Making the World Clean

Françoise Vergès (Reunion Island-France) is currently Senior Fellow Researcher at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Race and Racialization, University College London. A co-founder of the collective “Decolonize the Arts” (2015–2020), she is the curator of decolonial visits in museums and L’Atelier, a workshop and public performance with artists and activists. She is interested in the racial fabrication of “premature death,” the multiple practices of resistance and South–South circulations of theories and cultural forms. She writes books and articles on the afterlives of slavery and colonization, climate catastrophe and racial capitalocene, the impossible decolonization of the western museum, decolonial feminism, psychiatry, and the “post-museum.” Her publications include: A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonizing the Museum (Pluto, 2024), A Decolonial Feminism (Pluto, 2021), The Wombs of Women: Race, Capital, Feminism (Duke University Press, 2020), and Resolutely Black: Conversations with Françoise Vergès, with Aimé Césaire(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).

"Dalit women in India remove human excreta by hand from sewers. In the United States most cleaners are Black and brown women. In one angry, fell swoop Making the World Clean shows such phenomena to be neither accidental nor unintentional but the conscious product of racial capitalism. Françoise Vergès uncovers the violent, colonial social relations that make certain people cleaners of waste, while capitalism continues to waste lives and ecosystems. Capitalism won’t clean up its act, with the help of this book we can cleanse the world of capitalism." —Tithi Bhattacharya, Professor of South Asian History, Purdue University"Capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy are all forms of power that survive by monopolising our imaginary of how to cure ourselves of the very problems that they create and disseminate among us. They cause war, misery, and environmental disasters and colonise the way we think of peace, happiness, and sustainability. In the same vein, and as Françoise Vergès shows so well in this book, they cause waste, dirt, and toxicity and shape our imaginary of cleaning and cleanliness. Her differentiation between “cleaning up” and “cleaning” grounds a powerful critique of this colonised imaginary. It should be said that in this environment of intellectual pollution reading Vergès is itself a form of decolonial cleaning of the mind."—Ghassan Hage, Professor of Anthropology, University of Melbourne