Undesirable(s) and Transience: Stories of Gender, Race, and Empire in Francophone Ports and Waterways

Drawing from Cambodian, French, Senegalese, and Martinican archives, this talk explores how people of Southeast Asian, European, and West African origin, many poor, ill, and classified as undesirable, rejected patriarchal or racialized evaluations of them as “bad” as they sojourned in ports or traveled along waterways. Using police and security records to center their voices within an imperial history of transience and opposition, this talk will present a few case studies to reflect upon some of the ways historians can write imperial stories about those who have left fewer traces in the historical record.

Jennifer A. Boittin is the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global History at UNC Chapel Hill. She received her Ph.D. in History from Yale University and was previously a professor at Penn State University. Her research and teaching look at how colonial spaces in West Africa, Southeast Asia, North Africa, and the French Caribbean were shaped by intersections between class, politics, and urban culture around the world wars and decolonization. Completed in part thanks to a Paris Institute for Advanced Studies fellowship, her second book is entitled Undesirable: Passionate Mobility and Women’s Defiance of French Colonial Policing, 1919-1952 (2022, University of Chicago Press). Undesirable tells the virtually unknown history of hundreds of women in Southeast Asia (French Indochina) and West Africa (AOF) tracked by authorities because they were traveling alone and claiming Frenchness. Drawn from Cambodian, French, and Senegalese archives, Undesirable’s focus on how ordinary people react to being policed gives historical depth to pressing contemporary issues of migration and violence in France today and of similar reckonings on a global scale.

Boittin’s first book, Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris (2010, University of Nebraska Press) is an innovative, intersectional history of radical interwar politics. She has also published extensively on the Nardal sisters, Lamine Senghor, Tiémoko Garan Kouyaté, Black anti-imperialism, masculinity, Black and African diaspora, Josephine Baker, and women travelers. She is a Past President of the Western Society of French History, editor of French Colonial History, and founding member on the editorial committee for Marronnages, les questions raciales au crible des sciences sociales.