Policing black anti-colonial activism in interwar France : the surveillance of Lamine Senghor in Frejus, Marseille and Bordeaux

Murphy, David; Arens, Sarah and Frith, Nicola and Lewis, Jonathan and Vince, Rebekah, eds. (2024) Policing black anti-colonial activism in interwar France : the surveillance of Lamine Senghor in Frejus, Marseille and Bordeaux. In: Colonial Continuities and Decoloniality in the French-Speaking World. Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, pp. 255-277. ISBN 9781802078862

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Abstract

In her final, unfinished project, Professor Kate Marsh embarked on an ambitious study, ‘Policing French Colonial Metropolises, 1918–62’, which set out to examine ‘how the police and municipal authorities responded to colonial others in [the] transatlantic port cities [of Le Havre, Bordeaux and Nantes] between 1918 […] and 1962’.1 This study of the colonial provinces of France spawned a number of compelling articles in which Kate had begun to explore the lives of colonial migrants, primarily in Le Havre, their surveillance by the various forces of the colonial state apparatus, as well as more generally exploring the interaction between the French provinces and the empire (see Marsh, 2015; 2017; 2018; 2019; 2020). Of course, Marsh was not alone in exploring the surveillance of colonial subjects, and her work was in constant dialogue with that of scholars such as Simon Kitson (2014), Daniel Brückenhaus (2017) and Kathleen Keller (2018); while her final, posthumously published book chapter emphasized the need to examine the specific provincial/regional histories of colonial encounter in a book co-edited by Lydie Moudileno who had done so much to promote the study of the ‘postcolonial provinces’ (2012).

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