About
Françoise Vergès personal biography
About
Françoise Vergès personal biography
Early Years
My parents were anticolonial, feminist, communist intellectuals and activists in Reunion Island. My father, of Vietnamese and Réeunionese descent, and a leader of the anticolonial Communist Party, and my mother, who was French, a journalist, and a communist and feminist activist, always reminded me that the world was vaster than my island but also that the island was connected to a world that had not been exclusively shaped by Europeans, that we lived in the Indian ocean, a millennial site of exchanges and encounters between Africa and Asia, that was itself connected to other parts of the globe. I received an internationalist education, I read journals from Cuba, India, China, Egypt, the Soviet Union that were sent to my father. At the dinner table, I heard conversations on the decolonization taking place in countries of the Indian Ocean and beyond. I was taught how to observe the ways in which the French State operated as a racist and colonial power. I did not discover feminism in books but on the ground as I followed my mother in her meetings and protests with the island’s women’s movement. As a member of the Front de la Jeunesse Autonomiste Réunionnaise (FJAR), I participated in protests and meetings.
Biography
I arrived in moved to Paris in 1973 and soon left dropped my studies in Arabic and Chinese in favor of activism, joining protests against the American war in Vietnam, and in support of the Réunionese organization of migrant workers (UGTRF), feminist groups, and protests against militarization and wars.
In the late 1970s, I joined the “Psychoanalysis and Politics” group, Women’s Liberation Movement. I contributed to the weekly des femmes en mouvements journal of the Psychoanalysis and Politics group and to the collection “des femmes en lutte dans tous les pays”, éditions des femmes.
I went to Chile to collect testimonies of the sisters, mothers, and companions of the disappeared following General Pinochet’s military coup.
I applied to San Diego State University for a BA in Women’s Studies and Political Science.
I entered the Ph.D. program in Political science, Berkeley University. My Ph.D. thesis Monsters and Revolutionaries Colonial Family Romance and Métissage (1995), which obtained the Mark Joseph Rozance Memorial Award, 1995, was published by Duke University Press in 1999
I receive funding from the MacArthur Foundation Program on “Real Economies in Africa,” managed by the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA, Dakar) for my proposal “Mapping a Contact-Zone,” in the southwest of the Indian Ocean. I worked with two scholars, Christiane Rakotolahy and Abdul Maliq Simone, to join. We explored the networks of transnational identities and the processes of cultural mutations and (dis)continuity developed between the islands of the southwest: Madagascar, Seychelles, the Comoros, Mauritius, and Réeunion. The findings were published by CODESRIA.