Françoise Vergès

Françoise Vergès holds the Chair “Global South(s),” Collège d’études mondiales, Paris. Vergès grew up in Reunion Island in a communist, anti-colonialist and feminist family. In the 1970s–1980s, she was a journalist in a feminist monthly and weekly, an editor in a feminist publishing house in France and worked in anti-racist and anti-imperialist movements. She has written extensively on vernacular practices, memories of colonial slavery and colonialism, psychoanalysis, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and on processes of creolization in the Indian Ocean world. Between 2000 and 2010, she was Head of the scientific and cultural program for a forthcoming museum in Reunion Island for which she advocated the idea of a “museum without objects.” Between 2009 and 2012, she was president of the Committee for the Memory and History of Slavery in France, created in application of the May 21st 2001 Law (Loi Taubira) recognizing slave trade and slavery as “crime against humanity.” Beside her activism-based writings, Françoise Vergès is author of moving-image documentaries, collaborated with filmmakers and artists and has been working as an independent curator.