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On Wednesday, June 8, 2022, The Africa Institute hosted a panel of faculty and fellows who reflected, critiqued, and discussed Françoise Vergès’s award winning book, ‘A Decolonial Feminism’. Author of over 20 books, Françoise Vergès is a Professor of Cultural and Postcolonial Studies at the Africa Institute.
The panel included faculty Surafel Wondimu Abebe, Assistant Professor, Performance Studies and Theory; Amy Niang, Associate Professor, Political Science and Ali A. Mazrui Senior Fellow, Naminata Diabate who discussed their perspectives as the book, ‘a powerful manifesto’ highlights the essential issues in feminist debates today.
For too long feminism has been co-opted by the forces they seek to dismantle. In this powerful manifesto, Francoise Verges argues that feminists should no longer be accomplices of capitalism, racism, colonialism, and imperialism: it is time to fight the system that created the boss, built the prisons and polices women’s bodies.
A Decolonial Feminism grapples with the central issues in feminist debates today: from Eurocentrism and whiteness, to power, inclusion and exclusion. Delving into feminist and anti-racist histories, Verges also assesses contemporary activism, movements and struggles, including #MeToo and the Women’s Strike.
Centering anticolonialism and anti-racism within an intersectional Marxist feminism, the book puts forward an urgent demand to free ourselves from the capitalist, imperialist forces that oppress us.
Françoise Vergès is an activist and public educator. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of many books including A Decolonial Feminism and Wombs of Women.
Her academic and professional life has been linked with activism and artistic projects. Her work is trans-disciplinary looking at the fabrication of consent and dissent using decolonial psychoanalysis, visual, sonic and literary elements, and feminist, postcolonial, anticolonial and radical theories.
After she obtained her high school diploma in Algiers, she became engaged in the country’s cultural activities. Moving to France, she joined antiracist and feminist movements and was active as well in the political organizations of migrants from former French colonies. She worked as a journalist for a French feminist magazine and as an editor collecting testimonies of women under military dictatorships, wars or authoritarian regimes for des femmes editions (1979-1983). While in the United States, she joined fact-finding trips on the violation of women’s rights in Salvador during the civil war and in Panama following the US 1989 coup; in Berkeley, she co-organized “Building Bridges: Race, Class, and Gender. Feminism Across the Disciplines,” the first trans-disciplinary feminist conference for PhD students (1989 to 1994). She also worked for the Emma Goldman’s papers, the San Francisco Film Festival and was active in anti-imperialist movements.
She was president of the French National Committee for the Memories and History of Slavery (2008-2012), was a consultant for the Memorial of the Abolition of Slavery, conceived by Krzysztof Wodiczko and Julian Bonder (opening in 2012), is on the board of the Lilian Thuram Foundation against Racism and has been participating in the Ateliers de la pensée in Dakar, organized by Achille Mbembé and Felwine Sarr.
In 1996, she worked with artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien on “Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask”; for the Paris Triennal curated by Okwui Enwezor (2012) she curated “The Slave in Le Louvre. An Invisible Humanity” and was project advisor for the Platform 3 “Créolité and Creolization”; she has written films on Aimé Césaire (2013) and Maryse Condé (2011). Between 2004 and 2010, she worked on the scientific and cultural program of Maison des civilisations et de l’unité réunionnaise, the project of a museum in Reunion Island for which she proposed “a museum without objects,” but the project was killed in 2010. At the Collège d’études mondiales (FMSH, Paris), she created the Chair Global South(s) (2014-2018). In 2015, she cofounded the association “Decolonize the Arts,” and its free monthly university (2016-2019), the space opened by artist Kader Attia in Paris. She regularly curates workshops with artists, activists and scholars of color that end with a public performance.
Surafel Wondimu Abebe is an Assistant Professor, Performance Studies and Theory at The Africa Institute. Abebe studied Literature (BA) and Cultural Studies (MA) at Addis Ababa University (AAU) (2010). He served at AAU as a lecturer, researcher, and Deputy Dean of Humanities. He continued working with AAU as an assistant professor at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Center for African Studies, and College of Performing and Visual Arts after he completed his PhD in Performance Historiography at the University of Minnesota (2018). He is also board member of a multi-genre online journal, AGITATE, at the University of Minnesota.
Amy Niang is an Associate Professor, Political Science at The Africa Institute. Her work has been published in journals such as International Relations; Alternatives; Politics; African Studies; African Economic History, Journal of Ritual Studies and in many edited collections. Her research interests are broadly centred around the history of state formation and sovereignty, Africa’s international relations, and the history of geopolitics.
Prior to her current position, she taught at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Rabat, and has also held visiting positions and fellowships at the University of Sao Paulo, Princeton University, the University of Halle-Wittenberg, the University of Michigan, the Institute of Peace and Security Studies (IPSS) amongst many other institutions. Niang holds a BA in International Relations (2005) and a MA in Political Economy from the University of Tsukuba (2007) and a PhD in Politics and International Relations from the University of Edinburgh (2011).
Naminata Diabate is Ali A. Mazrui Senior Fellow at The Africa Institute. She is also an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. She is a member of the core faculty in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (FGSS), and affiliated faculty in Romance Studies; Africana Studies and Research Center (ASRC); Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies; Performing and Media Arts; and Visual Studies. Diabate holds a PhD in Comparative Literature with dual concentrations in African Diaspora Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies from the University at Texas at Austin (2011).
A scholar of African and African diaspora studies and sexuality and gender studies with linguistic expertise in Malinké, French, English, Nouchi, Spanish, and Latin, her work seeks to redefine how we understand specific forms of embodied agency in the neoliberal present in global Africa. Diabate engages multiple sites, including novels of 20th and 21st centuries, online and social media, pictorial arts, film, journalism, and oral traditions from Africa, black America, Afro-Hispanic America, and the French Antilles. Her most recent provocations of defiant disrobing, erotic pleasure, and the impact of Internet media on queerness have appeared in her book, Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa (Duke University Press, 2020), peer-reviewed journals, and collections of essays, such as Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Research in African Literatures, African Literature Today (ALT), Interventions, Routledge Handbook of African Literature, and Fieldwork in the Humanities
In addition to her interventions in the conventional academic channels, Diabate contributes regularly to several media outlets, including newspapers, women’s magazines, and podcasts. Recently, she wrote for the women’s magazine Voix/Voie de Femme in Côte d’Ivoire, PBS’s Academic Minute, The New Books in Women’s History podcast, and the South African Podcast series, Sound Africa. Diabate’s forthcoming work will appear in African Studies Review, The Journal African Literature Association (JALA) and the edited volume, New Visions in African and African Diaspora Studies. Currently, she is working on two monographs, “The Problem of Pleasure in Global Africa” and “Digital Insurgencies and Bodily Domains”.
On Wednesday, June 8, 2022, The Africa Institute hosted a panel of faculty and fellows who reflected, critiqued, and discussed Françoise Vergès’s award winning book, ‘A Decolonial Feminism’. Author of over 20 books, Françoise Vergès is a Professor of Cultural and Postcolonial Studies at the Africa Institute.
On Wednesday, June 8, 2022, The Africa Institute hosted a panel of faculty and fellows who reflected, critiqued, and discussed Françoise Vergès’s award winning book, ‘A Decolonial Feminism’. Author of over 20 books, Françoise Vergès is a Professor of Cultural and Postcolonial Studies at the Africa Institute.
The panel included faculty Surafel Wondimu Abebe, Assistant Professor, Performance Studies and Theory; Amy Niang, Associate Professor, Political Science and Ali A. Mazrui Senior Fellow, Naminata Diabate who discussed their perspectives as the book, ‘a powerful manifesto’ highlights the essential issues in feminist debates today.
For too long feminism has been co-opted by the forces they seek to dismantle. In this powerful manifesto, Francoise Verges argues that feminists should no longer be accomplices of capitalism, racism, colonialism, and imperialism: it is time to fight the system that created the boss, built the prisons and polices women’s bodies.
A Decolonial Feminism grapples with the central issues in feminist debates today: from Eurocentrism and whiteness, to power, inclusion and exclusion. Delving into feminist and anti-racist histories, Verges also assesses contemporary activism, movements and struggles, including #MeToo and the Women’s Strike.
Centering anticolonialism and anti-racism within an intersectional Marxist feminism, the book puts forward an urgent demand to free ourselves from the capitalist, imperialist forces that oppress us.
Françoise Vergès is an activist and public educator. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of many books including A Decolonial Feminism and Wombs of Women.
Her academic and professional life has been linked with activism and artistic projects. Her work is trans-disciplinary looking at the fabrication of consent and dissent using decolonial psychoanalysis, visual, sonic and literary elements, and feminist, postcolonial, anticolonial and radical theories.
After she obtained her high school diploma in Algiers, she became engaged in the country’s cultural activities. Moving to France, she joined antiracist and feminist movements and was active as well in the political organizations of migrants from former French colonies. She worked as a journalist for a French feminist magazine and as an editor collecting testimonies of women under military dictatorships, wars or authoritarian regimes for des femmes editions (1979-1983). While in the United States, she joined fact-finding trips on the violation of women’s rights in Salvador during the civil war and in Panama following the US 1989 coup; in Berkeley, she co-organized “Building Bridges: Race, Class, and Gender. Feminism Across the Disciplines,” the first trans-disciplinary feminist conference for PhD students (1989 to 1994). She also worked for the Emma Goldman’s papers, the San Francisco Film Festival and was active in anti-imperialist movements.
She was president of the French National Committee for the Memories and History of Slavery (2008-2012), was a consultant for the Memorial of the Abolition of Slavery, conceived by Krzysztof Wodiczko and Julian Bonder (opening in 2012), is on the board of the Lilian Thuram Foundation against Racism and has been participating in the Ateliers de la pensée in Dakar, organized by Achille Mbembé and Felwine Sarr.
In 1996, she worked with artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien on “Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask”; for the Paris Triennal curated by Okwui Enwezor (2012) she curated “The Slave in Le Louvre. An Invisible Humanity” and was project advisor for the Platform 3 “Créolité and Creolization”; she has written films on Aimé Césaire (2013) and Maryse Condé (2011). Between 2004 and 2010, she worked on the scientific and cultural program of Maison des civilisations et de l’unité réunionnaise, the project of a museum in Reunion Island for which she proposed “a museum without objects,” but the project was killed in 2010. At the Collège d’études mondiales (FMSH, Paris), she created the Chair Global South(s) (2014-2018). In 2015, she cofounded the association “Decolonize the Arts,” and its free monthly university (2016-2019), the space opened by artist Kader Attia in Paris. She regularly curates workshops with artists, activists and scholars of color that end with a public performance.
Surafel Wondimu Abebe is an Assistant Professor, Performance Studies and Theory at The Africa Institute. Abebe studied Literature (BA) and Cultural Studies (MA) at Addis Ababa University (AAU) (2010). He served at AAU as a lecturer, researcher, and Deputy Dean of Humanities. He continued working with AAU as an assistant professor at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Center for African Studies, and College of Performing and Visual Arts after he completed his PhD in Performance Historiography at the University of Minnesota (2018). He is also board member of a multi-genre online journal, AGITATE, at the University of Minnesota.
Amy Niang is an Associate Professor, Political Science at The Africa Institute. Her work has been published in journals such as International Relations; Alternatives; Politics; African Studies; African Economic History, Journal of Ritual Studies and in many edited collections. Her research interests are broadly centred around the history of state formation and sovereignty, Africa’s international relations, and the history of geopolitics.
Prior to her current position, she taught at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Rabat, and has also held visiting positions and fellowships at the University of Sao Paulo, Princeton University, the University of Halle-Wittenberg, the University of Michigan, the Institute of Peace and Security Studies (IPSS) amongst many other institutions. Niang holds a BA in International Relations (2005) and a MA in Political Economy from the University of Tsukuba (2007) and a PhD in Politics and International Relations from the University of Edinburgh (2011).
Naminata Diabate is Ali A. Mazrui Senior Fellow at The Africa Institute. She is also an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. She is a member of the core faculty in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (FGSS), and affiliated faculty in Romance Studies; Africana Studies and Research Center (ASRC); Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies; Performing and Media Arts; and Visual Studies. Diabate holds a PhD in Comparative Literature with dual concentrations in African Diaspora Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies from the University at Texas at Austin (2011).
A scholar of African and African diaspora studies and sexuality and gender studies with linguistic expertise in Malinké, French, English, Nouchi, Spanish, and Latin, her work seeks to redefine how we understand specific forms of embodied agency in the neoliberal present in global Africa. Diabate engages multiple sites, including novels of 20th and 21st centuries, online and social media, pictorial arts, film, journalism, and oral traditions from Africa, black America, Afro-Hispanic America, and the French Antilles. Her most recent provocations of defiant disrobing, erotic pleasure, and the impact of Internet media on queerness have appeared in her book, Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa (Duke University Press, 2020), peer-reviewed journals, and collections of essays, such as Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Research in African Literatures, African Literature Today (ALT), Interventions, Routledge Handbook of African Literature, and Fieldwork in the Humanities
In addition to her interventions in the conventional academic channels, Diabate contributes regularly to several media outlets, including newspapers, women’s magazines, and podcasts. Recently, she wrote for the women’s magazine Voix/Voie de Femme in Côte d’Ivoire, PBS’s Academic Minute, The New Books in Women’s History podcast, and the South African Podcast series, Sound Africa. Diabate’s forthcoming work will appear in African Studies Review, The Journal African Literature Association (JALA) and the edited volume, New Visions in African and African Diaspora Studies. Currently, she is working on two monographs, “The Problem of Pleasure in Global Africa” and “Digital Insurgencies and Bodily Domains”.
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