Racial Capitalocene: Françoise Vergès asks “Is the Anthropocene Racial?”
Françoise Vergès is a francophone political scientist, feminist, and historian whose expertise lies within the developing field of postcolonial studies. She holds a dual BA from UC San Diego and a PHD from UC Berkeley, and has published a great number of works in both French and English, which include the essay we read, “ Racial Capitalocene: Is the Anthropocene Racial? ” published by Verso in the 2017 collection The Futures of Black Radicalism . She has also produced several French documentaries, and often collaborates with artists through the workshop “ Cartographie de l’espace postcolonial " (Mapping of Postcolonial Space). Alongside her own scholarship, Vergès has taught as a professor at both the University of Sussex and the Goldsmiths College in the UK. She cites her interest in “racialized environmental politics” as being “partly biographical”: having grown up in the French colonial island of La Réunion in the Indian Ocean within a family of “communist, anticolonial, and f