Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa

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.

'This wonderful book opens up the question of race in Africa in two ways: departing from colonial visions of métissage, it follows instead how multiracial Africans themselves lived, conceived, and debated their identities in the French empire. Secondly, Jean-Baptiste demonstrates that local actors acted first and foremost as global thinkers, inventing forms of multiracial internationalism that still matter enormously today.' Florence Bernault, Center for History, Science Po

• 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.