Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire is the newest work from Dr. Joseph-Gabriel that dives into the history of France. Grab your copy today!

Bry Reed: Dr. Joseph-Gabriel could you please introduce yourself by telling us some of your academic and research interests?

Dr. Annette Joseph-Gabriel: My research focuses on Black women’s literary production and political activism. I work mostly on texts written by African and Antillean women in the former French empire and I ask questions about their visions for liberation in the colonial period. I also work on narratives written by enslaved people in the French Atlantic and I ask similar questions about freedom there too.

BR: When did you first become interested in Black Women’s Studies?

JG: In high school I wrote an “extended essay” which was essentially a 20 page paper on the novel Hill of Fools published in Heineman’s African Writers Series. The novel was a coming-of-age story of a young girl in a rural setting. Spending a semester just reading, thinking, and writing about an African girl was such a fulfilling experience. This too was literature, but it felt different from our regular fare of Shakespeare and Achebe. From there I became really interested in novels by or about African women. Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta, Ken Bugul, Nurrudin Farah...these are some of the early writers whose stories have marked my journey through African literature.

BR: Your latest book, Reimagining Liberation, explores the activism of seven Black women in France, what motivated you to write this book?

JG: As a dissertation, this project started with a really simple question: “where were the women?” I had been learning about negritude, antillanité, créolité as poetic movements and as political visions, but those hailed as the architects of these movements were primarily men. As the dissertation evolved into a book, “where were the women” also evolved into what I hope are a set of more critical questions about Black women’s political visions and the linguistic tools they employed to realize those visions.

BR: How does your work relate to Black feminist intellectual history?

JG: This is an interesting question. When I first wrote my book, I didn’t know how to make its Black feminist intent explicit. I will forever be grateful to the anonymous reviewer who described the book as being in line with Black feminist thought and encouraged me to be more deliberate in making that claim. My book is certainly informed by Black feminist frameworks of accounting (who is present, whose testimonies have gone unheard etc) and I hope too that it makes a contribution to Black feminist intellectual history.

BR: Who are some scholars that motivate you to continue your research and writing?

JG: Far too many to name. Two scholars whose writings leave me staring at the wall lost in thought for hours on end are Jessica Marie Johnson and Keguro Macharia. Just by lurking on Twitter I learn so much from them about how to think more expansively, capaciously and creatively about Black life. My academic training taught me how to think about texts and ideas. From Jessica and Keguro I have been learning what it means to think with texts. The shift is seemingly subtle, but it’s done a lot for how I am constructing my next project. There are many other scholars whose decisive writing, community activism, political engagement, and creative refusal of disciplinary boundaries have been a model for me. 

BR: Do you have advice for scholars interested in studying Black women in France?

JG: In his long poem, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, Aimé Césaire writes that “a screaming man is not a dancing bear” and cautions against viewing life as a spectacle. That something is a subject of study doesn’t also mean that it is not a matter of people’s real, everyday lives. My advice for others, which is also my hope for myself, is to never reduce a subject of study to a distant abstraction, to a scholarly spectacle.

Thank you Dr. Joseph-Gabriel for taking the time to chat with us!