Taboos and Tribunals in the Atlantic World:

African Bodies, Supernatural Authority, and Legal Power in the French Empire

My current research project Taboos and Tribunals in the Atlantic World: African Bodies, Supernatural Authority, and Legal Power in the French Empire focuses on African and diasporic practices of policing bodily behaviors, especially those that evidenced the embodiment of supernatural power, the performance of gendered identities, and the criminalization of certain sexual norms. It examines during the twentieth century the tensions among popularly embraced social opprobrium, spiritually inspired prohibitions of African Traditional Religions (ATR), and formally structured legal mechanisms in the Francophone Atlantic world. While France incorporated Muslim institutions into their colonial governance and legal structures, the colonial administration did not extend the same respect for leaders of ATR or their customary legal authority. Taboos and Tribunals will focus on three pivotal moments: the 1903 establishment of a colonial legal system in French West Africa and its larger repercussions in Afro-descended communities in Guadeloupe and Martinique, the 1937 Guernut Commission’s investigation into “ritual crimes” in French colonies in Africa and the Americas, and the subsequent 1951 inquiry on ATR, religious freedoms, and anticolonial resistance.  It seeks to answer the following questions: How did existing precolonial moral codes influence how groups and individuals in West Africa and its diaspora engaged the French colonial legal system in creative ways that reflected historically situated local embodied mores? On both sides of the Black Atlantic, how did the transformation of certain social taboos and ritual practices into crimes (or not) enhance specific forms of patriarchal authority and undermine others? How did African and African descended women and men accept, police, challenge, and defy these colonial regulations in their daily lives?