Françoise Vergès

Françoise Vergès (born 23 January 1952) is a French political scientist, historian, film producer, independent curator, activist and public educator. Her work focuses on postcolonial studies and decolonial feminism.

Vergès was born in Paris, grew up in Réunion and Algeria before returning to Paris to study and become a journalist.Vergès is the second daughter of Laurence Deroin and of the politician Paul Vergès. She is also the niece of Jacques Vergès.

Her father, the son of a doctor and consul during the colonial era, has been a French deputy, member of the European Parliament, senator, president of the Regional Council of Réunion and mayor of Le Port.

Her great-great-grandmother, Marie Hermelinde Million des Marquets is from a slave-owning family in La Réunion. They owned a 49 acres plantation and, according to the 1848 act, "121 slaves, from which 66 were Creoles, 12 Malagasies, 39 Mozambicans and 4 Indians or Malays".Her mother, Laurence Deroin, was a Zoreille born on 22 September 1924 in Ivry-sur-Seine and died on 3 November 2012 at her home in La Possession. An activist and employee of the French Communist Party (PCF), she worked for the Ministry of Reconstruction and Urban Planning, which was headed by Raymond Aubrac until the departure of the Communists from the government, and for Laurent Casanova. The Deroin-Vergès couple met in 1947 at the colonial section of the French Communist Party in Paris and got married in 1949. Laurence Deroin first came to Reunion Island at the age of 30 in 1954, when her father-in-law Raymond Vergès wanted her husband Paul to take over the PCF federation in Reunion. She was an activist in the Union of French Women, and was one of the founders of the Union of Women of Reunion (UFR) in 1958. After running a bookshop in Saint-Denis (La Librairie des Mascareignes) for a few years, Laurence Deroin worked for the newspaper Témoignages, where she ran a column on the status of women. She has also been a candidate in various elections for the PCR.

Françoise has an older sister who is a doctor, Claude, born on 1 August 1949, married to Dr Edmundo Lopez Caizadilla; she has lived in Panama since 1974, and has a daughter, Sandra Lopez. Françoise Vergès also has two brothers who are leading figures in the PCR: Pierre and Laurent.

She moved to the US in 1983, studying at the University of California, San Diego and Berkeley.Vergès' book A Decolonial Feminism was published in English in 2021, translated by Ashley J. Bohrer along with Vergès, with the support of an English PEN Translates award.