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.

• 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.

'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