“Miss Eurafricain”: Sex, Race, and Citizenship in Colonial Francophone Africa, 1945–60

Much of the scholarship on interracial sex, miscegenation, and twentieth century colonialism tends to render the mixed-race colonial subject as male and little has been published on how mixed race populations conceptualized their own status and identity. Engaging these gaps in the literature, this paper examines the imbrication of gender, race, and sex in examining how members of the Association of EuroAfricans of French West and Equatorial Africa sought to carve out a space for themselves as respectable citizens in the post-World War II French empire. The organization’s newspaper, published from 1949-1960, reveals the conscious efforts of mixed race men and women to fashion a distinct identity that blurred the colonial categories of (white) citizen and (black) colonial subject. A main aim of the association was to aid the mothers of mixed race children and the children who had been “abandoned” by European fathers, as well to convince the colonial state to provide them with economic, social, and educational opportunities.  This paper analyzes the Union’s focus on how mixed race girls and women embodied respectability— in photographs of beauty pageants, cultural fairs, social soirées; in fictional stories; and in articles authored by métis men and women—as a discursive space in which the association sought to present images of “civilized,” bourgeois women who would be productive citizens, images that contrasted colonial representations of such women as diseased and degenerate women.  The paper argues that Eurafricain efforts to portray African mothers and, in particular, their mixed race daughters as respectable, robust women were key to how mixed race peoples conceptualized their status in the new French empire. The paper concludes that the sexual-social movements of African women across racial boundaries shaped how state and societies drew and redrew conceptualizations of identity, respectability, and the law during the second colonial occupation.