Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa: Race, Childhood, and Citizenship

Description

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 metis 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 metis. Crucially, she centres claims by metis 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 metis individuals and collectives carved out visions of racial belonging as children and citizens in Africa, Europe, and internationally.

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.