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Drawing on multinational oral history and archival research, Rachel Jean-Baptiste investigates the fluctuating identities of multiracial people, or 'métis' in colonial French Africa. Offering a nuanced history of race-making, belonging, and rights, she shows how métis carved out varied visions of belonging in Africa, Europe, and internationally.
List of contents
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.
About the author
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.
