Black France, White Europe
illuminates the deeply entangled history of European
integration and African decolonization. Emily Marker maps
the horizons of belonging in postwar France as leaders ...contemplated
the inclusion of France's old African empire in the new
Europe-in-the-making. European integration intensified longstanding
structural contradictions of French colonial rule in Africa: Would
Black Africans and Black African Muslims be French? If so, would
they then also be European? What would that mean for republican
France and united Europe more broadly?
Marker examines these questions through the lens of youth, amid
a surprising array of youth and education initiatives to stimulate
imperial renewal and European integration from the ground up. She
explores how education reforms and programs promoting solidarity
between French and African youth collided with transnational
efforts to make young people in Western Europe feel more European.
She connects a particular postwar vision for European unity-which
coded Europe as both white and raceless, Christian and
secular-to crucial decisions about what should be taught in African
classrooms and how many scholarships to provide young Africans to
study and train in France. That vision of Europe also informed
French responses to African student activism for racial and
religious equality, which ultimately turned many young francophone
Africans away from France irrevocably. Black France, White
Europe shows that the interconnected history of colonial and
European youth initiatives is key to explaining why, despite
efforts to strengthen ties with its African colonies in the 1940s
and 1950s, France became more European during those years.
Postwar efforts to devise new approaches to national, colonial, and transnational youth and education policy engendered extensive reflection on the role of the Christian tradition in French society, ...the French colonial project in Africa, and “European civilization” more broadly. The quest for national unity after Vichy and Catholic participation in the Resistance created an opening to reconcile Catholicism and republicanism in metropolitan France and francophone Africa, and one of the key strategies education officials adopted in trying to reach out to Catholic educators was to characterize French culture, even laïcité itself, as culturally Christian. At the same time, French participation
As a student in the mid-1940s in French schools in Senegal, Marie Louise Potin Gueye had a wildly diverse set of classroom experiences. The daughter of métis parents from royal Serer lineages, Potin ...Gueye was born into the small francophone elite in Saint Louis and was part of an even smaller subset of African girls pursuing formal education in the middle decades of the twentieth century.¹ In a 2010 interview with the French leftist magazine Libération, Potin Gueye, then seventy-eight, recalled how during the war, she and her classmates were forced to pay homage to Pétain at the start of
When Amadou Booker Sadji graduated from the Lycée Van Vollenhoven in Dakar in 1955, he intended to study German at a university in France. That same year, French, German, and other Western European ...leaders committed themselves to a “European relaunch” after the French parliament voted against the European Defense Community and European Political Community in 1954. Pro-Europe activists successfully pivoted to narrower forms of economic and technical cooperation, which led to the creation of the European Economic Community and the European Atomic Energy Community in 1957.¹ As we have seen, excitement about the new European Communities stoked a surge in
Plans for postwar educational reconstruction in metropolitan France, colonial Africa, and transnational Europe converged on the desk of a single Free French official during the war. René Cassin ...served as national commissioner of justice and public instruction in Charles de Gaulle’s shadow government in London from December 1941 to June 1943. One of Cassin’s primary tasks in that capacity was to reconstitute French education along new lines in the wake of the national traumas of defeat, occupation, and collaboration. That entailed wading into entrenched ideological conflicts over schooling that had bitterly divided French leaders, educators, and the public for decades.
Between the founding of the French Union in 1946 and the 1949–1950 academic year, rates of schooling slowly but steadily rose in French Africa. By 1950, 100,000 more Africans in AOF and AEF were ...enrolled in some kind of school. Most of those gains were at the primary level, but Africans in secondary and higher education also increased from 5,819 in 1946 to 8,414 in 1950. Of those, 1,200 were studying in France on state scholarships.¹ State support for mission schools during and after the war ensured that a disproportionate number of students on scholarships, known as boursiers, were
Obscuring Race Marker, Emily
French politics, culture and society,
12/2015, Letnik:
33, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In 1945, the first significant cohort of African, Caribbean, and Malagasy deputies were elected to the French National Assembly, where they participated in special parliamentary commissions tasked ...with colonial reform. This article traces the contours of postwar conversations about colonial policy, race, and racism that took shape in those commissions, as metropolitan and colonial deputies confronted these issues face-to-face, as ostensible equals, for the first time. Deputies of color tried to force frank discussions about racial inequality in their campaigns to reform political representation, working conditions, education, and compensation for Africans. Their metropolitan counterparts responded, however, by developing new code words and rhetorical strategies that deflected accusations of systemic racial inequality in postwar Greater France. The competing understandings and ways of talking about race and racism produced in this encounter helped consolidate a postwar speech regime of “colorblindness” that obscured the way racial logics were inscribed in the new institutions of the postwar Republic.
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