Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry
Françoise Vergès. Making the World Clean: Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment, and Racial Capitalism. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2024. 248 pp.
Review by Emily Merson
14 February 2025
Who wastes the world, and who makes the world clean? Françoise Vergès’s Making the World Clean, published by the new Goldsmiths Press Planetarities book series, is essential reading to understand the distinction between the coloniality of gendered, racialized labor regimes tasked with “cleaning up” waste, and how feminist praxis of “decolonial cleaning” is an expression of transformative justice (p. 2).
Vergès explains: “I take cleaning as an analytic and as an elemental, in other words constitutive of social and cultural life” (p. 13). She analyzes how cleaning labor disproportionately done by lower-income women of color is necessary to sustain patriarchal racial capitalism, and yet simultaneously there are systematic denials of cleaners’ own elemental cleaning needs, like access to water and menstrual products.
Journalists and academics investigating the rising influence of repertoires of denialism in governance and interpersonal communication condemn denials of the evidence of genocides, election results, efficacy of public health measures, and the human causes of global warming. Caleb Smith’s Critical Inquiry review of Alenka Zupančič’s Disavowal (2024) notes that she intervenes to argue: “disavowal differs from denial; it doesn’t deny facts but gladly announces knowing all about them, and then it goes on as before.”[1] Smith concludes with the insight that moving beyond the impasse of critiques of denialism and disavowal calls for “a revolutionary movement answering to what everyone already knows.”[2]
Cleaners protest disavowal by demonstrating what everyone already knows about injustices of wasting. Postcolonial theorists have established how disavowals of both the violence of necropolitics and the agency of liberation movements have been elemental in the making of modernity.[3] For generations, environmental justice movements have protested unjust waste disposal and the disposability of marginalized communities, such as community coalitions of resistance to both toxic waste dumping in the United States and apartheid-era mining waste in South African infrastructure and ecosystems.[4]
A strike is an opening in a world of enclosures. Vergès’s incisive analysis names how problematic visual tropes about precarious labor were reproduced in news images of striking cleaners in Lyon in 2021 and, in 2023, Parisian sanitation workers’ strikes against pension reforms. The book would be enhanced by including these news images, images of resistance, and images of decolonial cleaning projects. For instance, during the COVID-19 pandemic, news media manufacture of consent through the making of the figure of the essential worker (who sacrifices themself in hazardous conditions for the greater good) was resisted visually by popular interventions like the 2021 music video for Belgian rapper and singer Stromae’s song, Santé.[5] Ultimately, Vergès’s outstanding book affirms the power of solidarity that “imagines cleaning out of drudgery” (p. 129).
[1] Alenka Zupančič, Disavowal (Hoboken, N.J., 2024), p. 2.
[2] Caleb Smith, review of Disavowal by Zupančič, Critical Inquiry, 24 Oct 2024, criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/caleb_smith_reviews_disavowal/
[3] See Aimé Césaire, Resolutely Black: Conversations with Françoise Vergès (Cambridge: Polity, 2020); Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in The Age of Revolution (Durham, N.C., 2004); and Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham, N.C., 2019).
[4] See Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots, ed. Robert D. Bullard (Boston, 1993), and Gabrielle Hecht, Residual Governance: How South Africa Foretells Planetary Futures (Durham, N.C., 2023).
[5] See Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York,1988) and Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York, 1922). See also Stromae, “Stromae – Santé (Official Video),” YouTube.
