Abstract

This book stands as a critique of racial capitalism and heteropatriarchy. Vergès, a Réunion-born independent scholar, defends a decolonial feminist approach to fight against the coloniality of power and advocates for a maroon political disobedience grounded in the possibility of futurity (38). Her book, soon to be translated in English, calls for a depatriarchalizing of revolutionary struggles (19) and questions the privilège de la blanchité (49) in the making of a civilizational feminism that continues to dismiss the experiences of racialized bodies today. Astonished by France's constant dismissal of slavery and colonialism in the contemporary understanding of its society, she poses that such avoidance is grounded in France's "passion pour les principes abstraits plutôt que pour l'étude des réalités" (52). While the first part of the book opens with the racialized figure of travailleuses domestiques, leading Vergès to critique the constant overlooking of indigenous struggle in imperial feminism, the second half of the book calls into question the fundamentalism of laïcité that subsequently develops against the background of a certain Orientalism centered around the white liberal elite. She highlights how "[l]es femmes racisées sont acceptées dans les rangs des féministes civilisationnelles à la condition qu'elles adhèrent à l'interprétation occidentale du droit des femmes" (79).