Undesirable - by Jennifer Anne Boittin (Paperback)

About the Book

"Examining little-known policing archives in France, Senegal, and Cambodia, Jennifer Boittin unearths the stories of hundreds of women labeled "undesirable" by the French imperial police in the early twentieth century. These undesirables were often women traveling alone, women who were poor or ill, women of color proclaiming their "Frenchness" to move throughout the empire, or women whose intimate lives were deemed unruly. Undesirability often brought alongside it immobility or imposed migration; French officials routinely either denied passage throughout the empire or attempted to relocate women as they saw fit. To refute the label, women wrote impassioned letters to police and ministers throughout France, French West Africa, and French Indochina. Some emphasized their "undesirable" qualities to suggest that they needed the care and protection of the state to support their movements. Others used the empire's own laws around Frenchness and mobility to challenge state interference, illustrating their independence. Tacking between advocacy and supplication, these women summoned intimate details to move beyond, contest, or confound surveillance efforts and the intrusions of imperial policing, bringing to life a practice that Boittin terms "passionate mobility." In considering how ordinary European, Southeast Asian, and West African women pursued autonomy, security, companionship, or simply a better existence in the face of police surveillance and control, Undesirable illuminates pressing contemporary issues of migration and violence"--

Book Synopsis

Archival research into policing and surveillance of migrant women illuminates pressing contemporary issues.

Examining little-known policing archives in France, Senegal, and Cambodia, Jennifer Anne Boittin unearths the stories of hundreds of women labeled "undesirable" by the French colonial police and society in the early twentieth century. These "undesirables" were often women traveling alone, women who were poor or ill, women of color, or women whose intimate lives were deemed unruly. To refute the label and be able to move freely, they spoke out or wrote impassioned letters: some emphasized their "undesirable" qualities to suggest that they needed the care and protection of the state to support their movements, while others used the empire's own laws around Frenchness and mobility to challenge state or societal interference. Tacking between advocacy and supplication, these women summoned intimate details to move beyond, contest, or confound surveillance efforts, bringing to life a practice that Boittin terms "passionate mobility." In considering how ordinary women pursued autonomy, security, companionship, or simply a better existence in the face of surveillance and control, Undesirable illuminates pressing contemporary issues of migration and violence.

Review Quotes

"This is a book that is both about telling stories and that itself tells many stories. It seems as if an accurate review should, itself, engage in an act of storytelling to fully convey the essence of Jennifer Anne Boittin's remarkable and, in many ways, unsummarizable Undesirable. Doing so, however, would require too many stories and more space than even H-France Review allows."--Hannah Frydman "H-France Review"

"Undesirable is a breakthrough study of women's determined pursuit of mobility across France's twentieth-century empire. Boittin uncovers in rich detail the many strategies that individual women from all walks of life used to defy a colonial state determined to keep them 'in their place.' A wonderful achievement."-- "Alice Conklin, The Ohio State University"

"Innovative and engrossing, Undesirable contains cutting-edge scholarship on sex and gender in the French Empire. Boittin provides a vivid and powerful set of images of white and Indigenous women's encounters with the French state, showing how women engaged the colonial bureaucracy, police, and judiciary."-- "Leora Auslander, University of Chicago"

About the Author

Jennifer Anne Boittin is the Frank Porter Graham Professor of Global History at UNC Chapel Hill. She is the author of Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris.