Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

28 results

Page 1 of 2

  • Future Directions in History in Africa

  • Lorelle Semley, Terri Barnes, Bayo Holsey, Egodi Uchendu
  • Journal:
    History in Africa / Volume 50 / May 2023
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    28 February 2024, pp. 1-6
    • Article
      • You have access
    • PDF
    • HTML
    • Export citation

  • With the 50th volume of History in Africa, the journal is not quite fifty years old. As we prepare for the 50th anniversary of the journal next year, it is a perfect time to examine the present and imagine the future of our field. Conceived as a journal concerned with historical method, scholarly debate, and sources, History in Africa has both generated and reflected significant epistemological change. But we also recognize that African history and African Studies, more generally, are engaged in longstanding and ongoing struggles to move beyond colonial ways of knowing.1 How can History in Africa actively reorient and reimagine its role in this crucial intellectual work?

  • Editors’ Introduction: “The Future of the African Past”

  • Lorelle Semley, Teresa Barnes, Bayo Holsey, Egodi Uchendu
  • Journal:
    History in Africa / Volume 48 / June 2021
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    11 February 2022, pp. 1-8

  • We signed on as the new editorial team of History in Africa (HIA) without knowing that we all sat on the precipice of tumultuous times. After over a year of the COVID-19 pandemic, global unrest calling for a reckoning on racial justice, and events that exposed the limits and fragility of democratic institutions, we are reminded of the importance of how people experience, remember, and chronicle the past. It is a weighty and fortuitous time to think about our craft as historians and how we develop methods for analyzing and revisiting sources. How do we want to highlight our unique approaches as historians of Africa, and how do we want to push our field of African history and our discipline of history, more broadly, in new directions? We salute and thank the previous team of HIA editors – Jan Jansen, Michel Doortmont, John Hanson, and Dmitri van den Bersselaar – for their excellent stewardship of the journal over many years.

  • 10 - Writing the History of the Trans-african Woman in the Revolutionary French Atlantic

  • from Part Three - Mobility
  • Edited by Mariana P. Candido, Adam Jones
  • Book:
    African Women in the Atlantic World
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    26 March 2019
    Print publication:
    15 February 2019, pp 191-216

  • Summary

    The story of Anne Rossignol, a woman of colour from Gorée, Senegal, in West Africa who made her first voyage across the Atlantic to Lorient, France in 1736 as a free girl, sounds like the beginning of a piece of fantastic fiction. The trip from Gorée to Lorient would have been wondrous and maybe frightening for a child. Given her peculiar circumstances, that initial crossing must have been awkward – for those travelling with her. At the time, Anne Rossignol accompanied her French father, Claude Rossignol, and his French wife, Renée Le Monier. For the entire trip, Le Monier would have been confronted with her husband's transgression in the light brown face of Anne whom Claude Rossignol listed as a ‘little mulâtresse, [his] natural daughter’.

    It is unclear when Anne Rossignol returned to Gorée. However, she was living there with her own children by the 1750s, appearing in census reports as a signare (‘lady’ derived from Portuguese senhora). When she departed Gorée in the 1770s to make a new life for herself and two of her children in Le Cap in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, Rossignol could not have guessed how the world would explode in 1789. Having lived with great privilege but also the potential threat of vulnerability, Rossignol died at a ripe old age in 1810 in Charleston, South Carolina. Her descendants’ squabbles over an enslaved family Rossignol had owned allowed her to enter the written record for a final time. The fragments of her story that appear in the archive capture a range of complexities about identity, gender, and belonging shared by many other women and men of colour living in the world. Rossignol was exceptional, but not the only person of African descent to live such a peripatetic life. As a result, her activities over her long lifetime may serve as a theoretical framework, even if it is impossible to know what the young Rossignol was thinking when she set sail for France in 1736. I will show that it is possible to flesh out what I propose to call a trans-African life.

    Studies have begun to focus on the roles of local women in the economy and society of European settlements and trading stations on the African coast. Scholars have struggled with some of the primary and earlier secondary sources that romanticise, exoticise and even demonise such women and their sexuality.

To Be Free and French
  • Citizenship in France's Atlantic Empire
  • Lorelle Semley
  • Published online:
    19 July 2017
    Print publication:
    10 July 2017
  • The Haitian Revolution may have galvanized subjects of French empire in the Americas and Africa struggling to define freedom and 'Frenchness' for themselves, but Lorelle Semley reveals that this event was just one moment in a longer struggle of women and men of color for rights under the French colonial regime. Through political activism ranging from armed struggle to literary expression, these colonial subjects challenged and exploited promises in French Republican rhetoric that should have contradicted the continued use of slavery in the Americas and the introduction of exploitative labor in the colonization of Africa. They defined an alternative French citizenship, which recognized difference, particularly race, as part of a 'universal' French identity. Spanning Atlantic port cities in Haiti, Senegal, Martinique, Benin, and France, this book is a major contribution to scholarship on citizenship, race, empire, and gender, and it sheds new light on debates around human rights and immigration in contemporary France.

  • Prologue: Citizens of the World

  • from Part I - Revolutionary Foundations
  • Lorelle Semley, College of the Holy Cross, Massachusetts
  • Book:
    To Be Free and French
    Published online:
    19 July 2017
    Print publication:
    10 July 2017, pp 3-23
    • Chapter
      • You have access
    • PDF
    • HTML
    • Export citation

Page 1 of 2