“Among the French People”: The Departmentalization of Mayotte and the Colonial Politics of Inclusion

Abstract

Abstract With its 2011 change in administrative status, Mayotte, a small island colony in the Mozambique Channel, became the only contemporary French department with an indigenous African Muslim population. Mayotte's departmentalization required restructuring a colonial local legal system influenced by Islamic, Swahili, and Malagasy legal practices. By putting legislation and public discourse concerning Mayotte's status into conversation with earlier political movements within the French Empire and scholarship on French colonial governance, I show how Mahoran politicians, writers, and activists advocating for departmentalization invoked claims to racialized notions of belonging “among the French People.” These claims were joined by demands that France fulfill its Republican promise by granting juridicopolitical inclusion to a colonial population. These distinct but related political discourses illuminate central features of the mutually constitutive relationship between law, race, and citizenship in the French Republic.