Abstract
Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire is a thought-provoking journey through interviews, speeches, news reports, scholarly articles, books and biographies that reveals the important contributions of Black women to expansive notions of identity, connecting French imperial politics, transnational Black feminism, and Afro-diasporic literature. The text focuses on French citizenship, even as it stands as a powerful model for how similar explorations might be insightful for unpacking the colonial legacies of other nations. The chapters follow seven Black women who made significant contributions to decolonial and transnational notions of citizenship: Suzanne Césaire, Paulette Nardal, Eugénie Éboué-Tell and Jane Vialle (discussed together in one chapter), Andrée Blouin, Aoua Kéita, and Eslanda Robeson. Author Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel explores the life stories and texts of these women with depth and nuance so that even as their contributions are highlighted, contradictions, inconsistences, and the fallibility of their humanity are not obscured. This is a rare gift in a text that calls readers to appreciate the contributions of important historical figures, even as it humanizes the women who could have been cast in ways that were larger than life, given their tremendous accomplishments.
The common thread running through the women’s stories is their engagement with the “language of citizenship.” More specifically, the text explores these women’s claims of simultaneous belonging to multiple cultural and political communities. As Joseph-Gabriel (2020) highlights, “In so doing, they expanded the possibilities of belonging beyond the borders of the nation-state to imagine Pan-African and Pan-Caribbean citizenships that were informed by their experiences as black women in the French empire” (7). Joseph-Gabriel locates these Black women’s interventions within anticolonial movements, naming their contributions to a form of “decolonial citizenship,” characterized by two important elements. First, decolonial citizenship challenges colonial foundations of belonging, including racialized and hierarchical characterizations of good citizens. Second, decolonial citizenship is not tethered to the national government as the only arbiter of one’s belonging, but instead moves us towards plural forms of identity. As Joseph-Gabriel describes, “It is a remaking, redefining the very terms on which collective identity and belonging can be imagined” (12).
Eugénie Éboué-Tell and Jane Vialle held as their goals the extension of French citizenship beyond the metropole. These women were both members of the French Resistance during World War II and later elected to the French Senate, where they advocated for feminist legislation. Foregrounding the role of colonial subjects in the French resistance, Éboué-Tell and Vialle demanded France’s recognition of the full citizenship of former colonial subjects, particularly women. They were also part of a transnational network of Black women’s resistance that connected Central Africa, the Antilles, French Guyana, the United States, and hexagonal France.
Even beyond the extension of French citizenship, the text examines Black women’s multivalent questions about belonging: “In imagining multiple citizenships that would both refigure their relationship to the French state and reach beyond the state to create and sustain transnational cultural and political communities, they also demanded a more complete reckoning with and recognition of the complex nature of belonging” (9). The Black women highlighted in this text stretch readers to think of collective identity and belonging outside of conventional notions of French citizenship.
Suzanne Césaire and Paulette Nardal explored the ideas of “archipelagic politics” and French-Antillean citizenship, respectively. As an instructor of French literature, French cultural ambassador to Haiti, and wife of Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire advanced an archipelagic politics that saw the Caribbean as interconnected spaces forming a new civilization. She saw poets as having the important and prophetic role of calling into being an imagined Caribbean civilization. Paulette Nardal advanced discussions of a French-Antillean citizenship that locates civic participation in French politics, while maintaining an Antillean cultural identity. Nardal was particularly committed to women’s political participation in Martinique and other French colonies.
Personal histories play an important role in shaping Black women’s political interventions, as is exemplified by the stories of Andrée Blouin and Aoua Kéita. As a métisse (mixed-race) woman who was raised in a Catholic orphanage in Brazzaville and separated from her family, Andrée Blouin challenged racial mapping onto national identity. She worked closely with a number of African liberation movement leaders, including Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Guinea’s Sékou Touré, and Congo’s Patrice Lumumba. Having spent the first 16 years of her life with no surname because she was unable to adopt her French father’s name, Blouin privileged flexibility and multiplicity in advocating for a more capacious Pan-African belonging. Aoua Kéita was a feminist, anticolonial, community health activist, before founding a women’s trade union and later becoming the first woman deputy in the Malian National Assembly. Her focus was on the often ignored political contributions of rural women in colonial France, and the reimagining of citizenship in ways that circumvent the state when necessary for women’s full civic engagement. For example, she registered women to vote who were under the legal age, yet functioned as adults in the community, as wives, mothers, and providers. Kéita ultimately renounced her French citizenship, “an act that adds yet another layer to her notions of malleable political affiliations by raising the possibility of disavowal” (153). As Joseph-Gabriel (2020) describes, this act forces a reconsideration of the very nature of citizenship: “It disrupts the ontological claims of citizenship as a state of being—that is, that one is French—and proposes in its place a vision of citizenship as an identification that is in constant negotiation through conscious practices that claim, redefine, and disavow those belongings” (153).
The final Black woman profiled is Eslanda Robeson, for whom “decolonial citizenship was a commitment to the overthrow of imperialism in order to bring about a decolonized future characterized by political independence and economic autonomy throughout the Global South” (174). Married to actor and singer Paul Robeson, she advocated for anticolonial resistance and proposed an expanded definition of citizenship for African Americans, who she argued could claim ties to both the Global North and the Global South. The Black transnationalism that she envisioned required a shared anti-imperialist politic and economic autonomy. Robeson’s vision highlights how discussions of transnational Black feminism challenges colonial geographies. As Joseph-Gabriel so eloquently writes, “Reimagining Liberation, then, is also about black women’s geographies of resistance, about mobility and intersections, and about transatlantic movement as exile, as homecoming, as survival, and even as liberation” (7). With this statement, Joseph-Gabriel hints at radical Black feminist geographies, such as those highlighted in Katherine McKittrick’s (2006) Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle.
Ultimately, Reimagining Liberation is in good company within a body of Black feminist texts that highlight the important work of Black women intellectuals who have been overlooked and undervalued. We might consider Ashley D. Farmer’s (2017) Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era, Brittney C. Cooper’s (2017) Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women, and Keisha N. Blain’s (2018) Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom. In addition to these single-authored texts, we also might consider Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (2015), edited by Mia Bay, Farrah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones, and Barbara D. Savage. Among these important texts, Reimagining Liberation adds a vital consideration of Black women’s contributions to French empire specifically, which is particularly important for understanding how citizenship is (re)imagined in Francophone West African and Caribbean countries.
Enhanced by diverse and intriguing personal narratives, the text remains focused on the important question of citizenship, as explored by Black women. In this vein, the text contributes to literature about how (access to) citizenship is shaped by race and gender. Gendered Citizenships: Transnational Perspectives on Knowledge Production, Political Activism, and Culture (2009), edited by Kia Lilly Caldwell, Kathleen Coll, Tracy Fisher, Renya K. Ramirez, and Lok Siu, is one anthology that similarly takes up these important questions of race, gender, and citizenship.
Joseph-Gabriel claims, “Reimagining Liberation puts black women’s writings in a renewed engagement with global black identities as a basis for understanding expressions of belonging and solidarity across national and linguistic borders. These women’s lives and experiences bear testimony to the fact that as imperialism spanned continents so too did feminist networks and modes of resistance” (28). Indeed, she has accomplished what she set out to do by sharing Black women’s contributions to anticolonial movements and decolonial thought, inspiring conversation about transnational Black feminism, belonging beyond citizenship, and solidarity that advances liberation.