Black France, White Europe: Youth, Race, and Belonging in the Postwar Era
Winner of the George Louis Beer Prize
Black France, White Europe illuminates the deeply entangled history of European integration and African decolonization. Emily Marker maps the horizons of belonging in postwar France as leaders contemplated the inclusion of France's old African empire in the new Europe-in-the-making. European integration intensified longstanding structural contradictions of French colonial rule in Africa: Would Black Africans and Black African Muslims be French? If so, would they then also be European? What would that mean for republican France and united Europe more broadly?
Marker examines these questions through the lens of youth, amid a surprising array of youth and education initiatives to stimulate imperial renewal and European integration from the ground up. She explores how education reforms and programs promoting solidarity between French and African youth collided with transnational efforts to make young people in Western Europe feel more European. She connects a particular postwar vision for European unity--which coded Europe as both white and raceless, Christian and secular--to crucial decisions about what should be taught in African classrooms and how many scholarships to provide young Africans to study and train in France. That vision of Europe also informed French responses to African student activism for racial and religious equality, which ultimately turned many young francophone Africans away from France irrevocably. Black France, White Europe shows that the interconnected history of colonial and European youth initiatives is key to explaining why, despite efforts to strengthen ties with its African colonies in the 1940s and 1950s, France became more European during those years.
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Emily Marker is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University--Camden. She has published in French Politics, Culture & Society; American Historical Review; and Know.
Any scholar of modern France would be hard-pressed to read this book and not find some element that casts a new light on their own historical investigations. Questions of who belongs, and, perhaps more critically, who is allowed to create or challenge a shared understanding of "Europe" are at the core of historical scholarship about this imagined community. I can't think of a better book to help my students to start unraveling these threads.
-- "Tocqueville 21"Black France, White Europe deftly weaves together the histories of French post-war reconstruction, West and Central African decolonization, and European integration in the 1940s and 50s. The richness of Marker's account which is warmly recommended to anyone interested in African and European post-war history - and especially to those who seek to connect both, as Marker so skillfully does.
-- "Francia-Recensio"In Black France, White Europe: Youth, Race, and Belonging in the Postwar Era, Marker (Univ. of Rutgers, Camden) examines identity and belonging in postwar France within the contexts of decolonization, European integration, and the early Cold War. Embracing transnational, colonial, European, and national frameworks, she navigates a complex set of influences and asserts that the European identity that emerged during this time was racial and religious in nature.
-- "Choice"Black France, White Europe is a stimulating, well-written, and careful study, as well as a highly recommended work for readers interested in French, colonial, European, and youth history. Refreshing a dialogue between such diverse fields is in itself a much welcomed and impressive accomplishment.
-- "H-Soz-Kult"Emily Marker offers fascinating insight into the culturalization of Christianity in the postwar conjecture. Thanks to an impressive array of primary sources, Black France, White Europe powerfully reminds us that we should not take for granted how the incompatibility of a Franco-African polity and a united Europe became naturalized in the postwar period, a moment of supposed global renunciation of religious intolerance and racism.
-- "Journal of Social History"The originality of Black France, White Europe lies in the lens adopted: Marker focuses on youth initiatives and education, an important terrain for personal emancipation, social transformation, and democratic consolidation, to analyze how French and African leaders attempted to turn French citizens into Europeans, and Africans living in the newly-created French Union into French citizens.
-- "Journal of Social History"
