Microhistories of multiracial families from “a historian who loves too much”
“I am going to tell you two stories today,” said Rachel Jean-Baptiste in her recent faculty research fellows talk at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, "'The Historian Who Loves Too Much': Storytelling and Microhistories of Mothers, Children, and Race in Colonial-Era French West Africa and France." At this event, she shared research on multiracial families in West Africa and France during the 20th century, and her next research project, about her own family’s history in Cap-Haitien, Haiti. Jean-Baptiste is the Michelle Mercer and Bruce Golden Family Professor of Feminist and Gender Studies; she is also faculty director of the feminist, gender, and sexuality studies program as well as professor of history and professor of African and African American studies.
Jean-Baptiste has often observed how studies that privilege intimacy, emotion, and individual experience are treated as “small topics” in histories of West Africa. However, the affective qualities of feelings and emotions manifest themselves in the historical record in meaningful ways, which she shows in her history of the lives of a multi-racial family in French Cameroon and France. In a forth-coming article, she explores the “infrastructure of feeling” and “emotional community” surrounding the lived experiences of the children of Eugene Jamot (1879-1937), a French military doctor known for introducing the mobile injection clinic into Africa to treat disease.
Jamot’s children were “métis,” a word used to identify multi-racial children in Africa, often those who were the progeny of French colonial officials and African women. “Some of these relationships are by sexual violence, some of them are from voluntary long-term relationships,” Jean-Baptiste said. Fatima Ben Labane, the mother of Jamot’s Cameroonian children, stayed in Africa while her children went with their father to Paris. However, Jamot was already married, and according to French laws, children born from adultery were legally “unknown.” This legal status left the children in a difficult position when Jamot passed away, because they had no legal right to inheritance.
Jean-Baptiste discovered information about the children’s lives after their father’s death from the letters of Louis, the eldest son, who sought financial and legal aid from his late father’s friends. It was through his emotional appeals, or pathos in the Aristotelian sense, Jean-Baptiste said, that Louis was able to secure legal gains and access to financial resources for himself and his siblings. She added, “Louis is deliberately calling on this kind of male bourgeois sense of honor and duty, and saying that those qualities erase his racial and legal alterity.”
Jean-Baptiste showed how the emotional community of these children and those who helped them created a sense of a “transnational family.” These connections were also responsible for the archival records and oral accounts that Jean-Baptiste was able to uncover to document this family’s history. Through her tenacious search for further information on the lives of the children and their mother, she came across a phone number in a twenty-year old document that put her in contact with one of Jamot’s granddaughters. According to the granddaughter, Jamot’s Cameroonian family was a “public secret.” Jean-Baptiste also learned that Fatima was a very elite woman, described as the princess of a wealthy trader in Chad. Fatima’s class standing facilitated equal conversations with colonial officials, because they were dependent on her family’s wealth for social and political inroads. Jean-Baptiste also learned that several of the children went back to Africa at some point, developing careers of their own there and reconnecting with their mother.
Jean-Baptiste’s next research project continues to look at the legacies of emotional communities in her hometown of Cap-Haitien in Haiti. She describes this as a “dinner-table ‘me’ story” after the fashion of Michel Rolph-Trouillot, who said, “I grew up in a family where history sat at the dinner table.” The study will be what she calls a microhistory of her own family, with a focus on oral histories and tales across multiple generations. She further seeks to elucidate the importance of Cap-Haitien in Black imaginaries, and how this plays a role in the lives of the people who have lived there.
Beyond this, Jean-Baptiste believes in offering clarity about her experiences of feeling during the research process. “I’m a historian who loves too much,” she said at the beginning of her talk, citing an article by historian Jill Lepore. “I want to talk about how my love of historical actors, my emotional engagement, my passion, and not my dispassion, my subjectivity is actually a lens and a way in which I get at these stories more fully, and to think about microhistory. So I am refusing to scale up, if you will, and talking about things on their own terms.”
Q&A with Rachel Jean-Baptiste
Serena Crosson: In a follow-up conversation, I asked Jean-Baptiste to elaborate on her approaches to emotions and feelings as a historian, and on her next project on her own family’s history.
SC: Your recent work is very interested in intimacy and emotional communities. You defined intimacy in your research talk as, “matters of emotional, bodily, and sexual engagement, and how these factors shape ideas about selfhood, and also peoplehood, so the individual and the collective.” Can you speak a little more on how you define emotional community and what it means for your research?
RJ-B: I believe it was Barbara H. Rosenwein – a medievalist historian – who first used the phrase “emotional community.” It is so common to see topics like politics and economics in big histories, but emotions are such a large part of people and how they act. I want to do the history of emotions because it was people’s emotions that made them do things that were out of step with their times. For example, a father bringing his children to France when he knew they would not be recognized, or these officials who were friends trying to get help. Or the children coming to Cameroon trying to find a connection and not knowing anything about it. So there’s this invisible foundation that is cohering people together through memories, and it connects these unlikely figures so that they act in ways not in keeping with their time.
SC: You outline how emotional connections are a large part of the historical narratives you uncovered. How have you encountered these emotional connections in your role as a historian?
RJ-B: In the end, I do not write only about emotions – it is about the emotional history of rupture, so looking at how relationships fall apart. Part of it is about my own emotions as a methodological tool. I felt this frustration, annoyance, and persistence. I found out so much about the French father, and there was not a trace of the mother. I collected all this material years ago, and then COVID happened and I could not go out to find out about her. But I did not want this mother to disappear, and that kept me being persistent and persistent and persistent. Then I found in the historical record the notes of a record of him just before he died, and in the notes there was a phone number that was twenty years old. I called it. Someone had kept that landline and the granddaughter answered the phone. Suddenly I was able to get details that were not part of the written record.
SC: You described your next research project about your family’s history in Cap-Haitien as a “dinner-table ‘me’ story,” or an autoethnography. Do you prefer one designation to the other, and how will you pursue this research?
RJ-B: Having finished one project on a family history certainly creates the bridge, and it has gotten the wheels spinning on how I want to do this. I do not like the term “autoethnography” so much – it seems to me very exoticized, like animals in a zoo. But I am a person and a historian looking at microhistory to open up bigger conversations. It isn’t fiction. It isn’t critical fabulation. I am still a historian tied to empiricism, and evidence. It may be that oral history is my way of getting at it. There are different ways people retain history, varied forms of the written word, that make up the experience. I really want to get this 360-degree perspective, so I will use multiple source bodies, archives, and newspapers, the full range of historical documents to tell this next story.
