Outside In: Rethinking French Identity from the Perimeter

Until fairly recently, historiography of Early Modern France focused almost exclusively within the hexagon of continental or metropolitan France. While an important generation of scholars in the 1980s developed thoughtful and influential challenges to French historiography based on gender, questions of race were virtually ignored -- partly due to official "color-blind" ideologies of race. Recent developments in contemporary France have highlighted the importance of French racial policy and ideology not only in the 20th century, but in the historiography of the Old Regime. This paper analyzes how current scholarship on race and gender in Early Modern French colonies are helping to reconfigure notions of national identity and citizenship as French subjects engaged in colonization and imperialism. Such inquiry re-invigorates the field of European history by unsettling the national boundaries of historical research and making connections with historical processes that extend beyond the nation-state.