On the terrace of a café-restaurant in the 20e arrondissement of Paris, Annette Joseph-Gabriel presents a cheerful alternative to the figure of the austere academic. Smiling and young, the forty-year-old researcher has just arrived from Brussels, where she was promoting her book Imagine liberation. Black women facing the empire. Published in May by Ròt-Bò-Krik, a young publishing house born in Sète in 2021, this stocky little volume (translated from English by Jean-Baptiste Naudy) portrays seven female and black figures in the anti-colonialist fight in France from the middle of the XXe century.
“Making these voices that disappear from the dominant historical discourse exist is what runs through all my work”, says this professor of French literature and women’s studies at Duke University in North Carolina. And it is not the only one: from art to literature via politics, the motif known as des “great forgotten” has become an editorial genre in its own right that is available everywhere, especially in the graphic novel.
But the singularity of the approach of Annette Joseph-Gabriel, born in Ghana, an English-speaking country, lies in her view of French history: concerned (she married a Frenchman and has had French nationality since 2017), but marked by the detachment that one often draws from looking (even very closely) at a country that is not one’s own. In the same way that, in the 1970s, the American historian Robert Paxton had revolutionized studies on collaboration in France.
A fresh look at decolonization
If Annette Joseph-Gabriel does not promise great revelations, she nevertheless takes a fresh look at the period of decolonization, influenced by the black studies, whose tradition in the United States dates back to the civil rights movement – “when African-American students demanded, in the 1960s, that their history become an object of study”, she explains.
But “the demographic nature of the black population in France is less uniform; there is no black community here like there is in the United States,” she says, citing the Republican assimilation model as another impediment to a narrative centered on the experience of a specific racial group. “Black French history is a contradiction in terms, the hexagonal narrative is limited to a French history, period”, says the researcher, before rejoicing that this work is becoming more and more visible on this side of the Atlantic.
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