Françoise Vergès on Decolonial Feminism and the Work of Imagination

The first time I read Françoise Vergès’s A Decolonial Feminism, I was by the sea in Lebanon. Her words took over every single space in my brain and have continued to do so since. Her extensive work on making a decolonial, anti-racist politics and her ideas on the importance of literature in populating abstract notions and bringing them to materiality, fighting dehumanization in the process, and much more than can be covered in these lines and pages that follow, have been an endless source of inspiration for my own work and research. This conversation came at a time of deep need for a spark to continue having faith in the importance of building community, especially in the face of the pervasive sense of powerlessness many of us feel. Her words evoke the centrality of imagination, of unlearning to learn. She spoke with me from sunny Tunis, near the sea, a full-circle moment.
—Caline Nasrallah