Empire's Children: Race, Filiation, and Citizenship in the French Colonies

ISBN-13: 9780226733074 / Angielski / Twarda / 2012 / 344 str.

Emmanuelle Saada; Arthur Goldhammer

Opis

Europe s imperial projects were often predicated on a series of legal and scientific distinctions that were frequently challenged by the reality of social and sexual interactions between the colonized and the colonizers.When Emmanuelle Saada discovered a 1928 decree defining the status of persons of mixed parentage born in French Indochina the" metis" she found not only a remarkable artifact of colonial rule, but a legal bombshell that introduced race into French law for the first time. The decree was the culmination of a decades-long effort to resolve the metis question: the educational, social, and civil issues surrounding the mixed population. Operating at the intersection of history, anthropology, and law, "Empire s Children "reveals the unacknowledged but central role of race in the definition of French nationality.

Through extensive archival work in both France and Vietnam, and a close reading of primary and secondary material from the Pacific islands and sub-Saharan and North Africa, Saada has created in "Empire s Children" an original and compelling perspective on colonialism, law, race, and culture from the end of the nineteenth century until decolonization."