To Be Free and French: Citizenship in France's Atlantic Empire by Lorelle Semley (review)

To Be Free and French begins with the Haitian Revolution and ends with the First World Festival of the Negro Arts in Dakar. Between those bookends is a temporally and geographically expansive study of the different models of citizenship envisioned by people living in the French empire over at least two centuries. This study excavates the voices of the women and men whose citizenship practices shaped ideas of race, gender, and belonging in France, and places these stories alongside the contributions of an array of political figures such as Toussaint L'Ouverture, Kojo Tovalou Houénou, and Gerty Archimède. A study on citizenship and empire is necessarily transnational, and Semley's work is attentive to the nuances in the different forms of movement by which people of African descent in the French-speaking world declared themselves to be global citizens.