After a long marginalization in French history and culture, colonial slavery became a reference to the women, children and men who identified with those who had been enslaved in the French colonies. It was used to question the French national narrative and local pervasive inequalities, to explore the role and place of racial thinking in the making of French society and culture, and to analyze its contemporary legacies both in France and in its former colonies that had become French departments in March 1946.

The Taubira Law which recognized in May 2001 slave trade and slavery as a “crime against humanity” marked a turning point: in 2006, May 10th became the national day of commemoration of the memories of slave trade, slavery and their abolition and in 2012, the Memorial of the Abolition of Slavery opened in Nantes, the largest in the world dedicated to the struggle against slavery. Progress has been made in the fields of education, research and culture. Yet, it is fair to ask in which ways the field opened by the struggle for recognition has been led astray, emptied of its radical promise of bringing back the idea of social justice. And to wonder where and how memories are revived to escape their instrumentalization.

Françoise Vergès was born in Paris and grew up in La Réunion and Algeria. She went back to Paris after high school to study Arabic and Chinese, but finally chose journalism as a career path. A journalist for 8 years (1975-1983) for the monthly then weekly journal Des Femmes en movement, she was also the editor of the collection “des femmes en lutte dans tous les pays” (women fighting in every country) for the publishing house Des femmes. For this later job, she travelled to countries under military and totalitarian dictatorships to gather women’s stories.

In 1983 she moved to the United States. She received her bachelor degree in political science and Woman’s studies with summa cum laude from the University of California, in San Diego, and a PhD in Political sciences from Berkeley University in 1995. The subject of her thesis was Monsters and Revolutionaries, Colonial Family Romance.

Vergès is the author of 10 books two of which translated into English. She has published extensively on postcolonial theory, creolization, psychoanalysis, slavery and the economy of predation and Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire. She has also directed two movies on the great Caribbean authors Aimé Césaire and Maryse Condé and organized a few exhibitions at the Louvre on slavery and women.