A Decolonial Feminism

From there Vergès turns to a harder charge. A certain feminism, she argues, has been recruited into the projects of empire and, more recently, into the defense of a supposedly enlightened West against a supposedly backward Other. She calls it, roughly, a civilizational feminism: one that measures women's freedom by proximity to a European norm, and that is happy to be mobilized against Muslims, migrants and the formerly colonized in the name of protecting women.

The history here is long and specific. Colonial powers routinely justified conquest as the rescue of native women from native men — unveiling them, schooling them, saving them from their own culture. The colonizer arrived as liberator. Vergès traces how that gesture never fully died. In contemporary France it resurfaces in debates over the veil, in the confident assumption that a woman covering her hair must be oppressed and that the state is entitled to free her, by force of law if necessary. The feminism invoked in these debates, she notes, is rarely interested in the actual women it claims to speak for.

Why "decolonial" rather than simply intersectional or radical? Vergès chooses the word deliberately, and she wants its history to travel with it. Decolonial thought grew out of the anti-colonial struggles of the twentieth century and out of the writers who theorized them — Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and the traditions of the global South that insisted colonialism did not end when flags were lowered and new anthems played. The economic dependencies, the racial hierarchies, the extraction of labor and resources: these outlived formal independence and shaped the world we live in now.

Applied to feminism, the word does specific work. It says that the situation of women cannot be separated from the afterlives of slavery and empire, from the way capitalism was built on racialized labor, from the ongoing plunder of the South by the North. Vergès draws on a lineage of Black and Third World feminists — from the women of anti-colonial movements to the American Combahee River Collective, which in 1977 argued that systems of oppression are interlocking and cannot be fought one at a time. She is recovering a genealogy that mainstream feminist history tends to thin out or forget.

Step back, and the deeper argument of the book is about what holds a movement together. The universalist feminism Vergès critiques assumed a shared subject: Woman, singular, whose interests could be represented once the particulars of race and class and geography were set aside. That abstraction was never neutral. Setting aside the particulars meant defaulting to the woman for whom race and class posed no obstacle — and calling her situation everyone's. The universal turned out to have a color and a bank balance.

Vergès does not respond by shattering feminism into a thousand separate identities, each speaking only for itself. That would surrender the very idea of common struggle. Her wager is different and more demanding: that solidarity can be built precisely across difference, not by pretending the differences away. A movement anchored in the experience of those with the least — the migrant cleaner, the plantation worker's granddaughter, the woman whose labor is invisible by design — is not narrower than the universal feminism it replaces. It is wider, because a demand made from the bottom, if it is met, tends to lift everyone above it too.

The book ends more or less where it began, with the women who clean. Their strike matters to Vergès not because it was large but because it was legible: it named a labor that the rest of the economy depends on and refuses to see. When those women stopped, the invisible became visible, and for a moment the arrangement stood exposed. A feminism that could recognize itself in that strike, she suggests, would be a feminism worth the name.