Listening for ‘Undesirables’ and Other Archival Voices

A workshop with Dr. Jennifer Boittin, Professor of Global History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Jennifer Boittin is the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global History at UNC. She received her PhD in History from Yale University and was previously a professor at Penn State University. Her research and teaching look at how colonial spaces in West Africa, Southeast Asia, North Africa, and the French Caribbean were shaped by intersections between class, politics, and urban culture around the world wars and decolonization. Completed in part thanks to a Paris Institute for Advanced Studies fellowship, her second book is entitled Undesirable: Passionate Mobility and Women’s Defiance of French Colonial Policing, 1919-1952 (2022, University of Chicago Press). Undesirable tells the virtually unknown history of hundreds of women in Southeast Asia (French Indochina) and West Africa (AOF) tracked by authorities because they were traveling alone and claiming Frenchness. Drawn from Cambodian, French, and Senegalese archives, Undesirable’s focus on how ordinary people react to being policed gives historical depth to pressing contemporary issues of migration and violence in France today and of similar reckonings on a global scale.