LMN is delighted to announce our fourth Resisting Mining Book Club of 2026, a collaboration with Manchester Museum’s Human Natures exhibition, with special guest speaker Françoise Vergès to discuss her book Making the World Clean: Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment, and Racial Capitalism.
This will be a hybrid event, with Françoise Vergès joining us online alongside an in-person option to participate in the book club in the exhibition at Manchester Museum.
About the book
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, including on mining waste, 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, a “decolonial cleaning.”
By examining the banal, the trivial, and the elemental needs of women of color, including access to water, 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. “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.
About the author
Françoise Vergès is a celebrated political theorist, curator and writer. She writes on the racist fabrication of premature death, decolonial feminism, the impossible decolonization of the western museum, climate disaster and antiracist, anticapitalist politics of vital needs. As co-founder of the collective “Decolonize the Arts” (2015–2020), she is the curator of decolonial visits in museums and L’Atelier, a workshop and public performance with artists and activists. Her publications include: A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonizing the Museum (Pluto, 2024), A Decolonial Feminism (Pluto, 2021), The Wombs of Women: Race, Capital, Feminism (Duke University Press, 2020), and Resolutely Black: Conversations with Françoise Vergès, with Aimé Césaire (Polity, 2020). She has written documentary films on Maryse Condé (2013) and Aimé Césaire (2011), and is currently working on a film about anti-colonial struggles in Reunion Island through her parents’ personal archives and her own.
About the exhibition
Using objects from Manchester Museum’s natural history collection, Human Natures explores stories of overconsumption and overexploitation of animals, plants and minerals. It looks at the consequences this has for climate, biodiversity and people but it also shares inspiring examples of individuals and organisations taking action to live in balance with nature. Entry to the exhibition is free so as many people can enjoy it as possible. Manchester Museum is a charity and all donations go directly towards the museum’s work. The exhibition is running until 1 November 2026 and will be touring to the Great North Museum, Newcastle, Horniman Museum London, and Norwich Castle Museum.