Main entry:

Vergès, Françoise, 1952- author. aut

Title & Author:

Making the world clean : wasted lives, wasted environment, and racial capitalism / Françoises Vergès ; foreword by Ruth Wilson Gilmore.

Publication:

London : Goldsmiths Press, 2024.
©2024

Description:

xii, 167 pages ; 24 cm.

Series:

Planetarities

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 131-167).
1. Is Cleaning a Decolonial Struggle? -- 2. "Slow Violence" -- 3. Radical Hope -- 4. The Elemental -- 5. Cleaning, Cleanliness, Cleansing -- 6. Water, an Elemental -- 7. Women as a Praxis -- 8. Exiting Colonial Dystopia -- 9. Polluting, Contaminating, Cleaning Up -- 10. The Racial Politics of Wasting and Cleaning Up -- 11. Race, Gender, Capital, and Cleaning -- 12. The Elemental of Cleaning -- 13. The Distribution of Time according to Class and Race -- 14. Why Must Cleaners Be Invisible? -- 15. The Denial of Vital Needs -- 16. How to Name the Age of Waste and Wasting -- 17. Racism and Waste -- 18. The Racial Stain of Cleanliness -- 19. The Politics of the Elemental -- 20. The Marxist Feminist Theory of Social Reproduction -- 21. The Whitening of Cleanliness -- 22. Olfactory Racism -- 23. Wasting and Protecting under Racial Capitalism -- 24. The Pleasure of Water -- 25. The Enclosure of Water -- 26. Weaponizing Water -- 27. Palestine under Colonial Water Politics -- 28. Occupying Armies and Water Contamination -- 29. Engineering Water and New Forms of Privatization -- 30. Colonialism Lays Waste -- 31. Is Colonialism a Direct Cause of Climate Disaster? --32. The Wasting of French Colonialism-Imperialism -- 33. The French Army, Science, Stolen Land -- 34. Mining is Wasting -- 35. Criminalization of Activists -- 36. Antiracist Politics of Breathing -- 37. The Politics of Refusal -- 38. Anti-Cleaning Politics.

Summary:

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.

ISBN:

9781913380397 paperback
1913380394 paperback
electronic book
9781913380380
1913380386

Subject:

Sanitation Social aspects.
Hygiene Social aspects.
Race discrimination Health aspects.
Sex discrimination against women Health aspects.
Capitalism.
Decolonization Social aspects.
Salubrité publique Aspect social.
Hygiène Aspect social.
Décolonisation Aspect social.
Sanitation workers

Added entries:

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, 1950- author of introduction, etc.

Holdings:

Location: Library main 320739
Call No.: 320739
Copy: 1
Status: Available