An antiracist theory of cleaning. In
Making the World Clean: Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment, and Racial Capitalism, Françoise Vergès examines the racial and gendered politics of wasting lands, bodies, and resources and the organized deprivation of clean water, shelter, and access to health services--in other words, the structural denial, along racial lines, of vital needs. Through 38 short sections, she looks at the social relations that have made cleaning into drudgery and into a racialized, gendered, poorly paid job that is nevertheless necessary for any society to function. She concludes with the proposition of a feminist, decolonial, antiracist, anti-patriarchal, and anti-capitalist politics of cleaning. Or, simply put, of "decolonial cleaning."
To Vergès, the structural denial of the
elemental needs of women of color (sanitary pads, access to water, and privacy for basic washing), and why these needs are considered insignificant and trivial, shows how racism and class war are gendered. By examining the banal, the
trivial, and the
elemental, the author addresses cleaning as a necessity rather than the maintenance of a consumerist lifestyle, a condition of basic care of the body and the mind that is considered with indifference by racial capitalism, white environmentalism, and even, too often, by humanitarian organizations. She argues that by building "life-affirming institutions," as Ruth Wilson Gilmore advocates, struggles against the whitening of cleaning create sites of freedom. "Decolonial cleaning" imagines cleaning as taking care of land, humans, plants, animals, and rivers, not seeking to discipline them or transform them into commodities or objects of conservation but cleaning as a practice dedicated to sustaining the living world.
一種反種族主義的清潔理論。在《讓世界乾淨：浪費的生命、浪費的環境與種族資本主義》中，Françoise Vergès 探討了浪費土地、身體和資源的種族與性別政治，以及有組織地剝奪乾淨水源、庇護所和健康服務的問題——換句話說，就是在種族界線上對基本需求的結構性否認。透過38個短篇章節，她檢視了使清潔工作變成苦差事的社會關係，這種工作被種族化、性別化，且工資低廉，然而對任何社會的運作卻是必要的。她以提出一種女性主義、去殖民、反種族主義、反父權和反資本主義的清潔政治作為結尾。簡而言之，就是「去殖民清潔」。
對於 Vergès 來說，對有色人種女性的基本需求（如衛生棉、用水的權利和基本洗浴的隱私）的結構性否認，以及為何這些需求被視為微不足道，顯示了種族主義和階級鬥爭是如何性別化的。透過檢視平凡、微不足道和基本的事物，作者將清潔視為一種必要，而非消費主義生活方式的維持，這是一種對身體和心靈的基本照顧，而這一點常常被種族資本主義、白人環保主義，甚至太多時候被人道主義組織所漠視。她主張，透過建立「肯定生命的機構」，正如 Ruth Wilson Gilmore 所倡導的，對清潔的去白化鬥爭創造了自由的空間。「去殖民清潔」想像清潔是一種對土地、人類、植物、動物和河流的照顧，而不是試圖去紀律化或將其轉變為商品或保護對象，而是將清潔視為一種致力於維持生存世界的實踐。
Françoise Vergès (Reunion Island-France) is currently Senior Fellow Researcher at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Race and Racialization, University College London. A co-founder of the collective "Decolonize the Arts" (2015-2020), she is the curator of decolonial visits in museums and L'Atelier, a workshop and public performance with artists and activists. She is interested in the racial fabrication of "premature death," the multiple practices of resistance and South-South circulations of theories and cultural forms. She writes books and articles on the afterlives of slavery and colonization, climate catastrophe and racial capitalocene, the impossible decolonization of the western museum, decolonial feminism, psychiatry, and the "post-museum." Her publications include: A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonizing the Museum (2024), A Decolonial Feminism (2021), The Wombs of Women: Race, Capital, Feminism (2020), and Resolutely Black: Conversations with Françoise Vergès, with Aimé Césaire (2020). She has written documentary films on Maryse Condé (2013) and Aimé Césaire (2011), and was a project advisor for documenta11 (2002) and the Triennale de Paris (2011).
