Postcolonial Spatialities with Rachel Jean-Baptiste

Join the SHC Research Workshop Postcolonial Spatialities, which gathers three times per quarter with guest speakers to explore the spatial implications of (neo)colonialism and imperialism. The series kicks off with Dr. Rachel Jean-Baptiste, who joins Stanford as the Michelle Mercer and Bruce Golden Family Professor in Feminist and Gender Studies and the Director of the Program for Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

Dr. Jean-Baptiste will be discussing a draft of an article, which will be circulated to RSVP’d attendees later this afternoon. The article analyzes the small number of cases—four in total but focusing in particular on one with the densest amount of archival material—that Dr. Jean-Baptiste uncovered in the archives regarding sustained parent-child relationships between white fathers of varied European nationalities who fathered multiracial children with African women in different colonies in twentieth century colonial French Africa. Over the course of the 1930s and 1940s, these men attempted to or had legally recognized their children or otherwise had their children live with them in Africa or Europe and maintained a relationship of care.  Rather than focusing on the legal aspects of the cases, Dr. Jean-Baptiste focuses on “infrastructure of feelings:” that created relational rupture or facilitated relational repair and connections that linked white fathers, paternal kin, and France to multiracial children. The article also explore the roles of multiracial children in cultivating affective bonds and social and legal belonging to their fathers’ milieus. In focusing on the gendered history of emotions, this essay tries to understand shifting meanings of race, masculinity, family, and belonging and the geopolitical spaces of colony, nation and continent. 

About the Speaker

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Dr. Rachel Jean-Baptiste (PhD, Stanford) is a social and legal historian of 20th and 21st century French-speaking Central and West Africa and the Atlantic World. Her research interests include the histories of: gender, women and sexuality; marriage and family law; race; citizenship; and urbanization. She is the author of two monographs, Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa: Race, Childhood and Citizenship (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and Conjugal Rights: Marriage, Sexuality, and Urban Life in Colonial Libreville, Gabon (Ohio University Press, 2014). 
 
Currently, Dr. Jean-Baptiste serves as the co-President of Coordinating Council for Women in History, an affiliate organization of the American Historical Association; member of the Board of Directors of African Studies Association; and member of the U.K. Editorial Collective, Gender and History.