Any scholar of modern France would be hard-pressed to read this book and not find some element that casts a new light on their own historical investigations. Questions of who belongs, and, perhaps more critically, who is allowed to create or challenge a shared understanding of "Europe" are at the core of historical scholarship about this imagined community. I can't think of a better book to help my students to start unraveling these threads.
~Tocqueville 21
Black France, White Europe is a stimulating, well-written, and careful study, as well as a highly recommended work for readers interested in French, colonial, European, and youth history. Refreshing a dialogue between such diverse fields is in itself a much welcomed and impressive accomplishment.
~H-Soz-Kult
Emily Marker offers fascinating insight into the culturalization of Christianity in the postwar conjecture. Thanks to an impressive array of primary sources, Black France, White Europe powerfully reminds us that we should not take for granted how the incompatibility of a Franco-African polity and a united Europe became naturalized in the postwar period, a moment of supposed global renunciation of religious intolerance and racism.
~Journal of Social History
In Black France, White Europe, Marker examines identity and belonging in postwar France within the contexts of decolonization, European integration, and the early Cold War. Embracing transnational, colonial, European, and national frameworks, she navigates a complex set of influences and asserts that the European identity that emerged during this time was racial and religious in nature.
~Choice
Black France, White Europe deftly weaves together the histories of French post-war reconstruction, West and Central African decolonization, and European integration in the 1940s and 50s. The richness of Marker's account which is warmly recommended to anyone interested in African and European post-war history – and especially to those who seek to connect both, as Marker so skillfully does.
~Francia-Recensio
Emily Marker's impressive and wide-ranging monograph uses the prism of educational reform, and more generally the construction of postwar elites, as her means of exploring the complexities of this process. In doing so, Marker succeeds in making a significant contribution to the record of both colonial and European history, with implications that stretch well beyond the particular case of France.
~H-France
In Black France, White Europe, Emily Marker describes the period in the immediate aftermath of WWII where the struggle for European integration and against decolonization converged. She argues that rather than being discreet processes as some historians have sug- gested they were inextricably linked.
~Anthropos
As Europe was attempting to come to terms with itself in the decades following the Second World War, it was also coming to grips with the weakening and eventual collapse of European empires across the globe. Emily Marker's Black France, White Europe is an important step in understanding how these two colliding concepts occupied the same communal space during this vastly transformative period in world history. The questions Marker examines in this impressive volume are just as important now as they were at the end of World War II.
~H-Africa
This book is a formidable source of information on this rich period of history for France, as it prepared to integrate Europe with her colonies while struggling with racism, religious pluralism, and national renewa
~Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth
Emily Marker's Black France, White Europe is an important step in understanding how these two colliding concepts occupied the same communal space during this vastly transformative period in world history.
~H-Net
