As part of a new series titled “Intellectual Discussions”, the Legal Agenda met with historian and decolonial activist Françoise Vergès to ask her about decolonial feminism, Gaza and the complicity of white feminism, and decolonizing the universal museums. Vergès is an expert on the history of slavery and decolonization with a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in the United States. For years, she has headed the National Committee for the Memory and History of Slavery in France.

The following are edited excerpts from the interview that we published on the Legal Agenda’s pages.

The Legal Agenda (LA): You were born and grew up on the island of Réunion and then lived in Algeria, where you obtained your high-school diploma. Could you explain to us how your personal history and family history influenced your intellectual path and commitment to the struggle?

Françoise Vergès: I began my life in Réunion and then in Algeria, and what I gained in these two places lies at the heart of my intellectual and political upbringing. In Réunion, I was reading literature, stories, and newspapers unrelated to the French school I was attending. Then I discovered Algeria, the country that won its independence after a war of liberation that I was constantly hearing about at home, especially from my uncle Jacques Vergès. He was a lawyer for the Algerian nationalists, foremost amongst them Djamila Bouhired. Naturally, I grew up with these personalities. So for me, it was about both upbringing and geography, i.e. the place itself where I grew up, initially on an island in the Indian Ocean next-door to Madagascar, India, and the island of Mauritius. Europe was, to us, on the periphery. Algeria, then, was my first experience with living on the African continent and everything it represented, to me, at that stage of my childhood and early adolescence.

LA: In your book, The Wombs of Women: Race, Capital, Feminism, you analyze thousands of sterilizations and abortions forced upon women in Réunion in the 1970s, just like they were forced upon women in the Global South. How can the concept of colonialism help us approach these criminal policies practiced against women?

Vergès: It’s very important to understand this because there is a prevailing idea in France, as well as Europe, that 19th-century colonialism and the post-Second World War independences are a page that has been turned and an era that has ended and we must move on to another stage. It’s true that we have transitioned to something else, but what gets obscured is what theorists call the “afterlife”, i.e. the thing that remains in spite of everything. The page cannot be turned on centuries of oppression, hegemony, and plundering. Hence, colonialism is a description of what still exists, whether in economic relations, political relations, or matters of culture and arts – all these issues that have been addressed, by Albert Memmi, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and several women such as Maryse Condé, as “alienation”. We were taught to disdain our mother tongue and native culture, and we came to think about ourselves in relation to the West. So it’s about getting rid of the persisting alienation, because relations of domination do not disappear simply because a given people reclaimed their land and rebuilt their state and nation.

LA: In a recent statement, French President Emmanuel Macron stressed the need to “rearm France demographically”. In the same speech, he declared the end of jus soli in Mayotte, i.e. ceasing the granting of French nationality to children born to foreigners in this French department located in the Indian Ocean between Madagascar and the Mozambique coast. How should we interpret this contradiction in Macron’s discourse? On one hand, he’s urging for increased reproduction in France, but on the other hand, he’s declaring that French nationality will no longer be granted to children born on French soil.

Vergès: That’s what I tried to explore in my book The Wombs of Women. I tried to show that although the state seems to practice two ostensibly contradictory policies regarding women, no such contradiction exists when it comes to reproduction and women’s wombs. In reality, these are clear political choices regarding who is entitled to reproduce and become a mother and who does not have that right, as well as the nature of the children that the nation desires and the children it does not desire. The phrase “demographic rearmament” does not mean all the women of France. It excludes women who are racially stigmatized, i.e. black women, women who wear hijabs, Romani women, and women who belong to the popular classes. The desired children are the children of the bourgeoisie, who will create France’s glory. Hence, behind this militaristic phrase that likens women’s wombs to a cannon factory, class and race issues remain very present.

In the colonies, a different reproductive policy was always applied. In the era of colonial slavery, for example, enslaved women were never considered mothers in the fullest sense of the word. They were defending themselves and resisting, but we know that the master could, for example, take a child to sell it and separate it from its parents. This was then codified in Le Code de l’indigénat (the Native Code). Later, in the post-slavery colonial period, colonized families never received the same rights as the colonists. This continues to this day. We know that in France today, racially stigmatized women are mistreated in maternity departments in hospitals, and the children don’t have the right to the same childhood. Hence, behind the prevalent phrase “women’s rights”, which claims to mean all women, there are in fact racial, classist, and genderist policies deeply rooted in history. On the island of Mayotte, not only is the right to obtain French nationality for people born on its territory (jus soli) under review. Rather, the director of the Regional Health Department, who is a senior official in the French state, also said in a statement last year that all the island’s women who attend the public hospital can be sterilized. In other words, sterilization is seen as a solution to the serious problems that women are experiencing in Mayotte.

LA: In your book A Decolonial Feminism, you wrote that being a feminist today comes with some burden. Specifically in France, and particularly since the adoption of the law banning the hijab in 2004, feminism has become a dominant discourse. In other words, the right and even the far right in France today claim to defend women. How did we transition in this country from a universal feminism unconcerned with the racial and colonial issue to a white or even imperialist feminism?

Vergès: Indeed, it is very important to understand the development of the dominant French feminism because there also existed, in parallel and throughout French history, feminists from various other persuasions, such as Marxist feminists, anarchist feminists, Trotskyist feminists… but the dominant feminism, which can be described as bourgeois feminism and also struggled for women’s rights, became imperialist at the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the third millennium. This is what I call femonationalism – feminism that is in service of nationalism and that has focused, as you say, on the hijab issue. The hijab is what gave this feminism its place in public opinion. 

In the feminism of the 1970s, there was also a statist dimension. The first state secretariat for women, attached to the Council of Ministers, emerged in the [Valéry] Giscard d’Estaing era. There was in France a rather historically ingrained state feminism that would gradually become more and more important. The truth is that the feminists of the secular left are the ones who raised the hijab issue. The fact that it came from the left is very important. I think that if it had come from feminists on the right, it would not have resonated so much. But at that time, we were under left-wing governments claiming that hijab-wearing women threaten the feminist gains of the 1970s and that Islam therefore poses a danger to women’s rights. So the left-wing feminists are the ones who provided such arguments to the state, neoliberalism, and imperialism based on deeply rooted Islamophobia. In this regard, we can recall a whole series of events and incidents and constant discourse about the burkini and other fabricated stories. This discourse was very important because it presented women’s rights as a measure of civilization… this is what I call “civilizational feminism”, which reproduces the “civilizing mission” discourse by adapting it to the 21st century. In other words, in the name of liberating women, we must intervene in other countries’ affairs. And secularism, which was originally the right to belief, transformed into a religion embraced by these feminists.

LA: In a Eurocentric approach, feminism is considered dominant as a product of the Enlightenment. How does it clash with this claim, and what can be done to decolonize the history of feminism today?

Vergès: The European and French feminist movement must look at its own history and ask itself how this feminism remained, as is incorrectly promoted, protected from the influence of ideas contending that colonialism is necessary to enrich the nation and France – ideas that emerged in force in the 18th century and became central in the 19th century. What insulated this feminism from the influence of these ideologies and from the idea of Europe as the bearer of enlightenment? What this movement forgot is that they are white and how they became white. There are not many studies about whiteness in the feminist movement… the issue is, how can feminists today resist whiteness as a privilege and ideology that has helped create a world pervaded by inequality, a world that consists of a North and a South, a world in which white has ultimately become synonymous with great civilization and culture?

LA: You adopt a decolonial feminism. What are the goals of this feminism, what are its battles, and what imaginary does it propose?

Vergès: Everyone can profess to be a feminist, including the feminists on the far right. However, we must distinguish between the various feminist movements. There is Islamic feminism, Black feminism… regarding decolonial feminism, I place it within the history of decolonization and its theories. Decolonization is a historical process: as Fanon says, it doesn’t end with the mere acquisition of independence. So decolonization aims to end the world of racism, capitalism, and imperialism – that cruel and barbaric world that produces inequality, deep injustice, and extractive economics, a world and system that is destroying the earth. Decolonial feminism is radically opposed to racism, capitalism, and imperialism. It does not merely oppose negative representations of women; rather, it truly resists this system that has made our planet unsuitable for millions of people to live and breathe. Decolonial feminism is also the liberation of all of society and the liberation of the planet from this system and this economic and ideological model.

LA: We are witnessing almost complete silence from the dominant white feminist movement in France and Europe over the genocidal war in Gaza. Does this feminist movement’s complicity with Israel indicate that it is influenced by Islamophobia and the political exploitation of antisemitism?

Vergès: The deafening silence of this feminism about what’s happening in Gaza is shameful. However, it perhaps finally unveils this feminism’s complicity, as you say. An entire people could be annihilated. Entire cities have been destroyed and become rubble, as well as schools and universities… everything that represents an entire people’s social and cultural life has been destroyed. Even the cemeteries have been ruined. All the excuses along the lines of “yes, but Hamas…” are today meaningless. 

So why this complicity? On one hand, I believe that it is linked to deep Islamophobia, as well as philosemitism, which is in reality antisemitic. We love the Jews, but it’s ultimately because we drove them out and removed them from our homes, i.e. from Europe. Israel is the “fortress of the West”, as is promoted, the democratic fortress… I think this silence reveals this feminism’s deep complicity with imperialism at all times. In the 19th century, there was complicity between a certain feminism and imperialism, but its voice was not loud. In other words, it wasn’t influencing political decision-making. Even the governments were not at that time putting its discourse at the forefront, because governments are very masculine. But because of the drift that I mentioned in the beginning, which happened in the 1990s and at the start of the third millennium, whereby women’s rights and feminism became an important weapon in the hands of neoliberalism and imperialism, it has become very important to exploit this against the Palestinian people today. Hence, there is a feminism upon which imperialism relies, and there is complicity between the two. 

I also believe that it’s a defensive reaction against several feminist currents, such as Islamic feminism, Black feminism, decolonial feminism, and, ultimately, all the feminisms that clash with this feminism and that have spread in France and around the world. Hence, it was necessary to react and confront them and prevent them from developing. We are facing a counter-revolution. This feminism that you are talking about carries within it a counter-revolution that attempts to block the other feminisms as much as possible. This is evident from the banning of demonstrations and the prevention of meetings and conferences.

LA: You have expressed reservation about the issue of compensation when it comes to Europe’s colonial crimes. Can you explain the reasons for this reservation and what your approach is for confronting these colonial crimes in order to impose truth and justice and prevent them from being forgotten today?

Vergès: Yes, it is an important issue. If compensation or reparation means doing justice, yes. When I say that compensation can be a tool for erasing the crime in a certain manner, that is because we see how some Western policies ended up acknowledging the crime as a result of pressure, demands, and many struggles. In France, acknowledgment of slavery as a crime against humanity took 20, 30, or even 40 years of struggle. But there are cases in which the acknowledgment, as reparation, is ultimately used to bring peace on the ground and to say “well, now it’s all over”. In my book Decolonizing the Museum, I sought to discuss a certain type of compensation that consists of saying, “Well, what we’re doing to erase the crime that was committed is great. Okay, now we’re innocent”. It’s a form of restoring innocence. These forms of compensation have provided, and continue to provide, work for the West. There are people who have become experts in compensation and reparation. So my criticism, when it comes to compensation, is that it has become a new field for extracting ideas and building careers. Compensation for the purpose of doing justice is also dependent on the type of crime. Not all compensation can be on the same level. It doesn’t all concern the same things. But there is, firstly, a need to acknowledge the crime, of course, and then ask why it was possible for this crime to be committed. That’s what attracted my interest when I worked on slavery. Why did it last four centuries? And the fact is that the condemnation of slavery came rapidly even in Europe (I’m not talking about the continuous struggles of the enslaved themselves). What allowed it to persist? Compensation is also about asking what made these crimes acceptable. That way, we can understand the reasons that, in a country professing humanity and universal values, such things could happen, rather than merely saying that although there were bad people, the system itself is innocent. There are also forms of financial compensation, and forms of nonmaterial compensation that must be devised. In other words, there are forms of compensation like ending the Global North’s extractive exploitation of the Global South. So, to me, compensation should be truly deep compensation that puts an end to this system. What I mean is that there cannot be a theory of compensation that comes from the North.

LA: In your latest book, A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonizing the Museum, you argue that the museum in Europe as a universal institution is in essence imperialist and colonial. Can you explain?

Vergès: You need only visit Europe’s largest museums to notice that they are brimming with displays from all regions of the world and all historical eras. You will never find such a thing in a museum in the Global South. You will never see 17th-century paintings from Bavaria in a museum in Lima or works from the Italian Renaissance in a museum in Mexico or Lagos. Hence, we see that the West has collected the world in its universal museum. This universalism means domination in the writing of art history and the transformation of pieces that belonged to an emotional, cultural, and social world into artistic showpieces, i.e. ultimately into something that can be viewed but not touched. So the museum is a place where things have been taken out of their context and environment and turned into something dead. The universal museums in Europe also contain many human remains, whereas there are no European human remains in any museums in the Global South. There are tons of hair, skulls, and bone fragments – all this greed is astonishing. This universal museum also reflects the principle of exhaustiveness that characterized the 19th century. Everything had to be collected: not just 100 butterflies, but all the butterflies of the world; not just a few antelopes, but all the antelopes of the Earth; not just a few African masks, but all the African masks that could be collected… there is a pathological need to make the museum into a neutral space, a revered temple of beauty. The museum is the last sacred temple in the West: we enter it respectfully and admire its beauty and aesthetics. Even the churches no longer enjoy such respect. So the issue is about a European structure that dates back to the 18th century, witnessed an imperialist boom in the 19th century with the campaigns of imperial expansion, and now finds itself filled with thousands of pieces. They talk of millions of pieces in the British museum and hundreds of thousands in the other museums. The humblest museum in Europe contains pieces from Africa and Asia. It’s astonishing. So there is this close connection to the idea that Europe is the beacon of the world, the owner of humanity’s treasures, and their sole guardian, and this approach relies on an ingrained imperialist idea based entirely on plundering and extraction.

LA: Any final words?

Vergès: What’s happening today in Gaza, as well as the rise of far-right and fascist movements, should alert us that a massive and comprehensive counter-revolution is happening because of the victories we’ve achieved. We must understand that fear is what drives it, and that means that we have power. All the native peoples’ movements, the Black Lives Matter movement, the movements against Islamophobia and political racism and to reclaim stolen artifacts, the Black and Islamic feminist movements, the decolonial movements… and all the upheavals in all corners of the world are today contributing to the defeat of the other side.

This interview is an edited translation of excerpts originally translated from French to Arabic.