Venue: Koserstraße 20, 14195 Berlin, A336

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 African and French societies about race and how ideas about racial identity shaped family life, childhood, and parenting, access to education, and citizenship. Tracing the life histories of multiracial children in 3 locations - St. Louis and Dakar, Senegal; Abidjan, Ivory Coast; and Paris, France - this talk traces the fluctuating identities of multiracial individuals. Crucially, it 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 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.

Rachel Jean-Baptiste is the Michelle Mercer and Bruce Golden Family Professor of Feminist and Gender Studies, and faculty in the Department of History and Department of African American and African Studies at Stanford University. At Stanford she is also the Faculty Director of the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research interests include the history of the family, marriage, childhood, citizenship, race, and the history of cities in the French speaking Atlantic World, encompassing, Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean. She is the author of Conjugal Rights: Marriage, Sexuality, and Urban Life in Colonial Libreville, Gabon, Ohio University Press, 2014. Her talk will draw on her award-winning second book: Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa: Race, Childhood and Citizenship, Cambridge University Press, 2023.

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