Lorelle Semley, To Be Free and French: Citizenship in France’s Atlantic Empire

Abstract

Lorelle Semley’s To Be Free and French is a fresh, surprising, and de-centering approach to questions of citizenship in France’s colonial spaces and the metropole, from the late eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries. Semley, a historian of Africa by training, has coined the term “trans-African” to describe the themes that tie this work together. By “trans-African,” she invokes overlapping networks of people, products, and ideas, as well as multi-faceted images of African identity (162...