SPECIAL ISSUE: Debout & Déter / Standing Up & Determined: Black Women on the Move, Black Feminisms in French (Post)Imperial Contexts
In a roundtable, the transcription of which concludes this Special Issue, Bintou Dembélé, a dancer and choreographer, discusses her relationship to the world through movement. She does not describe herself as engagée but invokes the hip-hop and banlieue (project-like housing development) slang déter (determined) and debout (standing up) to denote the conscious and stubborn dimensions of this active stance. In the same roundtable, using a Creole phrase, the Martinican singer Jocelyne Béroard adds tchin bé doubout (don’t give up), which she explains means “we are, we exist,” developing that same idea of standing up (doubout). The notion of femmes debout (women standing up, tall, on their two feet) and déter (determined women) defines this Special Issue devoted to “Debout & Déter: Black Women on the Move, Black Feminisms in French (Post) Imperial Contexts,” as do the forms of movement and engagement that lead women to take that stance. Alongside those whose voices shape this volume, Dembélé and Béroard remind us of the many ways women describe their place and actions in the world while questioning, rejecting, or reframing the language of feminism, activism, and academia.1 These debout women position themselves in this way after finding themselves either literally sidelined (in rural communities or banlieues) or figuratively sidelined, like the signares (elite women) of Gorée Island, Senegal, after men in that region received French citizenship in 1848.
As we listened to their words, we realized that the initial question driving our project had been rendered more precise by the contributors’ sources, voices, and analyses. This Special Issue began as an examination of Black feminisms as a way to resist oppression, be it colonialism, racism, or misogyny. But in the review and writing process, the focus shifted, becoming a collection of articles seeking to understand why in the Global South, or in marginalized communities of the Global North, words like “déter” or “debout” are so prevalent when women describe their social, political, and cultural movements, or their engagement with the world. Somewhere along the way, “Debout & Déter” provided a broader exploration of how women prevail to create a better existence, or a better life, for themselves and very often for their kin.2 Francophone Afrofeminist thinking remains present in these articles, including as explicit terminology. But these texts also examine collaborative strategies to create a more equitable world for people across genders and for the broader community. These [End Page 9] articles showcase women who stood and moved to create spaces in which they could better exist, at times even thrive, and from which they could keep moving forward.
This Special Issue of the Journal of Women’s History was inspired by a conference—Des féminismes noirs en contexte (post)impérial français? Histoires, expériences, et théories (Black Feminisms in (Post)Imperial French Context? Histories, Experiences, and Theories)—co-organized by the Guest Editors (Jennifer Boittin and Jacqueline Couti) along with Silyane Larcher, who first imagined the conference, and Lucia Direnberger, Myriam Paris, and Rose Ndengue (an author in this issue). The conference was held in Aubervilliers, on the EHESS campus right outside Paris, France, on March 3–5, 2020, mere days before many countries closed their borders against the COVID-19 pandemic.3 We already knew something was coming: the traditional bise (French greeting by kissing on the cheeks) had become elbow bumps; announcements in the metro warned people to wash their hands frequently (albeit not yet to mask); restaurants were disturbingly empty, and people ate outdoors when they could. Two days into the conference, many attendees were rushing to change return tickets as governments warned of imminent and indefinite border closings.
Yet the conference hall was packed and from the first to the last day of the conference, we saw evidence of a deep-seated need for this intellectual gathering of a community of scholars, artists, and activists—the first event of its kind to give evidence of how the question of Black women in Francophone spaces not only deserved scholarly inquiry, but in fact already flourished as a deeply entrenched research topic. For three days, people—mostly womxn, mostly from French-speaking spaces around the world, many of whom had never met one another—testified to the multiplicities and complexities of Black, French-speaking women’s experiences during colonialism and its aftermath. Each presentation highlighted the existence at different historic moments of women’s protests and vindication. This evidence fractured a narrative of feminism which, centered around the experience of white women, has too often erased the ways in which Black women have led movements and activism in Europe and in (post)imperial spaces. Such research also challenged the notion many still hold that Black feminism is specifically Anglophone or United-Statesian. Instead, the conference nuanced Black feminisms by placing them within precise chronological and geographical contours. Sometimes these feminisms depended upon the global circulation of ideas. Frequently, however, there is no evidence of direct contact and dialogue between sites as far afield from one another as Africa, the French Antilles, and Europe, even though simultaneity certainly occurred in how women approached their debout moments. Even before the formulation of a theory and sociolegal praxis of intersectionality, in mainland France itself—a national space at the intersection of metropoles and colonies—women from the colonies forcefully contested the multiple forms of social domination with which they grappled.4 Their social justice movements often knowingly united under the umbrellas of race or class consciousness, rather than under that of feminism, although their language and practices might be defined by many as feminist. Such movements remind us how sticky the terms “feminism” and [End Page 10] “feminist” were, even before individuals beyond the occidental world started to regard them with suspicion as Western or European concepts.5 Thus the variety and richness of feminist epistemologies from the Global South, at times overlooked, invite us to broaden our understanding of how we can study feminism.6 We complicate and enrich histories that have too often elevated a white European woman, whether from the elite or popular classes, as the female subject of history, but have also often fixed Black United-Statesian feminism as the defining model for how we research and theorize Black feminisms globally.7 “Debout & Déter” accounts for that broad reading of Black feminisms, including its interest in the concept of “movement(s).”
Starting in the 1920s, the Martinican Nardal sisters—intellectuals who paved the way for Negritude and had ties to the Harlem Renaissance—were not only aware of the importance of formulating a female experience of colonization, but also of the ties they could establish with other Afrodescendant women in spaces prone to racially motivated microaggressions and violence, like continental France.8 They serve as but one example of the utility of situating Black feminisms and movements in a simultaneously transatlantic and transnational space in order to grasp each movement’s specificity, including in contrast with United-Statesian theories and practices. In a more radical turn, in 1978, The Coordination des femmes noires (Coordination of Black Women) published, in continental France, a thirty-eight-page pamphlet in French that it defined as “a collective piece of work that represents a means of shattering the isolation of black women wherever they may be.”9 Its principal aim was to break Black women out of “a social and political ghetto.”10 And the activists did not mince words. At the end of a text that consistently denounced the sexist and oppressive effects of colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism, they wrote: “We will not let ourselves be massacred, sent away, locked up, assimilated, welfared, bartered, ethnologized, anthropologized, exoticized, exploited: we are going to forge our history differently.”11 Forty years later, in a similar raging aspiration for autonomy, the members of Mwasi, an Afrofeminist collective based in metropolitan France, wrote in their manifesto Afrofem (2018) that they refused “to be saved by anyone at all.”12
The eight contributions to this Special Issue take the form of six articles and the abridged transcriptions of a roundtable and an interview. Each invites us to consider how to write the history of Black or Afrodescendant feminisms in spaces indissociable from (post)imperial temporalities, including by forging history differently. In particular, we have deliberately sought to highlight the sites of knowledge production that exist beyond the academic realm. As Bintou Démbélé so directly told the predominantly academic audience during the roundtable, “sometimes your papers aggress me,” and a bit later: “I want to ask you the question, ‘Who are you talking to?’” She reminded academics that she wanted access to our spaces and that she wanted the people with whom she dances to have access to academic spaces, both acknowledging that we had organized the roundtable with the precise goal of recognizing all the other ways knowledge about women’s movements are produced, preserved, and transmitted in Black Francophone spaces. She challenged us to do far more of this kind of bridgework from within academia, sharing what we know in less opaque ways. [End Page 11]
Including transcripts of such “palavers,” the term Dembélé prefers, in “Debout & Déter,” is one small but significant way of continuing that conversation. In the vein of the Senegalese sociologist Fatou Sow and other feminist scholars, our contributors pay careful attention to the sometimes undervalued knowledge, epistemologies, and sociopolitical realities that coexisted with, but were distinct from, the colonial situation and its aftermath.13 Speaking of palavers, the hegemony of scientific, scholarly research in the English language makes it more difficult for scholars who write in French to share their knowledge of what makes up women’s movements. One of the particularities of this volume is to make known French-language research as well as cultural and creative knowledge available to an English-reading audience, even while preserving the original French for non-English-readers on the JWH website. This online publication includes full transcripts of the roundtable and interview and a link to the full roundtable, so that people can see the admonishments and subtleties that lie in-between what had to be cut to adhere to word counts. [https://jwomenshistory.org/fall-2023/français/]
After all, if French feminist research and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies have greatly contributed to breaking with androcentric historical narratives by unveiling women’s agency in history, much work remains to be done regarding the shifting boundaries between gender, colonial status, and national belonging in Francophone spaces.14 In countries where the assertion of national identity is often built primarily in opposition to the cultural imposition caused by the colonial relationship, the very signifier of “feminism,” identified as a Western construct, continues to provoke heated debates, if not outright rejection. That rejection comes from the fact that in the Antilles, Senegal, Cameroon, other parts of West and North Africa, and the Indian Ocean, colonized women have always been organizing and mobilizing to contest colonial domination and its racial and gendered mechanisms.15 They have opposed forms of patriarchy specific to their societies, which were quite often reinforced by the laws and norms of colonial situations.16 That is why these contributors speak of “women’s movements,” a concept that in conjunction with debout and déter reflects how locally inflected emancipatory projects have upset gendered or (post) imperial hierarchies and norms, often without explicitly invoking feminism.17
This Special Issue ponders how a conversation around global Black feminisms might shift if we consider the contours of feminisms and women’s movements generated from within (post)imperial spaces with ongoing ties to Francophone countries in Europe or the French language. Its pieces delve into the analysis of feminisms and movements in their specific geographies and histories, and the praxis of social or political alliances. They also analyze the power relationships between Francophone European states and continental (post)imperial spaces like the banlieues and the Global South, where the relationship with the colonial past continues to configure feminist and women’s struggles. After all, as just one example, African governments and politics since independence have also influenced identity and gender politics on that continent. Examining the constitution of Black feminisms, in short, does not lead to a smooth and well-organized history or chronology, but rather one made up of [End Page 12] tensions, debates, and resistance. That is why we use feminisms in the plural form, and why we speak of women’s movements, since not all activists for women’s rights name themselves feminists.18 This volume highlights the richness of debates around Black feminisms, a richness that comprises LGBTQ+ and queer movements and activism, although, unfortunately, no article explicitly focusing on this question was submitted, making this an avenue to be further explored.19 Indeed, some feminisms and women’s movements, including both the Coordination of Black Women and Mwasi, call into question Western normativity by centering non-heteronormative sexuality and different societal approaches to health, disability, children, or family, but these questions are more peripheral in this issue, with the important exception of the transcribed roundtable. Altogether, “Debout & Déter”’s texts explore the many ways Black women have directed and nourished a range of Black women’s movements, stretching back to the nineteenth century (they of course stretch even further back).
Thus Sarah Zimmerman explores how the 1848 abolition of slavery, which allowed many adult males on the island to become French citizens, transformed how Goréen signares and formerly enslaved women prospered economically and participated in the political sphere. Zimmerman examines Gorée Island (Senegal) as a French Republican colonial space that challenged a wide range of Goréen women’s traditions, such as their marital practices, economic independence, and authority. French Republican colonialism prevented women from living empowered lives. Pondering the signares’ loss of power and the ways in which they tried to prevail, Zimmerman reveals how a misogyny the French state liked to associate with Muslim, Senegalese, and more generally African culture, was also at the heart of the post-1848 French Republican project.
Building upon these nineteenth-century themes, the next three articles focus on the 1950s, with emancipation now framed by decolonization. Developing a concept of gender complementarity, Elizabeth Jacob recounts how feminism has been conceptualized in Côte d’Ivoire and other African countries through the example of the first woman prime minister, Jeanne Gervais, who emphasized compromise and reciprocity between men and women. Gervais argued that women’s contributions to family units needed to be viewed as just as vital as their contributions to society, a strategy that helped her male counterparts to take her efforts seriously while not feeling threatened by them.
Like Jacob, Rose Ndengue uses a complementarity principle to highlight a Black feminist decolonial project that does not use the label of feminism to define itself. She explores the political actions and mobilizations launched after the creation of the UDEFEC (Union Démocratique des femmes Camerounaises [Democratic Union of Cameroonian Women]). Ndengue shows how rural women developed a Cameroonian nationalist project that emphasized collaboration with men in the fight against French colonial oppression. These activists refused and counteracted French colonialism through ancestral and feminine techniques and strategies such as anlu, a ritualistic gathering to shame individuals who do not abide by particular moral codes. They fought for Black liberation and social justice while seeking to create a true democracy. [End Page 13]
Charlotte Grabli moves us to the elegance clubs of Brazzaville and Leopoldville (today Kinshasa), the twin capitals of the French and Belgian Congo. In these centers of fashion and dance, women engaged both socially and politically in forms of emancipation, including by inserting themselves into a Congolese rumba scene that had traditionally been a masculine one. They created mutual aid societies for single women (known as free women), whom authorities suspected of prostitution. Grabli explores female solidarity and struggles, showing how women’s movements on the dance floor and through associations also shaped the Congolese politics of the period. With three articles focused upon the 1950s in West Africa, we get a powerful sense that women’s emancipatory movements defined the region during a decade more often known for its overt and predominantly male anti-imperial and decolonizing politics.
The final two articles bring us into the late twentieth century, starting with Nora Eguienta and Sylvain Pattieu’s exploration of Antilleans’ partaking in a program designed to bring workers from France’s overseas departments to continental France, marked in the 1960s and 1970s by a strong female presence. Workers refused the latent racialization that undergirded the program, and the strict categories of employment to which women were confined: domestic worker, nurse’s aid, and office worker. Migrants’ interactions with the BUMIDOM (Bureau pour le développement des migrations dans les départements d’outre-mer [Office for the Development of Migrations in the Overseas Departments]) often shifted from an initial loyalty to the institution’s values and norms, to the voicing of critical stances, before culminating in exits from the program, such as silent abandonment of jobs. Even migrants who were not political nonetheless relied upon sisterhood: the sense that they had a common purpose and needed to look out for one another.
Finally, Pamela Ohene-Nyako considers how individual contexts shape manifestations of Black feminisms using biographical and international frameworks. Lydie Dooh-Bunya was a French novelist, journalist, activist, and mother of six children, who cofounded the Mouvement pour la défense de la femme noire (Movement for the Defense of Black Women), which stood against female genital mutilation, polygyny, forced marriage, and racism. Dooh-Bunya’s Black Francophone feminism also stood against white patriarchal universalism by promoting antiracist, antisexist internationalism. Ohene-Nyako emphasizes the emotional dimensions of activism, in other words how people are personally implicated and passionately engaged in their activism.20
Whether they or their families migrated or are multilocals who split their time between Europe and the French Antilles, or West Africa, the participants in the roundtable (Jocelyne Béroard, Bintou Dembélé, Joëlle Kapompole, Rose Ndengue, and Fania Noël) and Michèle Magema in her interview with Jacqueline Couti, take up the articles’ themes while bringing them into the twenty-first century, reinforcing that one cannot think about feminisms outside of praxis, and that often women’s movements are not explicitly about feminism. The participants are all women of African or Caribbean heritage who think about feminism and movement in relation to their lived experiences and daily practices. They demonstrate that feminist theory has no [End Page 14] raison d’être if it is not put into practice to change ourselves and improve individuals’ lives and conditions. That is why they often express women’s movements or activism as more a façon d’être (way of being) in the world. Each participant explores what it means to be a femme debout or déter, moving beyond the usual discussion of resilience and resistance against oppression to consider how to live one’s life to the fullest, no matter the circumstances.
Once we juxtapose the six articles with the roundtable and the interview, certain commonalities and defining features of Black Francophone women’s movements emerge. First, Tina Campt’s concept of practices of refusal were just as common as practices of outright resistance, if not more so.21 Consider the BUMIDOM workers’ refusal to pursue the careers imposed upon them or the Congolese elegance clubs as a form of emancipation, in contrast with Lydie Dooh-Bunya’s powerful resistance against polygyny or female excision. Second, we see the importance of travel and the networks and global interconnections it builds: the BUMIDOM migration continues to shape continental-overseas passages and families to this day, and Dooh-Bunya’s migration shaped her politics. Indeed, the BUMIDOM migrants were in situations similar to those of the Senegalese women of Gorée Island in the nineteenth century, in the sense that both pieces show us moments when women’s rights were curtailed, removed, or upended, leading women to create new frameworks or adapt to new constraints, like marriage, family, or sorority, in order to continue to function. Third, we see in several articles the importance of diplomacy and bridge-building, often within communities and between men and women, a form of sociopolitical gender complementarity. Béroard speaks of refusing a feminism that might put off the men with whom she works as a singer; Dembélé describes herself as “neither man nor woman, half-man half-woman,” speaking to blurred gender lines and, Gervais and other women in Côte d’Ivoire worked with Ivorian men, as did the Democratic Union of Cameroonian Women, and women in the elegance clubs of the two Congos.
Finally, a common trait of every piece is the search for, preservation of, and respect for Black francophone womxn’s voices and stories in archives, newspapers, photographs, music, dance, film, statistics, and many other sources. In the end, “Debout & Déter” thus shows how Black Francophone womxn of the Global North and of the Global South, who were more accurately Black polyglot women often speaking three, four, or more different languages—one of which was French—found many ways to move through the world, to manipulate and redefine politics, dance, connectivity, community, power, and language, and to question and urge others on, as the activist academic Fania Noël does. She asks us: “When you talk about the margins, what margins are you talking about?” Before giving us a direction: “Instead of getting into the politics of the glass ceiling, you have to concentrate on the politics of the sticky floor.” These women’s words, “debout,” “doubout,” “déter,” and “sticky floor,” are specific to the particular histories of Black women’s movements in Francophone spaces, initiated, depending upon one’s ability and age, by sitting up or standing up, and sustained by creating, by working with a community, and whatever the starting point, by moving on, literally and conceptually, from there. [End Page 15]
Jennifer Anne Boittin is professor of French, Francophone Studies, History, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris (University of Nebraska Press, 2010) and of Undesirable: Passionate Mobility and Women’s Defiance of French Colonial Policing, 1919–1952 (University of Chicago Press, 2022) and has published articles in Gender & History and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society, among other journals. Her work focuses on race, gender, class, and sexuality in France, West Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean, and includes collaboration across disciplines.
Jacqueline Couti is the Laurence H. Favrot Professor of French Studies at Rice University. Her research and teaching interests delve into the transatlantic and transnational interconnections between cultural productions from continental France and its now former colonies. Her work explores constructions of gender, race, sexuality, identity politics, and nationalism. She is the author of Dangerous Creole Liaisons (Liverpool, 2016) and Sex, Sea, and Self: Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourses 1924–1948 (Liverpool, 2021). Her most recent publications include: a new edition of Le Fruit défendu: Moeurs créoles, Roman martiniquais inédit by René Bonneville (L’Harmattan, 2022) and “Lumina Sophie, Nineteenth-Century Martinique,” in Women Claiming Freedom: Gender, Race, and Liberty in the Americas (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Notes
A special thanks to Silyane Larcher for inviting us to join the core committee of the Black Francophone feminisms conference that led to this volume, as well as to the other three conference organizers (Direnberger, Paris, and Ndengue) and its presenters and audience members, including Tyler Stovall, whom many of us saw for the last time in person there. Thanks also to Jennifer Davis and Sandie Holguín for inviting us to work with the JWH and to the authors, speakers, and creators who joined our project. Feminism takes many forms, and one is energizing collaboration; honoring the conference via “Debout & Déter” has been such an experience.
1. Laure Bereni, “Penser la transversalité des mobilisations féministes: L’espace de la cause des femmes” in Christine Bard, ed., Les féministes de la deuxième vague (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012): 27–41.
2. On kin, Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).
3. See https://mysymposia.wordpress.com/. This conference and its substantive call for papers, co-authored by its six organizers, have already inspired other calls and publications, such as Hanétha Vété-Congolo and Agnès Berthelot-Raffard, “Construire et promouvoir une pensée francophone sur le sujet femme noire,” Recherches féministes 34, no. 2 (2021): 1–297.
4. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review, 43, no. 6 (July 1991): 1241–1299; Jules Falquet, “Le Combahee River Collective, pionnier du féminisme Noir. Contextualisation d’une pensée radicale,” Les cahiers du CEDREF, no. 14 (2006): 69–104.
5. Abdellali Hajjat and Silyane Larcher, “Intersectionnalité: Introduction au dossier,” Mouvements, February 12, 2019, https://mouvements.info/intersectionnalite/; Ait Ben Lmadani Fatima and Moujoud Nasima, “Peut-on faire de l’intersectionnalité sans les ex-colonisé-e-s?” Mouvements 72, no. 4 (2012) 11–21; Bilge Sirma, “Le blanchiment de l’intersectionnalité,” Recherches féministes 28, no.2 (2015): 9-32; Baril Alexandre, “Intersectionality, Lost in Translation? (Re)thinking Inter-sections between Anglophone and Francophone Intersectionality,” Atlantis 38, no. 1 (2017): 125–137; Patricia Hill Collins “Lost in Translation ?: Black feminisme, intersectionnalité et justice sociale” in L’intersectionnalité: enjeux théoriques et politiques, ed. Farazina Fassa, Marta Orca I Escoda and Éléonore Lépinard (Paris: La Dispute, 2016), 53-74.
6. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” boundary 2, 12, no. 3 (Spring—Autumn 1984): 333–358; Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28, no. 2 (Winter 2003): 499–535. On sexuality, Anjali R. Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).
7. Christine Delphy, Un universalisme si particulier. Féminisme et exception française, 1980–2010 (Paris: Éditions Syllepse, 2010); Elsa Dorlin, ed., Black feminism. Anthologie du féminisme africain-américain, 1975–2000 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008); Naïma Hamrouni and Chantal Maillé, eds., Le sujet du féminisme est-il blanc? Femmes racisées et recherche féministe (Montréal: Les éditions du remue-ménage, 2015).
8. Jennifer Anne Boittin, Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010); Jacqueline Couti, “La Doudou contre-attaque: Féminisme noir, sexualisation et doudouisme en question dans l’entre-deuxguerres,” Comment s’en sortir, vol. 1 (2015): 111–139; Paulette Nardal, Beyond Negritude: Essays from Woman in the City, trans. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009).
9. “Coordination des femmes noires.” July 1978: 3, 396 COO, Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand (Paris).
10. “Coordination.”
11. “Coordination,” 36.
12. Mwasi Afrofeminist Collective, https://www.mwasicollectif.org/; Mwasi, Afrofem (Paris, Éditions Syllepse, 2018).
13. Fatou Sarr Sow, La recherche féministe francophone. Langue, identités et enjeux (Paris: Editions Karthala, 2009); Pascale Barthélémy, Sororité et Colonialisme: Françaises et Africaines au temps de la Guerre Froide (1944–1962) (Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2022); Rose Ndengue, “Mobilisations féminines au Cameroun français dans les années 1940–1950: L’ordre du genre et l’ordre colonial fissurés,” Le Mouvement social, no. 255 (April—June 2016): 71–85.
14. Pascale Barthélémy, Africaines et diplômées à l’époque coloniale (1918–1957) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010); Pascale Barthélemy, Luc Capdevila, and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, “Femmes, genre et colonisations,” Clio. Histoire, Femmes, et Sociétés, no. 33 (2011): 7–22 https://journals.openedition.org/clio/9994; Emmanuelle Bouilly and Ophélie Rillon, “Relire les décolonisations d’Afrique francophone au prisme du genre,” Le Mouvement social 2, no. 255 (2016): 3–16; Ochy Curiel, “Pour un féminisme qui articule race, classe, sexe et sexualité: Interview avec Ochy Curiel (République Dominicaine),” Nouvelles Questions Féministes 20, no. 3 (1999): 39–62; Odile Goerg, “Femmes africaines et politique: les colonisées au féminin en Afrique occidentale,” Clio. Histoire‚ Femmes et Sociétés, no. 6 (1997): 105–125; Anne Hugon, Histoire des femmes en situation coloniale: Afrique et Asie, XXe siècle (Paris: Karthala, 2004); Feriel Lalami, “L’enjeu du statut des femmes durant la période coloniale en Algérie,” Nouvelles Questions Féministes 27, no. 3 (2008): 16–27; Moujoud Nasima and Falquet Jules, “Cent ans de solitude en France. Domesticité, reproduction sociale, migration et histoire coloniale,” Agone (2010): 169–195 Myriam Paris, Nous qui versons la vie goutte à goutte: Féminismes, économie reproductive et pouvoir colonial à La Réunion (Paris: Éditions Dalloz, 2020). See also Trica Danielle Keaton, #You Know You’re Black in France When…: The Fact of Everyday Antiblackness (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2022) and the forthcoming book by Silyane Larcher, Afroféministes. Luttes féministes noires pour l’émancipation en France postcoloniale (Paris: Seuil, 2024).
15. This Special Issue focuses on Africans and Antilleans in transatlantic context, but the conference showcased fascinating work on Blackness in North Africa and the Indian Ocean.
16. Félix Germain and Silyane Larcher, ed., Black French Women and the Struggle for Equality, 1848–2016 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018).
17. Jean Allman, Susan Geiger, Musisi Nakanyike, eds., Women in African Colonial Histories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); Jennifer Anne Boittin, “‘The Great Game of Hide and Seek Has Worked’: Suzanne Césaire, Cultural Marronnage, and a Caribbean Mosaic of Gendered Race Consciousness around World War II,” French Colonial History 20 (2021): 145–173; Anny-Dominique Curtius, Suzanne Césaire. Archéologie littéraire et artistique sur une mémoire empêchée (Paris: Karthala, 2020); Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel, Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019); Robin Mitchell, Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2020); Marèma Toure Thiam, “Aspects épistémologiques, théoriques et culturels de la recherche sur le genre en Afrique,” Présence Africaine, 197, no. 1 (2018): 313–336; Jacqueline Couti, “Lumina Sophie, Nineteenth-Century Martinique,” in As If She Were Free: A Collective Biography of Women and Emancipation in the Americas, ed. E. Ball, T. Seijas, & T. Snyder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 373–392; Jacqueline Couti, Sex, Sea, and Self: Nationalism and Sexuality in French Caribbean Discourse, 1924–1948 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021).
18. Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
19. Robert Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality (London: Routledge, 2003); Salima Amari, “Lesbiennes de l’immigration. Construction de soi et relations familiales,” Nouvelles Questions Féministes 38, no. 2 (2019): 153–156; Richard Quang-Anh Tran “Sexuality as Translation. Locating the ‘Queer’ in a 1920s Vietnamese Debate.” Annali di Ca’Foscari. Serie orientale 56 (June 2020): 353–378, doi:10.30687/AnnOr/2385-3042/2020/56/014; Todd Shepard, Mâle décolonisation: L’ “homme arabe” et la France, de l’indépendance algérienne à la révolution iranienne, trans. Clément Baude (Paris: Payot, 2017).
20. On passionate engagement, Awa Thiam, La parole aux négresses (Paris: Denoël-Gonthier, 1978); Jennifer Anne Boittin, Undesirable: Passionate Mobility and Women’s Defiance of French Colonial Policing, 1919–1952 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022); Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Passion, Betrayal, and Revolution in Colonial Saigon: The Memoirs of Bao Luong (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
21. Kevin Coleman, “Practices of Refusal in Images: An Interview with Tina M. Kampt,” Radical History Review 132 (October 2018): 209–18. See also https://www.womenandperformance.org/ampersand/29-1/campt.
