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La colonisation n'est pas qu'une « mémoire à décliner au passé ». Elle a impacté durablement les pays colonisateurs et notamment la société française, où elle se fait encore sentir de nos jours, sous la forme d'une « après-vie » faite de réelles et concrètes injustices.

Françoise Vergès, Talk at the workshop Affective Ecologies, Anarchic Fragments: Documenting Militarized Worlds , ICI Berlin, 1 July 2019, video recording, mp4, 40:30

Abstract
This article draws from Françoise Vergès's book, Le ventre des femmes: Capitalisme, racialisation, féminisme,* which traces the history of the colonization of the wombs of Black women by the French state in the 1960s and 1970s through forced abortions and the forced sterilization of women in French foreign territories. Vergès retraces the long history of colonial state intervention in Black women's wombs during the slave trade and post-slavery imperialism, and after World War II, when international institutions and Western states blamed the poverty and underdevelopment of the Third World on women of color. Vergès looks at the feminist and Women's Liberation movements in France in the 1960s and 1970s and asks why, at a time of French consciousness about colonialism brought about by Algerian independence and the social transformations of 1968, these movements chose to ignore the history of the racialization of women's wombs in state politics. In making the liberalization of contraception and abortion their primary aim, she argues, French feminists inevitably ended up defending the rights of white women at the expense of women of color, in a shift from women's liberation to women's rights.

The objective of the organized visits titled "The Slave in the Louvre: An Invisible Humanity (2012)" was to explore how slavery had contaminated Europeans' tastes, ways of living, consuming, receiving, and representation of themselves. Looking at the paintings featuring men smoking; aristocratic women wearing cotton; and tables covered with china teapots, sugar bowls, coffeepots, or cowries was like pulling a series of threads to reveal the global network established by the mercantile economy of slavery and the ways its conditions of production were hidden. The paintings also exposed the intersection between bonded work, construction of gendered ways of being (tobacco associated with masculinity, sugar with femininity), accumulation of wealth, commerce, and European art.

En intégrant l'esclavage colonial dans la longue histoire de la décolonisation, F. Vergès estime que nous faisons en sorte que les luttes de résistance appartiennent à l'histoire des luttes anticoloniales comme luttes contre une économie de prédation et d'écrasement des peuples et de leurs manières de vivre et de faire. Pour elle, il faut se souvenir que de cette perception de l'esclavage peuvent naître des révoltes, des mouvements collectifs, mais aussi des avancées dans le droit, l'égalité, la dignité et la démocratie.