Biography
Françoise Vergès is Professor of Cultural Studies at The Africa Institute, Sharjah. Her academic and professional life has been linked with activism and artistic projects. Her work is trans-disciplinary looking at the fabrication of consent and dissent using decolonial psychoanalysis, visual, sonic and literary elements, and feminist, postcolonial, anticolonial and radical theories.
In 1996, she worked with artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien on Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask; for the Paris Triennal curated by Okwui Enwezor (2012), she curated The Slave in Le Louvre. An Invisible Humanity and was project advisor for the Platform 3 ‘Créolité and Creolization’; she has written films on Aimé Césaire (2013) and Maryse Condé (2011). At the Collège d’études mondiales (FMSH, Paris), she created the Chair Global South(s) (2014–2018). In 2015, she co-founded the association ‘Decolonize the Arts,’ and its free monthly university (2016–2019), the space opened by artist Kader Attia in Paris. She regularly curates workshops with artists, activists and scholars of colour that end with a public performance.
She was president of the French National Committee for the Memories and History of Slavery (2008–2012) and was a consultant for the Memorial of the Abolition of Slavery, conceived by Krzysztof Wodiczko and Julian Bonder (opened in 2012).
Her recent publications include A Feminist Theory of Violence (Pluto Press, 2022); De la violence coloniale dans l’espace public (Shed Publishing, 2021); A Decolonial Feminism (Pluto Press, 2021); The Wombs of Women. Race, Capitalism, Feminism (Duke University Press, 2020); and Resolutely Black. Conversations with Aimé Césaire (Polity, 2020).
She received her PhD in Political Theory from Berkeley University (1995).