Empire's Children: Race, Filiation, and Citizenship in the French Colonies - Hardcover

Saada, Emmanuelle

9780226733074: Empire's Children: Race, Filiation, and Citizenship in the French Colonies

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226733076 ISBN 13: 9780226733074

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2012

Europe’s imperial projects were often predicated on a series of legal and scientific distinctions that were frequently challenged by the reality of social and sexual interactions between the colonized and the colonizers.When Emmanuelle Saada discovered a 1928 decree defining the status of persons of mixed parentage born in French Indochina—the m�tis—she found not only a remarkable artifact of colonial rule, but a legal bombshell that introduced race into French law for the first time. The decree was the culmination of a decades-long effort to resolve the “m�tis question”: the educational, social, and civil issues surrounding the mixed population. Operating at the intersection of history, anthropology, and law, Empire’s Children reveals the unacknowledged but central role of race in the definition of French nationality.

Through extensive archival work in both France and Vietnam, and a close reading of primary and secondary material from the Pacific islands and sub-Saharan and North Africa, Saada has created in Empire’s Children an original and compelling perspective on colonialism, law, race, and culture from the end of the nineteenth century until decolonization.

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About the Author:

Emmanuelle Saada is associate professor of French at Columbia University. Arthur Goldhammer is an award-winning translator who has translated books by Georges Duby, Jacques Le Goff, and Jean Starobinski.

Review:

“Empire's Children is one of the finest recent examples of history � lafran�aise—its research deep, its arguments rigorous, and its erudition impressive. It is a must-read for anyone interested in how colonialism shaped modern Europe and racial thinking.” (Todd Shepard Johns Hopkins University)

"Empire's Children is a brilliant and deeply researched exploration of the place of race in the French citizenship experience, focusing on the rights of 'mixed-race' people in French Indochina and other colonies. Emmanuelle Saada deftly weaves together the perspectives of jurists, colonial officials, journalists and the "mixed-raced" individuals themselves to demonstrate why the French Empire -- and by extension, today's France -- cannot be analyzed in black and white terms. A nuanced and important account, beautifully translated by Arthur Goldhammer."
(Mary Dewhurst Lewis Harvard University)

“In this pathbreaking work of historical legal anthropology, Saada uses a vast array of primary sources to trace the deep racial logic of a new 1928 decree regulating the status of the m�tis, or person of mixed race, in Indochina. At a moment when much of the historiography of empire is focused on the crude violence of colonial rule, Empire's Children persuasively argues for the critical role of law in the exercise of power overseas.”

(Alice Conklin Ohio State University)

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