1In a short, incisive volume (the second in the Planetarities series at Goldsmiths Press), Françoise Vergès expands on her previous work on decolonial feminism, and turns her attention to the politics of cleaning. The structure of the book is accumulative, rhizomatic, not neatly linear or didactic, and takes the reader through interrelated concepts and case studies that highlight the kaleidoscopic nature and effects of colonial plunder – patriarchal racial capitalism, Rob Nixon’s “slow violence,” ecofeminism, ecocide, racial Capitalocene and alternate propositions of chronological systems. The author synthesizes and critiques the theorization of the Anthropocene, the Racial Capitalocene, the Plantationocene, the Chthlucene, and the Wasteocene. Her argument also hinges on a key distinction between cleaning (as racialized labor and as a neglected need of marginalized communities) and “cleaning up” (as the colonial management of resources that never questions systemic injustice). This study may operate as a primer to build and sustain a decolonial, feminist, anti-cleaning politics that affords universal rights to “elemental” needs, by taking stock of systemic, colonial injustice, but also by analyzing networks of decolonial solidarity.

2Through her process of charting the interconnections of racial capitalism, the author proposes a form of mapping which undoes the rigid categories and hierarchizations she denounces. This structure may aim to make the reader see differently and consider the accumulative dimension of racial capitalism and compounded systemic injustice, although Vergès insists on the importance of praxis, i.e., “what transforms seeing into doing” (37) and of building a “common platform of struggle” (44), and she voices her suspicion towards what resembles sentimental politics. The issue, she argues, is to propose “a decolonial antiracist feminist cleaning that does not adopt white bourgeois norms of cleanliness” (56). She investigates these norms as historical constructs most explicitly in her two sections on “The Whitening of Cleanliness” and “Olfactory Racism” in order to highlight the historical alignment of a form of cleanliness to white supremacy, and thus trace the history of our contemporary, racist, paradoxical politics of cleaning: “cleaning had to be done by people stigmatized as unclean to keep the whitened division between clean and unclean alive” (68).

3If cleanliness is a key concept for the far-right today as a fabricated tool of distinction that structures class hierarchies and racial difference, Vergès affirms the importance of cleaning as a right to the “elemental.” It is therefore not enough to deconstruct the ideologies that underpin cleanliness: decolonial politics must be rooted in liberation, in the abolition of settler politics (100), in a politics of refusal (122) which she links to marooning and to the rights of the oppressed who work the land without resorting to violent and wasteful extraction.

4The essay investigates the connections between the elemental and the global, and centers “non-white women’s elementary needs” (95) in order to substantiate the author’s call for a decolonial politics of the elemental. Vergès takes care to explain why the politics of the elemental matter. She specifically argues that forms of cleaning that have been made invisible or constructed as superficial are, in fact, essential. Her section entitled “The Politics of the Elemental” takes the example of the lack of menstrual care following the 2022 floods in Pakistan to show the compounded effects of physical and mental health issues on women, who are “the first to be deprived of cleaning” (52).

5The author addresses the role of our regimes of perception in the global network of waste production by attending to the politics of perception, the production of the invisible and the odorless. The question of visibility is, indeed, crucial to the book’s argument: patriarchal racial capitalism and the production of waste are both highly visible and dissimulated. They are visible through the very workforce Vergès talks about (racialized women, with whom she opened her book A Decolonial Feminism), and hidden by what Vergès describes as “cleaning up”: the Western politics of greenwashing, a wide-scale process of abjection powered by racial capitalism.

6Making the World Clean urges us to contend with questions of responsibility and repair in relation to incommensurable injustice. The author tackles the profoundly intimate dimension of cleaning and cleanliness (when she discusses olfactory structures, or access to menstrual care), and their geopolitical function, linked to larger scales or spatial organization, militarization, and colonization. She considers the question of waste in different perspectives: the plunder, extraction, and exhaustion of natural and human resources, the production of toxic waste that disproportionately affects marginalized communities, but also the waste of life, the lives lost and constructed as waste. Waste is transformed, naturalized, sublimated, Vergès explains, precisely as it cannot disappear: “Racial capitalism suffocates the planet with its waste, which can never be totally discarded, despite the industry of waste management and the work of millions of people involved in the informal waste recycling and cleaning, 80 percent of whom are waste pickers.” (76)

7Vergès’s volume is in dialogue with the works of major historians, anthropologists or philosophers, and may be complemented with works within animal studies and their critique of the ideological construct of “nature”; other works have also explored the complexity of developing what Vergès calls a global “ethics of cleanliness” (46-47) rooted in a decolonial, feminist, antiracist “politics of the elemental” (51). For example, Alexis Shotwell investigates the “metaphysics of purity,” its contradictions and entanglements (Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times, 2016), while Eula Biss blends the personal and the global to reflect on the politics of vaccination, pollution, and community (On Immunity: An Inoculation (2014). Moreover, the sections that briefly explore the politics of breathing, and the history and afterlives of the olfactory dimensions of racial capitalism (and allude to its reliance on processes of distinction, on categories of authenticity, etc.), are a useful introduction to the expanding and productive fields of sensory studies, materialist ecocriticism, and olfactive epistemology: for instance, The Smell of Risk by Hsuan L. Hsu (2020) examines the racial and colonial dimensions of atmospheric and olfactory violence. The upcoming release in the Planetarities series, Planetary Portals (2026) by the Planetary Portals Collective, will also develop a subject Vergès touches on, i.e. the colonial afterlives of extraction.