Mother Ada Wright and the International Campaign to Free the Scottsboro Boys, 1931-1934

L’affaire Galmot: Colonialism on trial in 1931

“…That said, l’affaire Galmot did not excite the same mobilisation against a blatant injustice, in which racialised discourses played their part, as other cases did. The Scottsboro case, which began in March 1931, with the campaign of support for its defendants organised by the international communist movement, is an obvious comparison here, with the French left expertly mobilised and vocal at a Scottsboro meeting held at the Salle Wagram in Paris in June 1932 (Miller, Pennybacker and Rosenhaft, 2001: 403). Moreover, the trial is largely overlooked in recent scholarship, either reduced to Monnerville’s plaidoirie (Wilder, 2005: 170) or subsumed under the story of Monnerville and misdated (Marshall, 2009: 238).…”

Hierarchies of Race and Gender in the French Colonial Empire, 1914-1946

“…10 In this article, we offer a third alternative, and a closer collaboration still: an articlelength co-authorship considering the conceptual and theoretical implications of empire-wide uses and treatments of racial and gendered hierarchies. 11 This alternative grew organically out of our individual research, after we realized during a conference panel that each of our articulations of how race and gender functioned within the French imperial context had so much in common that together they revealed the cohesive dimensions of transnational systems of empire. 12 We see its collaborative nature and focus on human interactions as a feminist project and propose that our approach offers several methodological possibilities.…”