Between Citizenship and Refusal: Feminist Practices of Care in 20th-Century Martinique

The feminist organizations that emerged in Martinique in the 1930s and 1940s grappled with political repression and economic deprivation wrought by colonialism and war. In these conditions, Martinican feminists imagined modes of social and civic engagement that embodied a politics of refusal and that articulated forms of citizenship exceeding the restrictive bounds of the colonial status. Delving into their long-neglected archive, this talk asks on what terms we may hear the voices of Martinique’s feminists today. What did “féministe” in the Martinican sense of the word look like as political movement, intellectual thought, mode of analysis, and praxis? 

About the speaker

Annette Joseph-Gabriel is the John Spencer Bassett Associate Professor of Romance Studies and Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University. She is the author of Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire, which was awarded the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book; Honorable Mention for the Eugen Weber Award for best book in modern French history; and was a finalist for the FETKANN Maryse Condé literary prize in France. She is the co-editor of Shirley Graham Du Bois: Artist, Activist, and Author in the African Diaspora, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, and is currently at work on her second monograph, Enslaved Childhoods: Survival and Storytelling in the Atlantic World. She has had Op-Eds, commentary, and profiles of her work featured in outlets including Al Jazeera, HuffPost, the Washington Post, Le Monde, France Culture, France 24 and Radio France Internationale. She is a recipient of the Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research on Women and Politics, and her research has been supported by awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Humanities Center among others. She has served as a judge for the National Book Awards, and is currently the senior editor of Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International; and co-editor of the Global Black Writers in Translation series at Vanderbilt University Press.

This event is jointly organized by the Gender Centre and the Department of International History and Politics.