To Be Free and French: Citizenship in France's Atlantic Empire (Critical Perspectives on Empire)
Cambridge University Press, 7/20/2017
EAN 9781107101142, ISBN10: 110710114X
Hardcover, 382 pages, 23.5 x 15.8 x 2.4 cm
Language: English
The Haitian Revolution may have galvanized subjects of French empire in the Americas and Africa struggling to define freedom and 'Frenchness' for themselves, but Lorelle Semley reveals that this event was just one moment in a longer struggle of women and men of color for rights under the French colonial regime. Through political activism ranging from armed struggle to literary expression, these colonial subjects challenged and exploited promises in French Republican rhetoric that should have contradicted the continued use of slavery in the Americas and the introduction of exploitative labor in the colonization of Africa. They defined an alternative French citizenship, which recognized difference, particularly race, as part of a 'universal' French identity. Spanning Atlantic port cities in Haiti, Senegal, Martinique, Benin, and France, this book is a major contribution to scholarship on citizenship, race, empire, and gender, and it sheds new light on debates around human rights and immigration in contemporary France.
List of figures
List of maps
List of tables
Preface
coincidental crossings
Acknowledgments
Part I. Revolutionary Foundations
Prologue
citizens of the world
1. To live and die, free and French
2. Signares before citizens
Part II. Colonial Constructions
3. When Blacks broke the chains in the 'Little Paris of the Antilles'
4. The trans-African origins of Porto-Novo
5. An 'evolution revolution' in Paris
Part III. Planning after Empire
6. A more perfect French Union
Epilogue
the art of citizenship
Bibliography
Index.