This lecture, as part of Black History Month Florence (BHMF), features a conversation with Professor Françoise Vergès.
A black woman’s experience of misogyny is different from the one experienced by a white woman. Similarly, her experience of racism is not the same as the one experienced by a black man. African-American female thinkers (Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberlé Crenshaw, bell hooks to name a few) were the first to insist on the necessity to consider the complex relations that existed between different types of social categorizations and the specific expressions of discrimination that derived from them.
In Europe, the influence of Black feminism has recently started to shed light on the limits of white feminist theories, and academic research addressing the specificities of the European context has started to emerge (Emejulu and Sobande, 2019). In France, the reception of postcolonial studies since the 1990s continues to cause controversy within the academic world and in the political realm. In her book A Decolonial feminism (published in 2019 in French and translated in English in 2021, Pluto Press), political scientist and activist Françoise Vergès calls for a multi-dimensional approach (that she privileges over the notion of intersectionality ) to the study of gender discriminations and social inequalities at large. How can feminism be separated from anti-racist, anti-capitalistic and anti-imperialist struggles? At the heart of her thesis is the urgent need to take into account the long-lasting consequences of European colonialism and to draw attention to white women’s privileges and the pitfalls of what she calls civilizational feminism. Vergès argues that the demands of non-white female workers during a strike movement in 2018 in France can only be understood in the light of a decolonial perspective.
Professor Françoise Vergès is a Consulting Professor at the Center for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College. She held the Chair of Postcolonial Studies at the Collège d’études mondiales until 2018. She is also the president of the Comité pour la Mémoire et l’Histoire de l’Esclavage. She has extensively published in French and English on postcolonial theory, French colonialism, black feminism, slavery, psychoanalysis, Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire.
