The call to decolonize philosophy is growing, and while this is a dense and robust demand, a vital maneuver of this commitment is to offer a fuller sense of human inquiry that forwards an intersectional and historically accountable notion of the human subject. This critique is vital because it helps us move beyond heteropatriarchal and colonial epistemologies that can enclose thinking. Additionally, this reshifts the geography of our reasoning (I borrow this claim from the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s annual conference themes, and I write this blog post as a continuation of the shifts this organization and its members have nurtured within me), particularly with the crosscurrents and historical contributions from the Global South or global majority. A scholar I repeatedly rely on to decolonize my thinking is Françoise Vergès. In this brief posting, I will narrate how I was introduced to her work and how it has helped me. In so doing, I hope that readers can consider how her projects might align and extend theirs.
Why Vergès?
I want to reflect on who introduced me to Vergès’s work and note that decolonial feminist philosophy was not part of my philosophical training. I include this detail to consider how scholars outside the discipline can help us expand who counts as a philosopher, an ongoing site of feminist argument. I am fortunate to have a growing group of scholars in the Twin Cities who are also committed antiracist educators. Arun Saldanha, a Cultural Studies professor at the University of Minnesota, is one of them. During the painful days of COVID and the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, we met at our favorite socialist coffee shop, May Day Café (I mention this café and signal my gratitude to the many shops, bars, pubs, bookstores, and other welcoming enclaves that are the material means of producing philosophy). While I later problematize, I acknowledge the power of these life-sustaining goods and services that allow our bodies to think with our minds. May Day, renowned for its affordable pricing and labor advocacy, sits in the underrated neighborhood of Powderhorn, less than a mile from the George Floyd Memorial. I insert this detail as Vergès is a thinker who mindfully asks us to consider the everyday memorials and symbols that challenge dominant forms of power.
As another layer, I am narrating the details of this conversation for philosophical reasons, namely, to elongate my argument that written philosophy is always in relationship with oral or verbal philosophy and are both contributing grounds for reason. However, oral philosophy is often viewed as less legitimate, rigorous, or valuable, as its displaced status in tenure review and promotion reveals. Formal and informal conversations with people writing and featured in the APA blog series have profoundly shaped my oral and written philosophy, including recent contributors Jennifer Carter, Anne van Leeuwen, Emily Anne Parker, and Kathryn Sophia Belle.
I explained to Arun my attempt to link and differentiate Luce Irigaray’s sexual difference theory with Édouard Glissant’s use of creolization. For me, each thinker offered critical critiques that deepened the question of the human subject. Irigaray’s sexual difference theorizes from the other side of the binary opposition of a phallogocentric economy; Glissant’s creolization theorizes a mixed identity poetically drawn from Caribbean cultures marred by the Middle Passage. I value Glissant’s work because he posits a complex and robust subject that neither elides nor essentializes Black(ened) identities (I am referencing Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s critique that to be Black(ened) is to be a Black person under the conditions of an antiblack system) born from the abyssal womb-tomb of transatlantic enslavement. I value Irigaray’s psychoanalytic sexuate critique because it reveals a symbolic system that successfully and harmfully generates sexual indifference. Given North American philosophy’s submersion in a culture of tacit whiteness and heteropatriarchy, I wanted to contend with both thinkers, but their ideas are weighty and differ in their geographical locations and commitments. As I explained my maneuvers, Arun interjected, “Why not consider Françoise Vergès?”
Upon a quick gloss of Vergès’s work, one can survey the scale of her contributions:
- French feminist activist
- Notable reader of Frantz Fanon
- Interviewer of Aimé Césaire
- Film writer (Aimé Césaire face aux révoltes du monde, 2013 ; Maryse Condé. Une voix singulière, 2011)
- Museum curator (« L’esclave au Louvre : une humanité invisible, » 2013; « Dix femmes puissantes, » 2013; « Haïti, effroi des oppresseurs, espoir des opprimés, » 2014)
- Decolonial feminist
Vergès, born in Paris, France, grew up in Réunion and Algeria before returning to France to study journalism. In an interview, she describes the activism of her parents and her counter-education to combat the minimization of Réunion and the Creole language. After fourteen years of living without supporting documentation in the United States, she entered graduate school and completed a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. An author of numerous books, two of which have been translated into English, I sense her work is just beginning to receive recognition.
At various philosophy conferences, I have heard panels and papers that cited decolonial and feminist theorists like María Lugones, Gayatri Spivak, and Sylvia Wynter; however, I have heard little about Vergès. Her works remain insufficiently recognized, along with decolonial feminist scholars who hail from regions outside the Global North or Global Minority. This omission contributes to philosophy’s Eurocentric and Euro-adjacent hold on the discipline that diminishes and overlooks many theorists who think with the African continent and its archipelagos. This form of antiblack racism deprives philosophy of its desired aims of broad scope and truthful insight. As philosophers who seek to decolonize and oppose sexual-racial hierarchies in our classrooms, curriculums, and teaching practices, we must engage the breadth of contributions outside, in this case, my narrow training in predominantly heteronormative, male-centric, eighteenth- to twentieth-century European Continental Philosophy. For me, trained in the writings of Jacques Lacan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Lévinas, Gilles Deleuze, and Irigaray, I knew I was missing vital contributors from the Francophone context, and their dialogues without reference to Europe, that reshape and resituate the narrow slice of French Post-War phenomenology and existentialism in which I have been steeped. Vergès can foray with more heavily read philosophic thinkers and assert claims and inquiries beyond their scope.
A historical and geographic intersectionality
I have found Vergès helpful in explaining and tracing a historical and geographic intersectional analysis of human subjects. Her work critiques the sexual politics of extractive technologies fueled by ongoing capitalist and neocolonial projects. Vergès does this in compelling ways that those teaching Feminist, Environmental, Africana, Philosophy of Race, Film, or Medical Ethics will find valuable. In The Wombs of Women (2020), previously published in French, Vergès suggests a parallel and alarming critique that many fail to note: extraction of natural resources is not just wood, gold, precious metals, and oil; it is also women’s wombs.
She explains how, during the 1970s, when activists and philosophers like Irigaray were arguing for French women’s rights to reproductive health, a scandal broke on the Island of Réunion. She details the lucrative reimbursements doctors received for supposedly minor medical interventions. These procedures were, in fact, thousands of abortions and sterilizations performed on the majority Creole population. She details, “Reunionese newspapers revealed that abortions were being performed not only without consent, but also on women as many as three to six months pregnant and that the procedures were followed by tubal ligations, also without consent” (p. 28). The racialized history of women’s wombs has become a site of scrutiny that recent literary works such as Jessamine Chan’s dystopian A School for Good Mothers and Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s historically based Take My Hand have popularized because the threats are prescient. Vergès pointedly records that her work to uncover this scandal, brought forward by a lawsuit of thirty women, required no special primary research methods, witness interviews, or archival search for hidden evidence. Instead, she was able to use all secondary sources because this harm remains in plain sight.
I draw from Vergès’s critique that women’s wombs have been controlled because they can reproduce or suppress wealth-making, a capacity Euromodern states seek to leverage. She notes that extraction can readily occur in places—in her case, France—deemed “territories” or “overseas departments” (département d’outre-mer, DOMs). These are economically and politically dependent former colonies that supposedly owe debts of gratitude toward their sage, economically generous, and “liberatory” colonial parents and siblings.
In Monsters and Revolutionaries, she outlines this colonial romance that diminishes these regions, their people, and their reasoned judgments, treating them as childlike and in need of oversight from their elder brothers (the fraternity that joins liberty and equality) and their colonial parent, the motherland or fatherland. In the case of France, mother and father are hybridized in the figure of La Mère-Patrie. Vergès’s colonial romance analysis also draws out the gender assumptions these regions used to generate colonial “daughters,” sexuating territories, and DOMs as distinct from the fraternity of the Metropole.
Her work moves us into an intersectional critique of this colonized daughter’s status and the contemporary labor a grateful daughter should perform. She notes with Sara R. Farris the rise of femonationalism, a posture that feigns generous admittance of poorer women to perform social reproductive labor. These women, often identifying with non-Christian religions whose garments they cannot publicly wear, wash the bodies of the elderly and disabled, clean businesses and institutions, and mind the young. They perform the social reproductive labor that white feminists abandoned. This casts formerly colonizing states as generous toward these daughters, sisters, and wives. At the same time, their sons, brothers, partners, and fathers may remain outside the national border or socio-economic hubs of power, portrayed as potential terrorists, illegal migrants, or troubled youth. Women’s coerced compliance is the tacit agreement.
Reshifting the geography of our reason
Vergès’s critique clarifies how wombs and social reproductive labor are converted into commodities extracted from France’s territories and DOMs. But she also signals how coffee, tobacco, sugar, spices, wood, dye, fruit, and textiles are others. In her article, “The Slave at the Louvre,” Vergès asks museum viewers to notice how enslavement was not something that happened “over there” but in their homes and habits. The Louvre, built in 1793, houses art through 1848. She notes the significance of these dates for formerly enslaved people: 1793 is the year that Saint-Domingue abolished slavery after the 1791 enslaved people’s insurrection, and 1848 is the year slavery was abolished again, after 1804 when Bonaparte rejected the decree of 1794. These dates frame the vital question of how enslavement is represented or not.
She contends that the quotidian scenes that fill the museum—tobacco pipes, coffee pots, teacups, sugar bowls, cotton dresses—become the means to construct bourgeois masculinity: smoking, gaming, and prostitution; parallelly, femininity is constructed through the parlor, the cotton dress, and service to men. These depictions reveal how European society’s “golden age” accepted enslavement, dispossession, and unbridled free markets. The museum visitor becomes aware of the inhumanity that these ordinary forms of elegant hospitality, emotional soothing, class aspiration, and cultural comfort conceal and reveal. I suggest that these depictions of global domination remain not “over there” or “in the past” but still hold sway here and today.
As an example, I am a person who enjoys keeping up with style media, and “French chic” has become its own global moniker. However, the concept is premised on the colonial availability of certain fabrics (cashmere, cotton, silk, linen, denim), materials (gold, diamonds, leather, jute, rattan, ivory), dyes (indigo), and activities (drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette, shopping, engagement-wedding) made possible because of France’s imperial reach. Brands like Cartier, Hermès, Dior, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Chloé, and YSL remain highly profitable despite the global recession and inflation, with stylists calling these brands “evergreen,” “classic,” and “timeless” in their appeal for globally recognized class achievement
As Vergès notes, “Coffee, sugar, cotton, precious woods, and indigo were intimately connected with slave trade and slavery, but the creation of the consumer and his or her rights—easy access to goods at a reasonable price—required distance from the producer, a naturalization of the economic system of slavery” (p. 11). This observation of distance that must be maintained between consumer and producer is insightful to me as I reflect that these regions were called outer sea departments and territories. The outer presumes an inner—an us versus them. I have written on Irigaray’s analysis of the double entendre of sea and mother or, in French, la mère/mer. Suppose there is an outer sea (Caribbean Sea, Indian Ocean) versus an inner sea (Mediterranean Sea). In that case, there is also an outer mother whose relationship with the Euromodern state is vastly different than the inner mother. The inner mother births the global consumer. The outer mother births the global producer. Becoming a consumer means that the system of the global neoplantation is still not over there and back then; it is here, and it is now.
I respond to Vergès’s critique by aiming to shift my identity from consumer to a fully human subject, capable of creating, curating, and conserving, closing the gap between consumer and producer. However, I am mindful that even these turns can quickly be co-opted into a chic minimalist marketing ploy that creates, curates, and conserves to consume less without fundamentally challenging global systems of oppressive domination. The decolonial feminist framework I read in Vergès’s works calls me to account. It recalibrates my senses, appetites, and practices toward new forms of agile resistance and awareness of my participation in this global system.
Finally, I submit that Vergès’s scholarship is unique because it offers a feminist theorization in and outside of France’s metropole and thinks with the streams of creolization situated in the Indian Ocean, thus extending the trajectory of Glissant’s Poetics of Relation from the Caribbean Sea towards its crosscurrents with the Indian Ocean. For example, her critique of filial subordination to colonial parents is a shared experience. It connects Vergès scholarship with Christina Klein’s analysis of Cold War Orientalism, Soojin Pate’s critique of U.S.-Korean adoption, and documentaries such as Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh’s “France is Our Mother Country” (« La France est notre patrie »).
Vergès is also helpful in thickening an analysis of being Black(ened) globally. She distinguishes depictions of Blacks as distinct from representations of enslavement. Her work offers the scale of critique that Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic posits, but rather than trace the flow of exchanges between a Christianized Europe and the New World, she invites readers to follow the crosscurrents of Islamic and Hindu African, South Asian, and Eastern Asian exchanges. Vergès’s work informs how the African continents and archipelagos are globally connected and prolific, producing their traditions of reason, art, and knowledge. Her Blackness is not merely an identity of social death engaged in a futile combative stance against systems of oppression, nor does she ignore this reality.
For those thinking about teaching figures like Glissant or Vergès, I submit that their theories of creolization better align with the experiences of many migrants and displaced people, often the very people who fill and seek status within predominantly white institutions in the United States. Theories of creolization are comprehensible with the lived experiences of many of the undergraduate students I have taught at an urban two-year college. These satellite campuses include three state correctional facilities. Although predominantly white-identifying employees work at these institutions, BIPOC students make up almost half of the student body, and these students want to know how to think with the racially-culturally-geographically mixed status of their identities and lived experiences. They want to know how to honor the ghosts of lost kin, live in the wake, encounter the shoals, and use the interference of these waves to generate new patterns of possibility. Vergès’s scholarship can steady us with these currents.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Alida Liberman or the Associate Editor Elisabeth Paquette.
Ruthanne Kim
Ruthanne Soohee Crāpo Kim is the faculty lead organizer for Community Antiracism Education (C.A.R.E.) at St. Cloud State University and an affiliate faculty at Pennsylvania State University. Her research queries feminist philosophy, critical philosophy of race, Caribbean philosophy, environmental philosophy, and decolonial studies. She also publishes and hosts workshops on decolonizing pedagogy, supporting minoritized scholars, and ontological labor in the academy. Her recent books includeRethinking Space, Place, and Identity with Irigaray (SUNY 2022) and a forthcoming monograph on Édouard Glissant.
