Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa

Erscheinungsjahr 2023
ISBN: 978-1-108-48904-1
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 292 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 594 g

Reihe: African Identities: Past and Present

Despite increasingly hardened visions of racial difference in colonial governance in French Africa after World War I, interracial sexual relationships persisted, resulting in the births of thousands of children. These children, mostly born to African women and European men, sparked significant debate in French society about the status of multiracial people, debates historians have termed 'the métis problem.' Drawing on extensive archival and oral history research in Gabon, Republic of Congo, Senegal, and France, Rachel Jean-Baptiste investigates the fluctuating identities of métis. Crucially, she centres claims by métis themselves to access French social and citizenship rights amidst the refusal by fathers to recognize their lineage, and in the context of changing African racial thought and practice. In this original history of race-making, belonging, and rights, Jean-Baptiste demonstrates the diverse ways in which métis individuals and collectives carved out visions of racial belonging as children and citizens in Africa, Europe, and internationally.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jean-Baptiste, Rachel

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Afrikanische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction; 1. Multiracial identities and the consolidation and subversion of racialized French colonial rule in French west and equatorial Africa, ca. 1900–1930; 2. Wards of the state: claiming and mediating colonial government welfare and French institutional care of multiracial children in the 1930s; 3. 'I am French': multiraciality and citizenship in FWA and FEA, ca. 1928–38; 4. 'Odd notions of race': reconfiguring rights of/to citizenship and children, 1939–ca. 1950; 5. The reconfiguration of maternal and child welfare in Dakar, 1949–1956: Nicolas Rigonaux and the Union of Eurafricans; 6. Multiracial internationalism: racial equality, universal rights, and just Eurafrican futures, 1957–1960; Epilogue.

Über Autor(innen)

Jean-Baptiste, Rachel
Rachel Jean-Baptiste is Associate Professor of history at the University of California, Davis. She has previously published Conjugal Rights: Marriage, Sexuality, and Urban Life in Colonial Libreville, Gabon (2014), as well as articles in edited books and academic journals. She is co-president of the Coordinating Council for Women in History and serves on the boards of the African Studies Association and the UK editorial collective of Gender and History.