MASCS Spring Lecture Series presents Rachel Jean-Baptiste from the University of California, Davis.

Monday, April 11, 2016
4:30 PM
10383 Bunche Hall
Los Angeles, CA 90095

Rachel Jean-Baptiste explores how societies construct difference and belonging based on changing thought about race, through analyzing how ideas about the being of multiracial persons in twentieth century francophone Africa shaped meanings and practices of sexuality, human rights, and citizenship. This paper is a draft chapter from her book project exploring the social and cultural history of métissage (miscegenation), métis (people of mixed race), identity, and citizenship in twentieth century francophone Africa.  In pre-colonial years of trans-Atlantic Ocean trade, interracial sex involving mainly African women and European men was commonplace along the coast and such relationships facilitated economic and social alliances. After World War I, the French increasingly centralized colonial rule and expressed hardened visions of racial difference between “black” (colonial subject), “white” (French citizen), and varied and differentiated “others” in Africa. Nevertheless, interracial sexual relationships of varied durations, degrees of legality, illicitness, complicity, and coercion, primarily between African women and foreign men, persisted. Heterosexual interracial relationships resulted in the births of thousands of children. This book project investigates the little-studied questions of how Africans conceived of race and race mixing and multi-directional processes of racialization in colonial encounters. The paper analyzes the 1936 colonial law in French Equatorial Africa that acknowledge “métis” as an official class, a social category of people entitled to the legal status of French citizen. Individual métis and varied self-help societies claimed alternative interpretations of what citizenship meant and conferred in terms of social, legal, and economic entitlements. Moreover, the question of métis identity and citizenship was also consequential for hierarchies of racial difference and legal status amongst Africans.  Analyzing the contested fields of legal discourses, judicial procedures, and lived experiences for this emerging form of citizenship, her research tries to demonstrate the multidirectional currents of intra-African and African diaspora debates and claims about the meanings of race, and how these meanings shaped French colonial thought and policies.

Rachel Jean-Baptiste is Associate Professor of African history at the University of California, Davis. She is an historian of colonial and post-colonial French-speaking Central and West Africa. Her research interests include the history of sexuality and gender and women's history, marriage and family law, urban history, race, and citizenship. Her articles have appeared in Journal of the History of Sexuality, Journal of Women's History, and Journal of African History. Currently, she is working on a book project that analyzes changes in racial thought, belonging, and citizenship in colonial Senegal, Gabon and Congo (Brazzaville).

This lecture is part of the Monday African Studies Center Seminar Spring Lecture Series.

Cost : Free and open to the public.

http://international.ucla.edu/africa/

Sponsor(s): African Studies Center