 So Dr. Ernest Joseph Gabriel is an assistant professor of French and Francophone studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and that is a scholar working at the intersection of French and Afro diasporic culture, literature and politics. She conducts research and teaches courses on race, gender and citizenship in France, the Caribbean and Africa. Her areas of expertise include black women's writings, anti-colonial activism and slavery in the French Atlantic. So Annette is going to speak to us for about 15 to 20 minutes. We will have a quick discussion and then invite you into the conversation through the Q&A function that we have available on Zoom. I also just wanted to take this opportunity to give a quick shout out to my friend Dr. Yolande Booker who really planted the seed in my mind last year around the possibilities of the sending out signals to the world in terms of the kinds of partnerships and collaborations that we can build as black academics located in different parts of the world including on the African continent. So this invitation today and this discussion is really as much a testament to the idea that Yolande planted in my head as it is to the work that we need to be doing consistently to connect with each other as black feminist women academics who are located in different parts of the world around our scholarship and to build greater solidarity in the work that we do. So Annette, let me turn over to you. Okay, thank you so much. We know for the invitation to be part of this conversation. And I'm also so grateful to everyone who has kind of tuned in. I'm grateful to you for your time and your engagement in joining us from near and far. So I'm going to go ahead and share my slide. Thank you for bearing with me just for one second. Ideally you should be seeing now my slide. All right. So, again, I just want to echo the kind of the shout out to Yolande. I want to thank you again and we know for creating this space for conversation. I'm not going to speak for very long because I'm really eager to get into conversation and exchange with everyone. So I want to begin with a provocation. Citizenship is a fiction. For this I do not mean that citizenship is a lie or that it is not real or any other connotations that the word fiction might carry for you. What I mean is that citizenship is a set of stories that we tell ourselves about who we are and where and how we belong. These stories include the laws and policies around entry and exit across borders around policing and surveillance within borders. But these stories also include the myths, the narratives that we weave about the intangible ties that bind us to our communities on multiple scales. So, kind of go back in the day, but it's interesting talking about the nation as an imagined community, right, that to think about citizenship as a fiction is to think about the multiple scales, right, at which people sort of imagine and construct communities within but also beyond but also sometimes in conflict with the national scale. So, focusing more specifically on the French context. I want to take as my starting point, one of the stories that France tells itself about what it means to be French. And so, every time I give a talk I kind of joke that I really wish that France would stop giving me materials of my talk right like let me just come and sit here and talk about my poetry. So here we are. So this is an article that appeared in the New York Times. Two days ago I believe what is pandemic time right but two days ago I think, and the title of the article is will American ideas tear France apart. Some of its leaders think so. And so if you go down towards the bottom of the page beyond the image there, right the opening is really quite dramatic right Paris. We locate France right the geography of France is Paris, the threat is said to be existential. It fuels secessionism, not at national unity, abets Islamism attacks Francis intellectual and cultural heritage. The threat certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States, said President Emmanuel Macron. French politicians, high profile intellectuals and journalists are warning that progressive American ideas specifically on race, gender, post colonialism are undermining their society. This is one of those fictions in this story racism has a nationality and that nationality is American. It is decidedly not French. And so to acknowledge the existence of the inequalities, the discrimination and the violence that are baked into the very fabric of French politics, society, and everyday life is to import an American linguistic and conceptual framework. At least so the story goes. In one sense, and in one sense only. This is actually true. To speak about racism in France, particularly as a black French person is to betray that national fiction that the disappearance of race is the disappearance of racism. And so in response to this New York Times piece scholars and public commentators of the last couple of days have offered up the long and damning catalog of Francis racial sins as evidence that the very idea of Frenchness developed was developed through and shaped by the country's slave holding past and colonial history. These examples I have kind of kind of popped up as evidence of Francis racial sins right so from Francis creation of the detestable could not write the black code that inscribed the brutality of slavery in law. You know to 20th century the massacre of Tiraia Senegal, you know colonial African troops that had risked their lives in the liberation of France during World War two, only to be shot and killed on the colonial administration's orders. And when they demanded the pensions they were owed to even more forward in time to a contemporary moment to today, right the alarming statistic by Defensiel the draw that people of black and Arab descent in France today are 20 times more likely to be stopped by police. The long litany of black people suffering killed destroyed can certainly be lies the national fiction of French citizenship as guaranteeing liberty, equality and fraternity and providing that long litany is one is one way to go right that accounting is one way to go. But the thing about fiction is that it offers opportunities to think creatively, both in the sense of constructing new narratives of belonging. And creatively in the sense of creation that is making those new narratives, life giving, rather than death dealing. So here's what I mean. When France says that the study analysis and critique of racism. It's an American importation. It erases the current activism by black women like a Saturday, whose years long fights for justice for the killing of her brother Adam at how we are the hands of police is ongoing. And it also erases the long history of black French intellectuals who have thought and written about racism in France in ways that are not routed through or imported from the United States. They may be in conversation, certainly right but they're not indebted in that way. It enacts to my mind and almost discursive killing that disappears these intellectuals and their and the victims of French violence, colonial and state violence that they write about. It disappears the evidence of their lives, and the work that they did in pushing France closer to its own ideals of liberty, equality fraternity. So what I try to do in my book reimagining liberation is to attend to the lives and work of black French women or black women in the French Empire, more broadly, who engage in creative fictions of their own through their anti colonial activism and literary and reduction, as they sought to redefine citizenship as various forms of community right so community to be questioned challenged unraveled reconstituted and brought into being on their own terms. So in this book I study seven women and you can see sort of photographs of them on your screen. Seven women from Africa, the Caribbean, South America so French Guyana and the United States to think about how they tried to reimagine what it meant to be a black woman and a French citizen as forms of belonging that did not necessarily have to be at odds. And so think kind of more concretely right, they sort of did this in three key ways. And they did this by directly challenging French state constructions of what it meant to be French. And I like to think about like the, the sarcastic chuckle that many of them would probably admit to read in my calls words about you know racism being sort of an American import. Right, but the thing that's interesting is that it's not so much the way that Frenchness is constructed as who is doing that construction. That is something that they're challenging right so they're challenging the French state constructions of what it means to be French. And so in a lot of their work, they understand that Frenchness had to go beyond the borders of France. So thinking geographically and had to go conceptually beyond citizenship, right as solely once relationships with the nation state. And so, for example, Suzanne Césaire from Martinique, who saw in poetry and in literary expression, the possibility for imagining a pan Caribbean civilization. The second way was to think about or to engage in transnational exchange through travel correspondence and activism. And one of the women who really stands out for this is as long the ropes in whose often sort of kind of subsumed under the legacy of her more famous has husband Paul Robeson. But you know who was an intellectual activist and performer in some ways in her own right right but as long the ropes and occupied kind of insider and outsider positions. As she navigated solidarity with black women in the French Empire from from her own front position as an African American woman whose citizenship was suspended when the US government confiscated her passports for communist activity. And the third key way was enfranchising black women as voters and as political representatives. And in the book there are two women who really stand out for this, Paulette Nadal from and working in Martinique and our cater from and working in then French Sudan today Molly, they were working in two very different frameworks, Paulette Nadal in what was at the time a newly minted overseas department of France right mountaineering and our cater and what was still effectively a colony right French to Sudan at the time as a French colony. And so because the because of the ways that those frameworks continue to tether their home and their home spaces to France, they understood the framework, or the space of electoral politics to be limited in the possibilities that they could offer. And yet they did not simply wash their hands off electoral politics and say well we're going to go off and do something more radical and more suitably radical, right that they refuse to seed ground, even in electoral politics despite its limits. And so both of them engaged in sort of like mass efforts to register women as voters, in order to have them also be able to kind of assert their political will and their voice and elections. And the interesting thing about French citizenship right that promise of French citizenship as guaranteeing always more kind of democratic or more equitable access to to political representation was again one of those fictions because she was a writer working in French to Dan today Molly, she at the time because of her class position as an educated woman as a midwife was classified as a French citizen. But she renounced that citizenship, because it did not actually offer her the benefits that she needed, right so she denounced that French citizenship because it prevented her from voting in local elections, and therefore severed her from the local that she found to be a more promising space. Right so when we think about the limits of electoral politics, the work of these women, not only refuse to seed ground, but also try to imbue those limited spaces, right with increased possibilities, right so hence the sort of the title reimagining. And so, you know, these were the three main ways that I sort of touch on in the book as I work through the lives and the stories of these seven women. You know, like I said, I won't speak very long today because I'm very eager to get into our conversation. So I want to close by by reading and reflecting on a brief passage from the book right the very first page as a way to kind of tie together all of these ideas of what it means to think about citizenship. And so essentially the book begins like this. In August 1944, as General Philippe Leclerc marched into Paris to liberate the city from German occupation. André Blouin marched into the mayor's office in Bungie, a French territory in Central Africa, to obtain a quinine card for the malaria treatment that would save her two year old son, Rene. Quinine cards were for Europeans only. And the mayor let the distraught woman know this in no uncertain terms. As the daughter of an African mother and a European father, Blouin was classified by colonial law as mitis or mixed race, a status that extended to her son. Colonial guards dragged her out of the mayor's office as she screamed, I am a French citizen, the same as you. And so is my son. Yours is an accursed race, cursed authors of a murderous law. In her autobiography, Blouin maintains that the events of World War II and her son's death in a seemingly far-flung outpost of the French Empire in Africa were inextricably linked. She writes and I quote, I have been asked why would white people be so cruel to a child who was three fourths white. My answer is, this was deepest equatorial Africa, and the war was on, end quote. The institutionalized racism that viewed people in the colonies as dispensable bodies on the battlefields of Europe was also at work in the murderous law that reserved anti-malaria treatment for white Europeans only. Rene's preventable death from malaria galvanized Blouin into political action. She first fought the quinine law and obtained a reform, making the anti-malaria treatment more accessible. From there, her activism became more explicitly anti-colonial and took on a regional and then international scale. She worked as an advisor to Sikuture and Kwame Kuma, the first presidents of Guinea and Ghana respectively, and eventually became chief of protocol in the cabinet of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. Blouin's experiences of exclusion and discrimination as an African woman in colonized territory propelled her to advocate for a more expansive form of citizenship beyond France's exclusionary race-based tiered citizenship policies. After losing her son, it became even more urgent to work toward a decolonized world. So I want to take a step back, right? I begin the book this way because, among other things, I wanted to think about what the Martin-Ecan poet Éme Sejal meant when he wrote, and I quote, And above all, my body as well as my soul, beware of crossing your arms in the sterile attitude of a spectator. For life is not a spectacle. A sea of miseries is not a proscenium. A man who screams is not a dancing bear. Blouin's screams were not a spectacle to be observed, to be written about dispassionately, and then to be read from the safety of the mediating pages of an academic monograph. They are a form of witnessing, witnessing the ways that the fiction of citizenship marked her body through racial classification, foreclosed her motherhood by killing her son, and galvanized her pan-Africanist work as a self-described, quote, African nationalist, whose vision for citizenship exceeded the narrow framing of racialized French citizenship, much as her own screams exceeded the constricting bounds of the colonial administrator's office that painful day when he condemned her child to die. There is probably so much more that we can say about all of this, right? We can talk about motherhood, we can talk about the geographies that black women work together in their work. I'm thinking about, you know, a Wino's own work on global blackness and transnational solidarity has been in now. You know, so there's so much that we can touch on and I'm very eager to be in conversation with you all today. So thank you so much for your attention and I look forward to our discussion. Thank you. Thank you so much, Annette. So there's a request before I go into my sets of questions. There's a request in the chat for you to invoke the names of the seven women that your book is anchored around. Yes, that is such such a crucial request and an unpardonable oversight on my part. So I put them back up on your screen, right? I went to lots of images. And so kind of looking, I don't know if you can see my cursor, but you know, so I begin with Suzanne Cézio, right? So I talked a little bit about Amy Cézio, the Martinican poet. Again, Suzanne, like many of the other women here, is sort of subsumed under the legacy of her more famous husband. But Suzanne Cézio in Martinique was a writer and intellectual. And I think about her work in Martinique in conversation with what's happening in Haiti, particularly because of her travel to Haiti. And so Suzanne Cézio in the book is going to articulate a sort of pan-Caribbean civilization in similar ways to how the French Revolution understands pan-Africanism. Next to Suzanne Cézio, you have Paulette Nadal, who has a distinction, among many other things, certainly, of being one of the first casualities of World War II, when a ship on which she was traveling was bombarded by German torpedoes, and she was gravely injured. And so the rest of her work, when she returns to Martinique after the traumatic incident, is going to really think carefully about how to navigate the relationship between the Caribbean and French citizenship as kind of political and cultural locations, specifically because when she came back home with those war injuries, the French state, despite her French citizenship, denied her disability benefits. So again, that fiction of citizenship. So then next to Paulette Nadal, we have Eugenie Ibuetel. I write about Eugenie Ibuetel and next to her Jean-Vial together in one chapter to think about how we might bridge, you know, the life of a woman from French Guyana, with that of the life of entre bluins, a woman from French Central Africa, and the work that they both did in the French resistance during World War II. Jean-Vial in particular was incarcerated in a concentration camp during World War II. So think about black women also as protagonists in that story of French resistance. And then the sort of the second tier, the first image that's entre bluins, that I've spoken about a little bit, next to her is Awaketa that I also invoked, and then next to her is Aslana Robson that I mentioned as well. So these are sort of the seven women who anchor the book. There are many others who kind of make brief appearances. And you know, so I think that this is a story that really needs to be developed because there are so many more women at the forefront than a kind of a masculine dominated history would suggest or allow us to recognize. So thank you so much for that question. Thank you. So one of the things, I mean, of course you're a brilliant writer and one of the things that draws a reader to your book is your prologue in which to begin by speaking about your own receiving of your French citizenship and the whole range of things that came in that process. And as I was reading that and then the book developed, one of the things that I wanted to ask is, why did this book choose you? What is it that drew you to this particular project? That is that that's a really fascinating question because I don't think I've ever been asked this question in this way, right, why the book chose me. I guess I always kind of trace the genealogy of this book to sort of the kind of intellectual introduction to the negative movement as that one of those masculine dominated both literary and political movements. Right. And so we think about, we think about these sort of male center traditions. And when we when we think negative, we will immediately invoke, you know, it may say they'll be able to send go and young boys on the mess. And then, you know, more recent work like tea didn't shop the whitings negative women, among others have started to start to think about the place of black women in these histories, but began with negative and the first question that came to my mind and thinking about someone like some girl as a poet politician, thinking about me as a poet politician was, well, where were the women, right, because my point of departure is always that they certainly were not absent or silent. And so that that sort of initial question was was how the sort of the quest began to think beyond where were the women was what were they doing what were they saying, and most importantly and more closely for me is how does hearing and understanding them allow us to, to think differently about how we understand negative claims to blackness about how we understand Francis narrative of citizenship about how we understand our world. Right. And so, you know, being located at the sort of the intersection of multiple kinds of oppression as black women in colonized territory right we see that play out with ugly blue one so so so terribly, but so clearly, you know, allows us to understand, and even I think an even more expansive way to stretch the concept of citizenship, beyond what the colonial states can bear as a way of unraveling those conflict restrictions. Thank you. So picking up on the point of silencing erasure the question of where the women one of the things that we often come against particularly if we're thinking about anti colonial work, or even slightly before that, at least in the African context where we are much more familiar with is the question of archives and narratives. And one of the things that struck me about your book is the methodological approach so that two things one is that you had to spend a lot of time in the archives in France to find some of this material. So there's that there's that thing that I want you to talk about in relation to where our stories like. And the second is how you worked methodologically to piece together just almost like you were doing a bit of scavenging and patchwork and putting texts together to to form this expansive and larger narrative so I'm really interested. And therefore you to speak a little bit about your methodology because I think it offers an opportunity for all of us to think about the kind of work that we want to do which we, we sort of stop ourselves from doing because we think that we do not have enough material to work with, and yet the multiple ways in which you could develop work to different kinds of methods to speak a little bit about the archives and the methodology. Yeah, yeah so the archives archives were so tricky right there so so tricky to navigate because it comes back again to write those stories that we tell ourselves it comes back to what passport you hold the allows you to you know enter which country. You know the last you didn't have access to archives, and so the fact that so many of these stories and archives are located in France, right and are located in in state institutions so you know I'm not just I'm not talking about like university archives or that kind of thing which I think I'm more used to in the US context, but you know, to access Jean Vial and if we tell stuff you have to literally walk into the French Senate. Right like and go to the French Senate archives right those state institutions. The rest of it we tell files are contained in the show the girl Institute. And so you know that her archives are a subset of her husband's archives, which are themselves a subset of show the girls archives right in Paris. And so to think about the way that the state institutions are going to order knowledge, right, how these institutions are going to order, where is the center like was a central node within this archive, and who's on the periphery. Right. And so you know all of those things are questions that that were so central and in kind of navigating archival accesses that I had to. I had to try to think really broadly about where to find the women, because that always look different than you know sort of what the state institutional catalog is going to give me as where they might be so for example, Suzanne says they say does not exist really right beyond the seven essays that she published, you sort of have to suss out her writings from, for example, an archive in Paris has a lot of in these letters. And as I was reading those letters I realized that there were two different handwritings on the page, and that some of that harassing was his wife right that and she would sign it so she doesn't like you have to literally be in a man's archive. The space of a man's right sort of textual production, in order to find traces of his wife's hand. And so and so that's that's one of the, the, I guess that the things that to think about in terms of you know where these stories are located. There are also questions of for Jean Vial, for example, because she was in a concentration camp, the record of her trial for her role as a clandestine agents in the French resistance. That record is sealed, and you have to sort of petition the French Minister of Culture, interestingly, right in order for for that record to be open and you it goes through multiple steps and then you get a letter saying that you have limited access to these documents and you can not use them to tarnish the image of the French state, which I cannot promise that I have lived up to that, to that legal stipulation but here we are. Right but again think about what it means that you know to have to petition a government body in order to obtain access to the life and trial of an African woman right so there are all these things that to navigate. I'm seeing a question about methodology in the chat so I'm going to try to box that in with your question and we know about the sort of the patchwork methodology. I don't think I've ever given a talk where I have not said that I'm not a historian right like because the book has received such overwhelming and positive support from historians. For which I'm so so grateful right and I wonder a lot about my legibility in my own field, because I'm trained as a literary scholar right like I said I wanted to just come here and talk about poetry and yet friends keeps giving me material. Right and so, but that literary training in fuses a lot of how I read right infuses the patchwork methodology. Right is that in my mind, I am I am putting narratives together to try to understand always how language is used to create meaning right that's that's the central sort of framework that I come with as a literary person. And so that I think you know kind of. That that accounts for some of the patchwork methodology and it's also a question of necessity right because, like I said Suzanne says else private letters, you kind of have to source them from a lot of different places, but you cannot leave them on the table. I could write a book today about ms is there. I could write a book today about notebook of her terms and native land alone right that one ms is a poem. But with Suzanne says it's just those seven short essays she wrote, and so you can't leave anything on the table. And so the published writing has to sit alongside the private letters have to sit alongside right the narratives and the memories and the interviews they all have to kind of come together in this kind of quote like pattern in order to really flesh out right not just her life but her her intellectual tragedy because you cannot trace it over multiple published works. And so in terms of you know Victoria's question about applying that methodology to groups to other groups of marginalized women in colonial context. I mean I cannot quite speak to what the archives look like for Southeast Asia, but I suspect that you know that's not only possible but but might be a necessity. Right that that the methodology emerges organically from the state of the archives, that it emerges organically not only from what the archives allow in their limitations, but also what they foreclose and prevent. Right. And so there are certain kinds of stories I cannot tell about Suzanne says a but this patchwork kind of quilting way is one that I can I suspect that you know for the specific archives that most folks are working with that the both the possibilities and the limits of those archives will ultimately shape the kind of methodology that emerges for projects. Great. Let's stick with Suzanne's is there for a minute and that was a particular chapter that intrigued me. Partly because of this intertextual thing that you're talking about where a mayor reports about certain things and then remembers that all I was with Suzanne and adds it into the text. Or, you know, the ways in which it speaks about her illness and all of this dynamics. And there's there's a Kenyon scholar who writes about political widowhood and she's looking at, you know, the wife of the first, the second Kenyon president, Mui, and his wife, Lena Mui, who was sort of very invisible in the public domain yet when you look back into the archives you find her doing all kinds of things, but she became a political widow right. All looking at my Kumalo who is Jacob zoomers fast wife, and I went when I was reading about Suzanne three or what that was the thing that struck me the ways in which women are present but they're almost absent at the same time. And how they have to work consistently to recuperate their own agency. Even in moments where that particular union was held as as being something significant and useful both for the French Empire and also for themselves if you could just speak a little bit about that. Yeah, I mean that concept of political widowhood is so so intriguing. Right, because it applies I think in different ways to the different women here. So, Suzanne says they're dies of a brain tumor she dies, you know, much, much, much earlier than her husband dies and so that it is still has a sort of long expanded legacy right he does and so in her case right her her absence is is occasion also by right her quite literal absence right from from from passing so soon, whereas someone like it would tell is going to be more quintessentially the political widow because she becomes the first black woman in the French Parliament, and it's kind of tapped to run for that position, because of the sort of monumental right immediate national memory of her husband, who you know it's kind of on record as being you know the first kind of French public official to respond yes to shout the ghost international call for for for rallying right people's the French resistance. But in any case right regardless of whether their their husbands you know were live longer than them you know I'll leave them or not, you have that overshadowing that happens right there's always that overshadowing that happens. I'll give you an example from if we tell because it's a fascinating moment in the biography of her husband Felix if we where the biographer devils a few lines to her and says you know well she are coming to her husband to his post in in in in chat, where she just sort of sat around and he says specifically right he said she sat around grew fat got measured for a bunch of new clothes. And there was a hat that was named after her. And then that was it right like she disappears from the biography, and I thought, what a fascinating way to think to focus on her body right the party that the terms on which he puts on her body. And I just sort of like this kind of like excessive presence that is nevertheless really trivial and useless right because all it's doing is lending its its its name to a hat that becomes very unpopular very quickly and nobody even likes the eugenie hat anyway. Right. And so I kind of go into think about usually if we tell us like oh boy I'm going to have to try to like really put some flesh on the bones of what I imagine will be a scanty archive about her work as a public person. And I get to our archive and I'm drowning in just the sheer right the letters, the bills and resolutions that she's pushing forward in the Parliament in the French Senate and I'm thinking, what a way to erase someone who was the black the first black woman parliamentarian and then Senator in France right as someone who's like completely insignificant in this way in particularly gendered terms. Right. And so you know that that overshadowing always happens and demands always a different set of lens or kind of recuperating right I began with recuperation as my goal, but I realized that that meant that that biographer was setting the terms on which I would engage with a hotel. And so I had to kind of quickly try to move beyond recuperation and to think more broadly about about contribution and presence in ways that were not kind of beholden to the erasures right that had that had occasioned their absence. I have another question but there's a question here in the charts which is around can you briefly flesh out the court now. Yes, yes, yes. Oh gosh okay so a kind of a brief overview of Francis racialized since in two minutes and go okay so the court now essentially right the during during at some point, you know during during the slave trade and in Francis kind of institutionalizing of slavery in its colonies, right particularly its new world colonies right so the Caribbean and the Americas. So France is going to promulgate the black codes. Right, so the couldn't well it's essentially this this document that sets out the, the laws, if you will, to govern the practice of slave holding. So for example, you know, how many times an enslaved person has to run away in order for you to whip them or you know so after the first, the first flights you know they get X number of lashes. After the third flight you know you cut the tendon and the foot right so like it was it was it was gruesome and brutal but it was it was legally enshrined. So the goal was to temper the excess of violence right by slaveholders. So you know if if all of the horrible things that are laid out and that could not appear terrible to us today. They are apparently you know supposedly quite measured compared to just a kind of the excess of violence that slaveholders were meeting out to and save people in the colonies. So the sovereign sort of every aspect of the lives of enslaved people including you know like what to do on Sundays, you know, who, who and when and how a person can be baptized right every element of their, their spiritual physical, you know, existence in the colonies on the plantation. So that's that's a good one. The degree to which it was applied was very spotty. But again, it comes back to challenge the idea that France never codified racism the way that the United States did. Because the court law is one example of that. The police didn't wow the, yeah, the police did not is another of those laws and codes that showed Francis qualification of race and racism in its laws and so the police didn't wow. In 1780s essentially was to prohibit or to regulate the entry of enslaved people into metropolitan France, because France had the free soil principle right that anyone who touches French soil is free. And so then in order to continue to prevent right people from, you know, attaining that freedom was to regulate how and when enslaved people could enter the colonies and to prohibit essentially the entry. So that's the code. Wow. That's the police didn't wow. And then the post war massacre. I mean, with some events film, come to try why I'm going to put that in the in the chat is an interesting, you know, kind of creative fictional, but also historical treatments of the of the tiawai massacre. And there are also a number of monographs that that kind of discuss it right but essentially demobilized African soldiers who had come back to from from World War Two. Right, so they were in tiawai sort of waiting to be kind of dispatched to their their home locations wherever they came from, you know, thank you for your service, etc. You know, we're not receiving the pensions right as as as demobilized soldiers that they had been promised when they went to fight right so the fiction that colonial soldiers went to fight to liberate France because they cherish the motherland right and right. It's kind of laid bare by the demand. Well, you also told us that we were going to, you know, receive these pensions. And so they, you know, they kind of had a had a went on strike essentially a protest to demand their pensions, and they were shot and killed. I think they were massacred by the French Army on the orders of the colonial administration right in Senegal. And so, so that's the tiawai massacre. Up until I want to say about four or five years ago, veterans of World War Two right African veterans of World War Two were still petitioning friends for those those pensions by the way like friends really never ever made good on that promise to recognize right in whatever culture way that it could monetarily to recognize the sacrifice of African soldiers who went to, you know, he did the call to come and liberate France from Europe's own Nazi, you know, Nazis and turn, turn on itself so so that's that that's the tiawai massacre. Thank you. Let's talk a little bit about our cater and one provocation for you is that you make an argument first of all this is in the seven women this is one of the women who had actually written how on, you know, autobiography people you make the argument that perhaps one of the reasons why how her material and her work, you know, sort of goes out of circulation is because of the limited attention she gives to the personal and the focus on the political. I question that. I'm asking whether there's a lot more going on there. So, so for instance, you know, if I think about our caters, our caters a person, I would think of her alongside, maybe somebody like say Winnie Mandela, right. In the sense of the political work that she was doing in communities and mobilizing women and other communities around a set of particular political ideals. What distinguishes these two people is the fact that one was tethered to a well known, you know, political prisoner and fought over time to distinguish herself, of course, as a political actor, as you know, in her own right as opposed to one that is connected to Nelson Mandela. Well, our cater is not. So is there something else that is still gendered but is not necessarily connected to her refusal to appeal to the, you know, mother of the nation narrative that makes her history and her work, not captured or known in the ways in which others would for instance. Yeah, that's a really interesting question. And I mean I agree with you completely right is. So I'll say this I don't I don't know that Katie herself refuses the mother of the nation kind of right I'm refusing that that for her. I'm questioning the utility or the limits of describing Katie as a mother of the nation. So you know, because in some ways Katie is hailed, wherever she goes as the mother of the nation because as a midwife. She quite literally right sort of facilitated that the birth and delivery of a lot of by her count thousands of children in Mali. And so and so by, by, by her count right that she is in some ways, the mother of the nation. The difference is that in the few moments where she is then read in scholarship. She is read solely or primarily through that lens. And you know kind of thinking about the work of I mean I'm on for example, what it means to to always routes African women's political activism through the lens of giving birth to the nation right through the lens of mothering the nation. You know that's kind of what I was I was trying to push back on to say, well, Katie herself, even if she is hailed as one of the nation where she goes. She sees that primarily through the lens of this is my work my professional work as a midwife. Right. And she herself avoid so much of the personal. Now I agree with you in the sense that I'm like we Mandela I'm like I think I'm looking at my, my, my board my image of the seven women here. I think Katie is the only one, Katie and the other ones who don't have the famous man. Right, like, I had a famous husband or even I work with Patrice Lomba or you know whatever right she doesn't have the famous man hook. And so you're absolutely right that that's part of, you know, why people tend to bypass her right because she, you won't encounter her if you're coming at this from the sort of traditional routes of like, these are the primary figures of African liberation. The women who are sort of adjacent to them. If that's the path then you won't really encounter Katie much. Right. So that's part of what what needs to the elision. But I also do think that her avoiding she talks about the personal in like 10 pages out of a 400 page autobiography right like her whole life from birth to her, you know, her childhood education marriage divorce 10 pages the beginning. And then the rest of the 390 pages right to some degree she'll talk about like one election. She'll just go like blow by blow right at 315pm on that election day this will happen and then 330 and she cataloged right so so much space is devoted to the kind of the public activism. And I think there's something to be said for that imbalance. And for the way that people who have ultimately studied kata have always lamented the, the, the, the absence of the personal. So I do think that that does still play a role because at a particular time of like post colonial literature post colonial theory, etc. We didn't quite know how to approach a text by an African woman that was not about her suffering in a domestic space. So I think about like the quintessential right like maria my boss, you know so long a letter as as the kind of other text right one of the tech that I need from a literary perspective, as one of the central text to which we come to understand African women's writing, right folks like bookie richita floor and rock and others right like this is how we understand African women's writing, and those writings are so so so critical right so this is not to be little them in anyway, but it's to say that when you think about a contemporary of these women, who doesn't do that at all right and has this huge 400 page text that tells you about these cool administrators and how she like you know, shot a gun in the air because they wanted to chase her out of town. Like, there wasn't really a logical framework in at least a particular strand of scholarship for how to think about her and I think that that really did kind of move attention away from her work to the degree that it kind of fell out of out of readership and then out of friends, but I absolutely agree with you right there's so many more factors, including you know the lack of the famous man for sure. I think a little bit about Andre, who I discovered recently of course because everyone was, you know, talking about Patrice Lumumba is anniversary and it's great that you actually wrote that article in Al Jazeera, just to remind many of us who invoke that speech about who was behind that speech. But you also are one of the things that I like that you do in the book you're very clear that you know there's an expansion and a reimagining of citizenship that is happening. Through this seven women but there are also limits to which that happens right and I think Andre's stories of is a specific one she's just given the sort of mixed race heritage and how she plays into that at different moments. Could you could you just spend a little time exploring this Metis dynamic and and and how she mobilizes that leverages it or not in the ways in which she imagines what pan-Africanism could look like. Yeah. Ooh, that was that was that was a tough a tough kind of thing to to wrap my mind around in the book right so you know in much the same way as Cata's focus on the public to the detriment if you will maybe of the of the personal you know makes her her text this the strange book that I don't we I we initially don't quite know what to do with right Andre Bluance autobiography is similar in the sense that well, you know I myself began my talk talking a lot about black women. Right. And blue one doesn't really identify that way she identifies as mixed race because she is identified as mixed race. Right. So the question is what do you do with an African nationalist, a pan-Africanist, who doesn't quite identify as black. And the other thing is that you have to grapple with race in ways that we one of the fictions we tell ourselves I think on the African continent is that you know we we never thought about racial people take a little time right I never thought about race in America so I was okay that you can like, well, race is still very important to know you know the constant evening we appear to be right the majority if you will. And so, you know, and it might be different like you know Southern Africa but certainly in West Africa we think we like to tell that a lot. So to think about about blue one as mixed race, meant thinking about racial construction on the African continent, and how we engaged in those constructions at the specific moment of decolonization or independent let me say independence happened. So, you know, in that moment there was a lot of kind of subsuming racial difference even gender difference right as kind of like minor things to think about, but you know to be subsumed under the larger, more critical project of, you know, independence now, and so that we cannot think about race because that's dividing us, we cannot focus on gender differences beyond mobilizing gender in these politicized narratives of mother of the nation etc, because that's dividing us right. Blue one is going to say and show and argue that you have to think about race because the construction of race was part of the construction of the colony, and that unraveling those colonial constructions will have to grapple with race, if independent is going to be meaningful right and so that's at least that's the lesson that I take away from what it means to think about a woman who identifies as mixed race and as a pan-Africanist, and who's constantly navigating her relationship to her white French father and her black African mother I was already troubled by those terms right that that sort of situate whiteness in this specific like national frame of France, and then blackness of this continental thing right of an African mother blew our purposes those colonial categories a lot in ways that are certainly troubling, but also also that end up kind of showing the fiction behind the separation of races. So remember the question that she asked in that painful moment that I read in the introduction, when she says why would white people be so cruel to a child that is three fourths white. There's a racial calculation that's happening there. And that shows the way that France is kind of obsession with racial categorization or the colonial powers obsession with racial categorization is going to end up influencing and shaping how blue one herself sees herself how she sees her son and their their rights to accessing different degrees of French citizenship sort of protections, you know access to healthcare, etc. I mean, you know that there's so much I think to be said about about this this mitisage question in the book I show how folks like people single for example, make these sort of clumsy attempts at, at thinking about or sweeping under the under the rug, this idea of being mixed race by saying oh we're all African and we all belong to you know the black race and doesn't matter, etc. And in certain ways of course right race race is a, it's a social construct. Right, but there's nothing near about a social construct and that it marked blue one's life, her body, etc. I'll give one really, really quick and final example is the fact that she grows up in an orphanage. Her two parents are alive. But if you are mixed race in the French colonies and the Belgian colonies, you have to grow up in an orphanage, because it was unbearable for the colonial administration to allow the evidence of interracial mixing to be superior. Right, it would be lie again the fiction that you know, white whiteness is superior to blackness, etc. Right that that intimate mixing there becomes really troubling for that separation. Belgium, a few years ago apologized very awkwardly in its parliament right as the descendants of mixed race Belgians were sitting in the in the wings of Belgium parliament. Apologize for for kind of shunting children off into these violent and abusive orphanages France does what France does right if we don't see it then it never happened. So you know people are still waiting even for that minor acknowledgement of a terrible thing that happened. But those those species of segregation right where mixed race children grew up away from their families, usually under the tutelage of Catholic nuns are spaces of violence that that that that attest again to the racialized forms of segregation that we might attribute to other parts other kinds of colonial settlements, but we're certainly the case even at Richard colonies, like Francis colonies in Western Central Africa. And you're bound to find the Catholics everywhere now. I was also going to say that I am amongst those group of people who argued that until I went to a certain place I had no very visceral experiences of racism and that was, you know, spending time in South Africa and being reminded that oh okay. So I think you're right races always there it's it's the ways in which we experience it in a majority black world that looks different. And it's not to argue that it's, it's nonexistent. I want to return to where you started off which is citizenship is a fiction the current events that are happening in France and they, the work that is being done by Afro, you know, Afro European, you know, movements are from feminist movements across Europe. And as I offer this final question from my end, I want to invite any more questions from the audience as well. Otherwise we will slowly come to a close. If we look at the seven women and you're making strong political arguments around what they do to what they push us to think about in relation to the bounds of the nation state. What they do in relation to pushing us to think about what black nationalism black solidarity black consciousness look like in the in the in the ways in which they mobilize and engage with the French Empire. And if we turn to this particular moment that we all finds ourselves in globally, of course, cultivated and sort of catalyzed very powerfully, you know, to the movement for black lives in the summer of 2020 at that then sort of forced us globally to have some serious conversations that that we've been having in very sort of scattered ways in different parts of the black world. What would you argue are the lessons, if you will, that feminists of today should take or can think with in connection to this women's work, recognizing the limits of the radicalness, of course. But there's something there that's why this book was produced there's something there that you're trying to say that's not just about here they are the way I'm trying to show you that women existed that's not what you're trying to do. So is there stuff that we can learn as feminists who are mobilizing at this particular moment around at the nexus of racial justice and and and gender freedom that we can draw from these seven women and others that you know, are lying in the archive some that that is that is an incredible question. I'm kind of looking at my notes and trying to figure out what to what to what to possibly distill because because part of what was interesting for me in the book was the range of visions right that these women all had from you know from from feminists to you know more more conservative leaning, you know from believing independence to believing in a French Union to the French overseas departmentalization, right that they're the visions were so different. That the value for me was to understand how to how to think expansively about black women's activism, regardless of of how effective or not regardless of how closely or not the ally to my to my own thinking. So, I make the argument like like you're saying in the book that there is something that unifies all of them right and and that something would be ideally right that that that lesson I think that we can take away in our present moment. I think sometimes when I'm asked this question is the answer changing spend on what I'm asked, but ultimately at the heart of it for me was about it's going to sound so basic but who controls the narrative. Right because regardless of ultimately the differences in their visions. These women refuse to seed ground in any of the domains that they had identified as crucial from literature to language teaching to writing and autobiography to voting to electoral politics right to all of it. There are two intimate relationships right within our cross racial lines, etc. The question for them, ultimately, was what it meant to refuse French state constructions, or even limiting right sort of post independent national narratives by understanding the ways that those narratives about citizenship, freedom and belonging continue to be tied to a colonial foundation. Right, and I think that that's that's one of the that that's one of the lessons that that we can carry with us in the present moment is when we are faced with what appear to be convincing arguments about the impossibility of abolishing policing, for example, or about the necessity of surveillance or punitive right kind of military interventions beyond borders and within our own borders as the necessary price that we pay for national security, right that each time we are faced with these narratives these fictions right is to understand the colonial roots, the imperial roots of those narratives in order to articulate a response that is life giving and not death dealing. Suzanne Cisiel in the midst of the bombardment of World War Two, who writes in a letter that she sees constantly in her mind she replaced images of war. Right when I think about her in our present moment where we are confronted constantly with constant images on the loop of black people being killed at the hands of police that we must be presented with that video evidence constantly for people to believe that this is happening. Right that Suzanne Cisiel refused that death dealing as the point of departure for understanding political activism that for her it had to be grounded in understanding of the possibility of black life. And I think that that's what groups like Muassi and France are doing. I think that that's what Asa Talwe is doing and her demands for justice for her brother's death, because certainly she talks constantly right and and and and engage constantly with the fact and the realities of his death, but I intended a talk that she gave recently where she said a striking sentence, she said nobody ever came to my mother and asked her, Madam Talwe what do you like to do in your free time. I was astounded. I said but we're here to talk about you know the death and the killing and the autopsy and etc etc, and she wanted to think about her mother's quotidian access to joy and leisure. Right in the face of all of that, as one of the starting points for imagining right her response, her counter to the death dealing of the colonial French state. That for me I think it's a powerful lesson to continue to carry with us now is what does it mean to focus on the possibilities of black life. Wow, that's powerful and I think it has catalyzed some more questions so this first one from Julia. If you could please comment on the critical risk theory and how it's currently being interpreted on us campuses. Then the second one is from one Gary. And let me just scroll down if I can. What are your thoughts about Franco for about how Franco from Africa and Africans currently interact with France and the French state and vice versa. This is in relation to citizenship language culture monetary arrangements etc. Whoo. I want to touch that one. Okay. I mean, you know, I'm always talking about you know really understand, you know, how we relate to France etc. But okay I will I will try to wait into those very tricky waters. But I'll start with Julia question about about critical race theory. The way that critical race theory is sort of being marshaled in public right because you evoked the article Julia is being marshaled in the media right is as a kind of a catch all term. And in the same way that the martial identity politics as a catch all term for anything that is distasteful because it emphasizes or highlights blackness in ways that a dominant majority would ideally not want to confront. But identity politics as term that was first used and defined in the 1970s right by by the black feminist right combo he river collective. But when it is marshaled on on Fox News, the most certainly have not read the combo he river collective statements right but identity policy kind of thrown out and critical race theory is the same thing is happening now. It's happening in France. It's happening in the US. It's happening, you know, in recent, you know, sort of state policies in both places to kind of like tamp down on, you know, any kind of states or federal support for research programs etc that is a critical race theory right so it's a kind of the in a kind of an opposite effect of what happens when MLK is sanitized right here, right, the theory is taken demonize if infused with a particular kind of definition, and then trotted out as the boogie man right as the ill to be countered, which is a really classic tool I think of misdirection. Why talk about the fact that black people in France are 20 times more likely to stop by police. If you can talk about critical race theory being imported by America as a way to challenge right to to destroy what it means to be French. I think that there's something that we can all supposedly as French people can all rally around we don't none of us want Frenchness to be destroyed certainly right. Although, okay, let me let me end that statement there unless I get myself into trouble, but so all of that to say right to in terms of my views about critical race theory and how it's currently being interpreted. I think the great interpretation in the media is quite different from its its application and use in intellectual spaces right particularly in the field of black studies. Why black studies and education so where it kind of originates right but in the field of black studies as a as a crucial framework for thinking about the ways that the constructions of race and the structures of racism continue to order our lives. Right so I think that there's that kind of disconnect that's happening there. We can try to kind of like lob it back into the media and say this is the actual definition, but my suspicion is I don't know to what degree that's going to be effective right so that's that's where we are. The question about how francophone Africa and Africans currently interact with friends in the French state. Okay, let's do this. I mean, it's a really important question right because it's a question that speaks to the longevity of those colonial ties. That the nature of that continued interaction right the way that one guy you're asking here about the CFA, the CFA for example, right the longevity of those those ties speaks to the nature of French colonialism and the fictions of French colonialism right as a civilizing mission right so France is dominant narrative right what I what I talked about in the book, you know, building on the work of Francois Villegers as the French colonial gift, right that that France makes this gift of civilization to two Africans right that gets a civilization is its language its philosophy its history etc. And that all you have to do is assimilate well enough to deserve and attain those gifts. That colonial that founding colonial fiction continues to order the relationship between I think France is former colonies and endometrical. The British didn't quite engage in that level of subterfuge to that degree at least they were so they're bare knuckle tactics were a little bit different. But he was convincing right and it's in it's in its camouflage about about the gift of civilization to be stolen Africans and so for someone like single right even when when that fiction is quite clear to him as a fiction is still going to be so very indebted to kind of a French education, right that you're going to see traces of that in terms of the philosophers that he engage with for example, as his starting point. And so you know that's that's just that's just maybe what what is what the initial things I just say about that right this is that the present is continued evidence of the nature of the foundational narrative of French colonialism, which are so very much about this the support of the civilizing mission and shout out to Antiochus who has to leave us soon. Thank you for being here. Thank you so much and net for this very rich discussion and a book that I really enjoyed reading my time invite you as we close to read us a short excerpt from your book and then we can wrap up. Oh, goodness. Okay. Yes, certainly. Okay, let's see where is there a particular portion of the book that you found particular person that you found evocative. I found you. I really enjoyed the prologue and I wondered whether you might return there. Oh, okay. Yes, I'm happy to do that. The prologue is I guess my, my, my attempt to do what I said when I read the passage from the first pages right that blue one screams were not a spectacle that for me as as a writer, I wanted to not approach this work from the safe distance but to think about my own implication personal political and otherwise in this in this work. And so the prologue is essentially this. I became a French citizen in 2017. As I was writing this book. There was no pomp and circumstance, no singing of the Marseillais in a tearful ceremony attended by joyful relatives eager to welcome me into the foals of France. None of my relatives are French. The plain white envelope that arrived in the mail from the French consulate contained a red, white and blue folder, bearing the image of Marianne swinging the Tricolore, an image taken from Eugene de la Croix's famous 19th century painting, Liberty leading the people. Inside the folder, the form letter bearing Francois Hollande signature announced my quote, attachment to the long history of a France that over centuries has welcomed women and men who have recognized themselves in its values, Liberty, equality, fraternity, secularism. The well known tripartite motto of Liberty, equality, fraternity that began as the rallying cry of the French Revolution sported a new addition in this repackaging of national values for an age when secularism was no longer brandished in the face of the Catholic clergy with as much conviction as in the revolutionary era. And when Islam now constituted a key site of contestation over who could really be French. The rest of the folders contents illuminated the government's view on the necessary ingredients for becoming a good French citizen. The official scores of the mandatory language exam proved that I knew enough French to be French. Glossy A4 sheets printed with the words to the Marseillais, finally, the Constitution of the French Fifth Republic and the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen were testaments to the specific elements of French history that I could now apparently claim as mine. This last documents, Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen would be a useful point of departure for my analysis of citizenship in this book. Of the plethora of administrative documents that came with my acquisition of French citizenship to in particular stood out as emblematic of the comfort and disconfiture that this new status brought. The first was a brochure informing me that if I had not responded to the consulate's initial offer regarding the galacization of my name, it was not too late to do so. Now anyone who has been through a French administrative process will be struck as I was by the rarity of second chances. An entire dossier could be unceremoniously thrown out or at best returned to the applicant over a typo. To offer a second chance at modifying the spelling of my name then is to underscore a need to render legible to the French state, those names, identities and cells deemed illegible. The second document was a French consulate's registration card issued in Chicago as proof that I had now been placed under consulate protection. This was a year when unstable leaders who will remain unnamed in the United States and North Korea goaded each other with barbs about their physical appearances, mental capacities and nuclear arsenals. The consulate's language of protection dubious as its efficacy may be provided an illusion of safer alternatives to a grim reality. This was, however, also the year that the French government fired the high profile feminist activists, anti-racist activists, Rochaia Diallo, from the National Digital Council over her use of the term state racism to publicly contest institutionalized racism in France. The promises of rights and protections, the administrative reminders to revitalize myself for legibility, and the realities of black women's ongoing and unfulfilled demands for equality in France all come together in the terms on which I engage with citizenship in this book. Citizenship, as my French naturalization folder attests, is the individual's relationship to the state. It unfolds in the legal arena of constitutions and laws, rights and duties. The linguistic and visual images in the folder show that citizenship also unfolds in the social, cultural and political spheres of community building, identity formation, and belonging. It is concrete and abstract. What follows in this book is an examination of the different ways that the concrete and abstract came together and pulled apart as black women demanded full citizenship in the mid 20th century at a particularly pivotal period in French history. In the text that formed the core of this project archive, we find a different set of ingredients for good citizenship. We hear a remix of the Marseillais that calls on Guadalupe to make their political voice heard by voting for Eugenie Ébuitel to become the first black woman deputy in the French National Assembly. We see the tricolor, but in the hands of Awa Keita, a community organizer in rural Mali, actually stitches the letters RDA onto the French flag to represent the Rassemblement Démocratique African, a West Africa wide anti-colonial political party. These different texts go beyond simply showing that black women too can be French citizens. They brought us instead to rethink the relationship between race, gender, belonging, and political agency. They show us again and again that to demand full citizenship as a black woman is to un-make and remake the French Republic. It is to redefine the very nature of civic participation and national identity in a country that both sees itself as white and claims to be colorblind. It is also to imagine citizenship beyond the borders of Imperial France and to reclaim multiple forms of belonging that take into account the varied spaces that black women have historically claimed and continue to claim as theirs. Thank you very, very much, Annette. And once again, I want to thank you for taking this opportunity to come and spend time with us to talk about your amazing book project. I really encourage everyone to look for the book. It's fairly affordable and buy it, read it, because this work by black women and black scholars, if we don't engage this material, it serves no great purpose to our own collective work of looking for greater freedom and justice for ourselves. In the world, read it, cite it, engage with it, pass it on to your family and friends too. And to those who showed up this evening, afternoon, morning, wherever you are to spend time with us, as Santeni, Sana, Sana, Sana. Be well, go well, and have a good day. Thank you so much.