Citizenship and its Boundaries: Law, Islam, and Empire in Senegal, 1870s-1930s

FAIN: FT-278999-21

Larissa Kopytoff
University of South Florida (Tampa, FL 33620-9951)

Research and revise chapter five and the introduction for a book that examines how Senegalese citizenship was continuously redefined and re-imagined by African men and women who negotiated their notions about identity at the beginning of the twentieth century.

This project explores how African men and women imagined and practiced citizenship in French colonial Senegal. Senegal was the site of a legal anomaly: four towns whose inhabitants claimed and exercised rights generally reserved for French citizens, yet did so while conducting their personal affairs according to Muslim law rather than the French civil code. This seeming contradiction held implications for the expansion and restriction of rights in other colonies and prompted decades of debate. Through laws, court cases, elections, petitions, and protests, we see how Senegalese men and women shaped that debate, mobilizing their own ideas about citizenship to seek political rights, legal protections, religious autonomy, and economic and educational opportunities. I argue that as they made claims on the French state, they also raised questions about the compatibility of French citizenship and Muslim law and called attention to the contradictions underpinning the French imperial project.