{"id":7521,"date":"2010-06-16T05:06:08","date_gmt":"2010-06-16T05:06:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=7521"},"modified":"2015-11-01T01:29:36","modified_gmt":"2015-11-01T01:29:36","slug":"%e2%80%9ca-black-girl-should-not-be-with-a-white-man%e2%80%9d-sex-race-and-african-womens-social-and-legal-status-in-colonial-gabon-c-1900%e2%80%931946","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=7521","title":{"rendered":"\u201cA Black Girl Should Not be With a White Man\u201d: Sex, Race, and African Women’s Social and Legal Status in Colonial Gabon, c. 1900\u20131946"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cA Black Girl Should Not be With a White Man\u201d: Sex, Race, and African Women’s Social and Legal Status in Colonial Gabon, c. 1900\u20131946<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Journal of Women\u2019s History<\/a>
\nVolume 22, Number 2<\/a>, Summer 2010
\nE-ISSN: 1527-2036
\nPrint ISSN: 1042-7961
\nDOI: 10.1353\/jowh.0.0140<\/a><\/p>\n

Rachel Jean-Baptiste<\/a><\/strong>, Associate Professor of African History
\nUniversity of California, Davis<\/em><\/p>\n

This article reviews representations and lived experiences of interracial sex and m\u00e9tissage in twentieth-century colonial Gabon<\/a> to argue that African communities and colonial societies debated over “the m\u00e9tis<\/a> problem” as question of how to demarcate African women’s sexuality, and socioeconomic and political power in the urban locale. These discourses and social realities reflected ambiguous and contradictory colonial discourses and polyvalent<\/a> struggles among Gabonese populations to recast gender and respectability in the colonial capital city. Mpongw\u00e9<\/a> women’s participation in interracial relationships, frequently brokered by male kin, had unintended consequences that threatened colonial order and reordered gender hierarchies within Mpongw\u00e9 communities. Following World War I<\/a> through the 1950s, shifting coalitions of elite African men, colonial officials, and private French citizens\u2014anxious of the social mobility black and mixed race women achieved and sought to maintain\u2014frowned upon and sought to restrict interracial liasons. Mpongw\u00e9 women, both black and m\u00e9tis, involved in interracial relationships struggled to maintain control over their property, their labor, and insist upon their respectability in the precarious urban milieu. Using oral and written sources, this article addresses a gap in the scholarship on gender, sexuality, and colonialism by foregrounding how African women and men engaged in and reflected on miscegenation<\/a> at the center of analysis. Furthermore, this article emphasizes the colonial encounter as a dialectic in which the actions of African women shaped colonial perceptions and policies.<\/p>\n

Read or purchase the article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cA Black Girl Should Not be With a White Man\u201d: Sex, Race, and African Women’s Social and Legal Status in Colonial Gabon, c. 1900\u20131946 Journal of Women\u2019s History Volume 22, Number 2, Summer 2010 E-ISSN: 1527-2036 Print ISSN: 1042-7961 DOI: 10.1353\/jowh.0.0140 Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Associate Professor of African History University of California, Davis This article reviews […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1295,12,459,1467,8,394,25],"tags":[20761,3140,3139,3141],"class_list":["post-7521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-articles","category-history","category-law","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-women","tag-africa","tag-gabon","tag-journal-of-womens-history","tag-rachel-jean-baptiste"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7521"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43647,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7521\/revisions\/43647"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}