Interracial Intimacies in France and the French Empire
Intimités interraciales en France et dans l’empire colonial français
“French Politics, Culture, and Society” Journal
Revue « French Politics, Culture, and Society »
Published on Thursday, December 14, 2023
Abstract
For more than two decades, scholars have shown how such ostensibly private practices have always been matters of state, with interracial intimacy buttressing, challenging, and even redefining broader social, political, economic, and cultural concerns. French Politics, Culture, and Society seeks contributions to a special issue on interracial intimacy in France and the French empire, co-edited by Elisa Camiscioli and Caroline Séquin, and invites to explore sex, love, conjugality, and desire across the color line in any period of French history.
Announcement
Arguments
French Politics, Culture, and Society seeks contributions to a special issue on interracial intimacy in France and the French empire, co-edited by Elisa Camiscioli and Caroline Séquin. We welcome contributions from history, the social sciences, and cultural studies. In addition to research articles, we will consider shorter reflections on recent events or debates. Abstracts (and article manuscripts if selected) may be submitted in English or French.
The issue explores sex, love, conjugality, and desire across the color line in any period of French history. For more than two decades, scholars have shown how such ostensibly private practices have always been matters of state, with interracial intimacy buttressing, challenging, and even redefining broader social, political, economic, and cultural concerns. In the early modern period, race-mixing (métissage) was tolerated in some imperial spaces, whether to foster assimilation or broker political and trade relations. By the early eighteenth century, however, the Codes Noirs signaled the repression of marital (and sometimes sexual) relations across racial boundaries in parts of the empire. And while republican universalism has prevented, in principle, the adoption of laws banning interracial relations in the modern era, a range of legal and extralegal strategies has impeded the practice of interracial intimacy.
Thus in France, as in other national and imperial sites, the regulation of intimate relations was entangled with ideas about belonging and exclusion, morality and immorality, and sexual normativity and perversion. Yet the policing, repression, and politicization of intimate life are but one side of the coin. The lived experience of interracial intimacies often circumvented state initiatives, appearing as conjugal, commercial, consensual, and non-consensual relations in an ostensibly color-blind land. We seek contributions that explore everyday practices of intimacy—dating, sex, marriage, and other formal and informal unions, whether ephemeral or enduring—as well as studies pertaining to the regulation of sex, race, gender, class, ethnicity, religion, and age. Our aim is to provide a more granular account of interracial intimacy in France and the French empire across time and place, to bridge the colonial and postcolonial, and draw comparisons to other empires.
Possible topics include:
- Whether there were uniquely French aspects to the sexual cultures shaping the discourses and practices of métissage
- Queer interracial intimacies
- “Interracial desire” as a historical (and historiographic) construct
- Connections between intimacy and liberatory political projects
- Lived experience, including love, sex, violence, alienation, and longing
- How ideas and practices pertaining to interracial intimacy relate to French, European, and national-imperial borders
- Legal and extra-legal attempts to regulate interracial intimacy
Submission guidelines
By January 15, 2024, please submit an extended abstract summarizing the article you wish to contribute (about 1,000 words) and a one-page CV to:
- Elisa Camiscioli (ecamis@binghamton.edu)
- Caroline Séquin (sequinc@lafayette.edu)
Abstracts for articles should include a discussion of the archival, oral, and/or published sources and explain the essay’s contribution to the existing scholarship. Authors will be notified in late January whether they should submit a full version of their manuscript for peer review. Regular articles should be no more than 10,000 words including footnotes; essays on recent events and debates can range between 3,000 and 6,250 words. The due date for completed manuscripts is September 15, 2024. Articles selected for publication after the peer review process will be published in 2025.
Editorial board
- Marcos Ancelovici, Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada
- Frank Baumgartner, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, États-Unis
- Alban Bensa, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, France
- Laure Bereni, Centre Maurice Halbwachs, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, France
- Herrick Chapman, New York University, États-Unis
- Nicholas Entrikin, University of Notre Dame, États-Unis
- Éric Fassin, École normale supérieure, France
- Julie Fette, Rice University, États-Unis
- Marion Fourcade-Gourinchas, University of California at Berkeley, États-Unis
- Laura L. Frader, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University; Northeastern University, États-Unis
- Patrick Fridenson, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, France
- Stéphane Gerson, New York University, États-Unis
- Arthur Goldhammer, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University, États-Unis
- Nancy L. Green, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, France
- Gérard Grunberg, Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris, France
- Stanley Hoffmann, Harvard University, États-Unis
- Denis Hollier, New York University, États-Unis
- Olivier Ihl, Institut d'Études Politiques de Grenoble, France
- Paul Jankowski, Brandeis University, États-Unis
- Jean-Francois Klein, INALCO, France
- Lawrence D. Kritzman, Dartmouth College, États-Unis
- Michèle Lamont, Harvard University, États-Unis
- Jonah Levy, University of California at Berkeley, États-Unis
- Mary Dewhurst Lewis, Harvard University, États-Unis
- Kimberly Morgan, George Washington University, États-Unis
- Philip Nord, Princeton University, États-Unis
- Bruno Palier, Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris, France
- Deborah Reed-Danahay, SUNY Buffalo, États-Unis
- Donald Reid, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, États-Unis
- Jacques Revel, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, France
- Susan Carol Rogers, New York University, États-Unis
- George Ross, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University; Brandeis University, États-Unis
- Emmanuelle Saada, Columbia University, États-Unis
- Anne Sa'adah, Dartmouth College, États-Unis
- Martin Schain, New York University, États-Unis
- James Shields, Aston University, Royaume Uni
- Alexis Spire, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Université de Lille 2, France
- Christian Topalov, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, France
- Frédéric Viguier, New York University, États-Unis
- Patrick Weil, Centre national de la recherche scientifique Université de Paris-I, Panthéon-Sorbonne, France
- Claire Zalc, Institut d'Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, CNRS-ENS, France
- Martha Zuber, Centre de sociologie des organisations, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, France
Subjects
- History (Main category)
- Periods > Early modern
- Periods > Modern > Twenty-first century
- Periods > Modern
- Zones and regions > Europe > France
- Society > History > Social history
Date(s)
- Monday, January 15, 2024
Keywords
- intimacy, race, gender, sexuality, France, colonialism,
Contact(s)
- Caroline Sequin
courriel : sequinc [at] lafayette [dot] edu - Elisa Camiscioli
courriel : camis [at] binghamton [dot] edu
Information source
- Caroline Sequin
courriel : sequinc [at] lafayette [dot] edu
License
This announcement is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal.
To cite this announcement
« Interracial Intimacies in France and the French Empire », Call for papers, Calenda, Published on Thursday, December 14, 2023, https://doi.org/10.58079/1cdt
