Making the World Clean

An antiracist theory of cleaning. Every year, capitalism produces tons of goods that go right to waste. Mining, deforestation, social inequalities, racism, extractivism, and hyper-consumption add to this fantastic amount of waste. How is their disappearance and invisibility organized? Who cleans the world? Upon whose bodies rests bourgeois and white cleanliness? <Making the World Clean< looks at the masses who daily clean the world to make it livable and comfortable for a few. That comfort rests on the exhaustion of non-white bodies and their exposition to dangerous chemical and premature death. Who cleans the world is thus a political question, with an anti-patriarchal, antiracist, and anti-capitalist frame. To explore this, Francoise Verges looks at the notion of cleanliness of white bodies and the cleanliness of cities in which they live and of the planet they wish to inhabit, stressing the naturalization and invisibilization of cheap labor. Racial capitalism produces waste, waste is the measure of its potency, and greening waste hides the fact that colonizing the planet and thus transforming life into waste is essential. Against this politics of wasted lives and wasted lands, Verges opposes the politics of antiracist and anti-capitalist cleaning, looking at works and actions of activists throughout the world.

Auteur

Françoise Vergès

Texte du rabat

An antiracist theory of cleaning.

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.