Desiring Whiteness: A Book Talk with Professor Caroline Séquin

Please join us for a book talk with Professor Caroline Séquin on her recently published book, Desiring Whiteness: A Racial History of Prostitution in France and Colonial Senegal, 1848-1950 (Cornell University Press, 2024) with Professor Jeremy Zallen as discussant. Refreshments will be served.

Desiring Whiteness uncovers the intertwined histories of commercial sex and racial politics in France and the French Empire in the century following the abolition of slavery. The absence of laws banning interracial marriages in republican France has served to reinforce two myths about modern France—first, as a sexual democracy and second, as a color-blind nation where all French citizens can freely marry whomever they wish regardless of their race. Caroline Séquin challenges this narrative of French exceptionalism by revealing the role of prostitution regulation in policing intimate relationships across racial and colonial boundaries and contributing to the making of white French national identity in an imperial nation-state that claimed to be race-blind. 

Caroline Séquin is Assistant Professor of Modern European History at Lafayette College. She is a social and political historian who researches on gender, sexuality, race, and migration in France and the French Empire.