Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
The Métis of Senegal: Urban Life and Politics in French West Africa . By Hilary Jones . Bloomington, IN : Indiana University Press , 2013. Pp. xi+276. $80, hardback (ISBN 978-0-253-00673-8 ); $28, paperback (ISBN 978-0-253-00674-5 ).
Reviews of Books
Hilary Jones frames her study of métis in St. Louis, Senegal from the mid-nineteenth century to 1920s as an effort to recast Senegal's political history through the lenses of racial identity, gender, and culture. She defines métis as espousing a conscious group identity, self-identifying as descendants of an African woman signare and a European merchant or soldier residing in fortified coastal depots St Louis or Gorée in the mercantile period. As the capital city of the fledgling colony until 1902, St Louis was at the center of contestations over the meanings of colonialism as the French sought to centralize governance. However, in their social organization, cultural practices, and electoral politics, métis men and women insisted upon presenting themselves as citizens of the French republic and cultivated a social and political branch of civil society.
Chapter One outlines the emergence of the town in the eighteenth-century period of mercantile trade. Jones emphasizes that early St Louis consisted of Afro-European households presided over...