Lorelle Semley is Professor of History at College of the Holy Cross where she teaches classes in African history, gender history, and on the African diaspora. She is the author of the award-winning book To Be Free and French: Citizenship in France’s Atlantic Empire (Cambridge, 2017) and Mother Is Gold, Father Is Glass: Gender and Colonialism is a Yoruba Town (Indiana University Press, 2011). Her wide-ranging work has appeared in several journals including Radical History Review, Law and History Review, and Gender & History as well as in several edited volumes. She is the new Managing Editor of History in Africa, one of the two flagship journals of the African Studies Association. Her current book project titled “Bordeaux, Forgotten Black Metropolis” is supported by an ACLS Fellowship at RITM in 2021 and NEH Fellowship in 2022.
“Bordeaux, Forgotten Black Metropolis”
While Bordeaux easily evokes images of wine, bourgeois wealth, and stunning architecture, a forgotten history of race and labor also shaped the city. The vigorous role of the city’s merchants in the Atlantic slave trade is now acknowledged, but Africans and Antilleans—enslaved and free—also have resided in the city since the eighteenth century. In addition to performing labor in homes or in shipping, they lived as artisans, students, and artists, sometimes forming families or building other relationships. Piecing together waves of movement and settlement in the city and region, this project reveals how Africans and Antilleans figured in histories of merchant capital, transnational networks, and notions of citizenship and belonging. Given present-day immigration debates, Black people appear in this story as they rarely have in Atlantic history—as a force in the making of a French city, the nation, and its empire.