Lorelle Semley. To Be Free and French

To Be Free and French examines the political struggles of people of color who lived in the French Atlantic and claimed French citizenship amid the shifting terrain of French imperial rule from the late eighteenth century until the fall of the Fourth French Republic in 1958. Lorelle Semley’s work ambitiously integrates the fields of African diaspora and Atlantic studies with the history of citizenship, French empire, gender, law, transnationalism, and urban studies. This broad methodological approach enables Semley to weave together the stories of men and women who made their lives in the currents of the French Atlantic and who struggled for forms of recognition and citizenship that acknowledged multifaceted identities formed at the interstices of empire and nation. Semley manages this impressive chronological and geographical scope by anchoring her account in individuals who lived in key urban areas in the French Atlantic at pivotal moments of legal change. Some of these individuals, like Toussaint Louverture and Cyrille-Charles-Auguste Bissette, are well documented. Others, like Anne Rossignol and Marc Kojo Tovalou Houénou, are less known or largely forgotten. All possessed wide familial, professional, commercial, and intellectual connections that linked them to the wider Atlantic World and enabled them to transcend their local contexts. They were, Semley writes, Africans and Antilleans who shaped history “through their physical mobility and their intellectual ability to imagine themselves as more than a slave or subject” (xvii–xviii).

Ancient history · Atlantic World · Citizenship · Diaspora · Empire · Genealogy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Transnationalism · Cultural Identity and Heritage · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies