Black Women and Their Discontents in the French Context

This essay explores the decolonial future imagined by the Black women who make up Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel’s Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire (2020). A much-needed project of historical redress, Joseph-Gabriel’s study proposes the concept “decolonial citizenship” as a framework to tackle the archival and scholarly invisibility of Black women’s contributions to decolonial movements and their espousing new ways of belonging that are grounded in practices, geographies, epistemologies, and communities that persist despite the French colonial orb. This essay argues that the contemporary Afrofeminist movement in France’s fight for Black liberation and articulations of new forms of belonging point to the continued discontents of the country’s Black population with the universalist pretenses of the French republic.