015-2020), the initiator of decolonial visits in museums and as creator of “L’Atelier”, a workshop and public performance with artists and activist (the more recent one was for Berlin Biennale, 2022). As the co-director of the team for a “post-museum” in Réunion Island (2004-2010), she proposed the notion of a “museum without objects” (the project was politically defeated in 2010). She is on the board of different artistic projects and a member of the scientific council of the Foundation for the Memory of Slavery in France.
Interested in the racial fabrication of “premature death” and in the multiple practices of resistance, she writes books and articles on the afterlives of slavery and colonization, climate catastrophe and racism, the impossible decolonization of the western museum, decolonial feminism, psychiatry, and the “post-museum.” Her publications include: A Program of Absolute Disorder. Decolonizing the Museum (Pluto, 2024), A Decolonial Feminism (Pluto, 2021); The Wombs of Women: Race, Capital, Feminism (Duke University Press, 2020), Aimé Césaire, Resolutely Black. Conversations with Françoise Vergès (Polity, 2020). She has written documentary films on Maryse Condé (2013) and Aimé Césaire (2011), and was a project advisor for documenta11 (2002) and the Triennale de Paris (2011).
