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About Me

Jennifer Anne Boittin is a native bilingual French-American who received her Ph.D. in History from Yale University.  Among many other themes she considers how colonized spaces in West Africa, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean were shaped by intersections between gender, race, migration. class, and urban culture.  She also focuses upon how such historical questions shape contemporary France.  Using archives, newspapers, literature and film, such intersections shaped her first book, Colonial Metropolis:  The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris (University of Nebraska Press 2010, paperback spring 2015) and her second book, Undesirable: Passionate Mobility and Women’s Defiance of French Colonial Policing, 1919-1962 (University of Chicago Press, 2022)  She has also published extensively on the Nardal sisters, anti-imperialism, policing of populations and migrations, masculinities, mobility, black and African diaspora, Josephine Baker, Negritude thinkers and women travelers in journals such as French Politics, Culture & Society, Gender & History, French Colonial History and Historical Reflections.

Recent Publications

Undesirable: Passionate Mobility and Women’s Defiance of French Colonial Policing, 1919-1952. University of Chicago Press, 2022.

“Black Feminisms in France and the Francophone World,” co-editor with Jacqueline Couti, special issue, Journal of Women’s History.

“In the Crucible of Race: Lives That Matter in French and Francophone Spaces,” co-editor with Christy Pichichero, special issue, The Journal of the Western Society for French History, Vol. 48 (2022).

“’The Great Game of Hide and Seek Has Worked’: Suzanne Césaire, Cultural Marronnage, and a Caribbean Mosaic of Gendered Race Consciousness around World War II,” French Colonial History 20 (2021): 145-173.

“‘Are You Trying to Play a French Woman?’ La Mère Patrie and the Female Body in French West Africa,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 40, no. 4 (Summer 2015): 841-864.

“Adventurers and Agents Provocateurs: German Women Traveling Through French West Africa in the Shadow of War,” in “War, Occupation and Empire in France and Germany,” guest editor Jean Pedersen, Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 40, 1 (2014): 111-131.

“The Militant Black Men of Marseille and Paris, 1927-1937,” in Black France: The History, Poetics and Politics of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), edited by Trica Keaton, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Tyler Stovall: 221-246.

“‘Among Them Complicit’? Life and Politics in France’s Black Communities, 1919 -1939,” in Africa in Europe: Studies in Transnational Practice in the Long Twentieth Century (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), edited by Robbie Aitken and Eve Rosenhaft: 55-75.

“Hierarchies of Race and Gender in the French Empire,” co-author with Christina Firpo and Emily Musil Church, Firpo, Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 37, 1 (2011): 60-90.

Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Feminism and Anti-Imperialism in Interwar Paris. The University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE: 2010). Paperback edition, summer 2015.

“Intersections of Race and Gender in French History,” co-editor with Tyler Stovall, special issue, French Historical Studies, 33, 3 (Summer 2010).

“Introduction: Who is French?” co-author with Tyler Stovall, in “Intersections of Race and Gender in French History,” edited by Jennifer Anne Boittin and Tyler Stovall, special issue, French Historical Studies 33, no. 3 (2010): 349-356.

“Black in France: The Language and Politics of Race during the Late Third Republic,” French Politics, Culture & Society 27, 2 (Summer 2009): 23-46.

“In Black and White: Gender, Race Relations and the Nardal Sisters in Interwar Paris,” French Colonial History 6 (2005): 119-135.

Media Coverage

https://imbrications.hypotheses.org/189; “La France vue de l'étranger (2/5) Luttes féministes, anti-coloniales, anti-racistes,” Les Nouvelles Vagues, France Culture, Paris, France, March 7, 2017; “Tumulte Noir à Paris,” Africa4 blog article pub

Social Media

Country Focus

France and French Empire

Expertise by Geography

Africa, Caribbean, France, Southeast Asia, Western Europe

Expertise by Chronology

20th century, 21st century

Expertise by Topic

Colonialism, Gender, Migration & Immigration, Race, Rebellion & Revolution, Sexuality, Urban History, Women, World War I, World War II