Gender, Race, and the French Imperial Republic

Abstract

Gender, Race, and the French Imperial Republic Amelia H. Lyons (bio) Nimisha Barton, Reproductive Citizens: Gender, Immigration, and the State in Modern France, 1880–1945. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020. 306 pp. ISBN 9781501749636 (cl); 9781501749681 (ebook). Françoise Vergès, The Wombs of Women: Race, Capital, Feminism. Translated by Kaiama L. Glover. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 184 pp. ISBN 9781478008521 (cl); 9781478009412 (pb); 9781478008866 (ebook). Sarah J. Zimmerman, Militarizing Marriage: West African Soldiers' Conjugal Traditions in Modern French Empire. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2020. 318 pp. ISBN 9780821424223 (cl); 9780821424476 (pb); 9780821440674 (pdf). When French people of color raised their voices as part of the global Black Lives Matter movement and brought increased attention to endemic institutional racism in France, President Emmanuel Macron responded by blaming foreign influences, especially "Anglo-Saxon traditions based on a different history, which is not ours," for fomenting separatism that led to the spread of "Islamo-leftism" and the corruption of French society. He worried that "children of the Republic," who had never experienced colonialism and whose parents and grandparents had lived in France, were being tempted to revisit "post-colonial or anti-colonial discourse."1 In short, the French government argued that scholars like those whose works are being reviewed here are to blame for putting "radical" and "activist" ideas that intend "to divide, to fracture, to pinpoint the enemy" into the minds of French people of color.2 This view that racism is not a French problem has roots in French history and in a range of contemporary issues that infantilize, minimize, and deny the agency of French people of color. Moreover, it assumes that the traumas of colonialism, decolonization, neocolonialism, and systemic, institutional racism are somehow not French. It pretends that the French are unaware, until told by anglophone scholars, that their own family histories have a fraught relationship with the French imperial republic. The French do not need to read these works to understand their own experiences; nevertheless, academic work plays an important role in analyzing the connections between the past and the present. Recent publications by Françoise Vergès, Sarah Zimmerman, and Nimisha Barton are excellent examples of the kind of academic work that President Marcon and others malign. All three provide careful, scholarly research that underscores the connections between racism and the management of women's bodies. Together these works help [End Page 156] us to understand that the tenets of French republicanism, with its claims to secularism and universality, are not separate from, but part of an interconnected history of France that includes systemic racial and gender discrimination and violence. We need this scholarship, as Kaiama Glover states in her thoughtful translator's introduction to Vergès's book, because for most of white France "the concept of race is perceived as incommensurable with progressive discourse. Race per se does not exist in France" (xiv). These books are part of a growing body of scholarship intended to force France to grapple with its difficult history and to demand that the French accept race as a constituent element of French history, society, and national identity. In her recently translated book, The Wombs of Women: Race, Capital, Feminism, Françoise Vergès, a French, antiracist feminist and public intellectual, intentionally disrupts the contention that a critical examination of the intersections of systemic racial and gender discrimination is both foreign to and intends to corrupt the French people. Vergès's goal is to expose, through the politics and history of reproduction, how French colonial power continues to function. To do so, she examines the largely forgotten case of French doctors' regulation and violation of women's bodies in the department of Réunion for over a decade, mainly in the 1960s. As she puts it, by studying the "management of women's wombs," her book serves as "an act of historical reparation for the raced, despised, and exploited women of France's overseas departments" (3). Vergès begins with a history of the violent conquest of Réunion, followed by the story of Doctor Moreau and others who used French fears about overpopulation to justify aborting and sterilizing thousands of pregnant Réunionese women without...