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

Explores the history of race-making, belonging, and rights by outlining the contested place of multiracial people in colonial French West and Equatorial Africa.

Rachel Jean-Baptiste (Author)

9781108489041, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 8 June 2023

292 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.2 cm, 0.61 kg

'This is a pathbreaking book that expands the history of childhood and race in Africa and rethinks our methods for studying intimacy and emotions. With case studies drawn from diverse archives, Jean-Baptiste combines a discussion of state welfare policy with attention to children's rights and considers colonial sexualities from the point of view of Africans.' Stephanie Newell, Yale University

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.

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.

Subject Areas: African history [HBJH]