AHA Session 286
Society for French Historical Studies 2
French Colonial Historical Society 3
Society for French Historical Studies 2
French Colonial Historical Society 3
Sunday, January 10, 2027: 11:00 AM-12:30 PM
Studio 7 (New Orleans Marriott, 2nd Floor)
Chair:
Emily Marker, Rutgers University–Camden
Panel:
Malick Walid Ghachem, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Jessica Johnson, Johns Hopkins University
Melanie Lamotte, Duke University
Nathan Elliot Marvin, University of Arkansas at Little Rock
Jessica Johnson, Johns Hopkins University
Melanie Lamotte, Duke University
Nathan Elliot Marvin, University of Arkansas at Little Rock
Session Abstract
This roundtable examines the dynamics of race, gender, and law in France’s early transoceanic empire through the lens of Mélanie Lamotte’s By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire. The first pan-imperial history of the early French Empire to appear in English, the book demonstrates how a cohesive racial legal culture connected colonies and outposts across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. It also argues that sex, labor, and the political actions of enslaved and free people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent were central to both the making and the unmaking of France’s imperial formation. Following a brief overview of the book’s principal arguments and contributions by Nathan Marvin, Malick Ghachem will address its legal dimensions, situating the work within broader historiographical debates on law and slavery. He will also place the book in conversation with his scholarship on law and slavery, the Haitian Revolution, the French company, and the rise of increasingly violent planter regimes in the Atlantic world. Jessica Marie Johnson will bring a Black feminist perspective to the discussion, placing her own work on Black women’s intimacies and struggles for freedom in the Atlantic world in dialogue with Lamotte’s analysis of sexuality and imperial domination, women’s contestation of imperial authority, and the economic, cultural, and political experiences of women of color. A leading digital humanities scholar, Johnson will also comment on the book’s accompanying digital projects. Nathan Marvin will conclude the session by reflecting on developments that followed the period covered in Lamotte’s book, drawing on his own research to highlight both continuities and ruptures in the ways race, gender, and law continued to shape imperial power. Lamotte will respond to the comments, after which there will be a Q&A.
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