2025 Theses Doctoral

Looking for Love: Marriage and “Out-Marriage” Between France and West Africa, 1939-1985

Colpa, Luz

Who we love, who we marry, and how we understand the emotions and connections that make up these experiences, is central to how we define ourselves, and our community belonging. This dissertation looks at ‘out-marriages’, or marriages outside one's national, ethnic or religious community, exploring how social and political difference was defined in France and Senegal from 1939 to 1985.

Using a combination of archival research, French sociology, ethnography, and literature, I explore the relationship between understandings of monogamous romantic love, the regulation of marriages between France and West Africa, and the policing of citizenship. I find that love and emotional ties were not separate from colonial governance but were instead central to the construction of race and social order in France’s empire.

Finally, I argue that the legal links between emotion, marriage practice and citizenship constructed in the late-colonial period were hardened in the postcolonial period, become part of the underlying logic around the policing of out-marriages after the global oil shocks of the 1970s.