Contact Information
Biography Information
Lorelle Semley received her BS in French from Georgetown University, her Master’s in African Studies from Yale and her PhD in African History from Northwestern University. She is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the College of the Holy Cross where she teaches courses in African history, the African diaspora, and gender studies. Her book Mother Is Gold, Father Is Glass: Gender and Colonialism in a Yoruba Town published with Indiana University Press in 2011, examines the concept of public motherhood in West Africa and Brazil from the period of the slave trade through the rise and fall of colonialism in Africa. She also has written on memory and the Atlantic slave trade and on women and Islam in Africa. The recipient of numerous fellowships and grants, her current book project on black citizenship during French colonial empire has been supported by a Mellon Summer Research Grant, the Harvard University International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, the Wesleyan University Center for the Humanities, and the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.
Project Description
Lorelle Semley’s new book project tentatively titled, “Free and French: The Challenge of Black Citizenship to French Colonial Empire,” examines the ways that black colonial subjects in the Caribbean, Africa, and France used French democratic ideals to demand rights and redefine the meanings of freedom and “Frenchness.” Since the period of the French Revolution, Africans and people of African descent have engaged with French republican ideals to demand rights and citizenship. Despite the rhetoric of freedom, equality, and human rights promoted during the French Revolution, French colonial empire maintained slavery in the Americas into the nineteenth century and introduced exploitative labor and trade policies during the colonization of Africa in the twentieth century. Africans and people of African descent challenged these contradictions through armed struggle, formal petitions, political activism, and artistic expression, and attempted, at various moments, to become both “free” and “French.” By tracing these historical processes from the Haitian Revolution in 1791 through the fall of the French Fourth Republic in 1958, this comparative study engages scholarship on citizenship, race, empire, and gender and places current debates about human rights and immigration in France in historical perspective.