When the metropolitan-based, anti-imperialist organization known as the Comité de défense de la race nègre (Committee for the Defense of the Negro Race, hereafter CDRN) shifted from African to Afro-Caribbean leadership in 1927, it also changed its title to the Comité de défense de la race noire. Replacing nègre with noir made an explicit political statement. Although black intellectuals did not begin formulating the cultural and political declaration of black pride known as Negritude until 1935, anti-imperialist and nationalist members of the African diaspora-predominantly workers-had previously announced their desire to reclaim the word nègre. 2 In a 1927 article in La Voix des nègres, a short-lived organ of the CDRN presided over by a Senegalese antiimperialist leader and former tirailleur named Lamine Senghor, the CDRN explained that there existed levels of racial categorization. 3 These included noir and nègre, classifications created by those in power (Europeans) to divide blacks among themselves, encouraging some groups to believe that they were superior to others. The editors encouraged all those oppressed because of their pigmentation to unite under the banner of the term nègre, stating: "the youth of the CDRN make it their duty to pick this word up out of the mud through which you're dragging it, in order to make it a symbol." 4 What did it mean to be black in the French working-class circles of the interwar years? French fascination with otherness, resulting in popular cultural phenomena such as negrophilia, allowed black performers to find work during these years, but there were also self-definitions of race that revealed agency amid the black colonial community. 5 Race was used in multiple ways by the colonial subjects and citizens who lived and worked in the metropole. Their understanding of race helped them to explain their perceptions of, and rela-

In a 1935 issue of the feminist newspaper La Française, Huguette Champy complained that 'the French woman living in the colonies sometimes has what one calls "bad press"; she is too readily criticised for her taste for pleasures, and for her easy-looking life'. 1 The multiple meanings associated with 'pleasure' -including its sensual as well as its bon vivant dimensions -were intentional, for overseas territories had a powerful hold upon the French imagination. Popular culture and the press played upon established preconceptions when they sensationalised colonised women from all over the empire, but the full extent of colonialism's seductive embrace is exposed by the manner in which French women who inhabited overseas spaces were folded into the exotic mould alongside their colonised sisters. 2 Thus, whereas metropolitans presumed that life away from mainland France was a decadent and indolent one, French women who settled there insisted that their life was an exhausting but vital service to the nation. 3 During the interwar years, exotic was a multidimensional term. 4 It denoted adventure, travel and danger but also contained distinctly sexual and sensual dimensions. Through all its variations, however, exoticism was often linked with both colonised and colonising women. When applied to the southern shores of the Mediterranean, it was associated with two strongholds of European fantasies: the harem and the veil. 5 These tropes, and hence presumptions regarding Arab and Berber women, crept not only into colonial novels but also to the forefront of French feminists' concerns with respect to the role they could play overseas. 6 The imaginary and real-life experience of colonialism collided for French women who lived in, or travelled to, predominantly Muslim territories under French control in North Africa, including the French départements in Algeria and the protectorates of Morocco and Tunisia. In turn, journalists and novelists among them helped to mediate the North African colonial setting through the printed word for female metropolitan audiences. This article investigates how French women who were associated with the Union Française pour le Suffrage des Femmes (French Union for Women's Suffrage, UFSF), or its newspaper, La Française, came to terms with their North African counterparts in three different media: newspaper articles, novels and correspondence. The degree to which these means of communication were public, the ends for which they were intended and the extent to which the women using them were primarily based

In recent years scholars of France have devoted a great deal of time and effort to the study of what has been called French universalism, the idea that the nation's republican tradition, and to an important extent French culture in general, centers on certain values held to be applicable to all peoples. Explorations of this issue have emphasized not only the essential contours of this ideology but also its contradictions.1 How can adherence to a certain set of values simultaneously define both a specific national identity and the common experience of humanity? Among other things, Frenchness is a culturally expressed sense of belonging to a political state. Yet what does one make of those individuals and communities who live in France, even possess French citizenship, and yet are not regularly included in the concept of civilization-defined through education, language, culture, and morals-that normalizes acceptance?2 Moreover, if one focuses on ideas generated during a particular period (for France, especially the Enlightenment and the Revolution), do those values change over time, and how do concepts of national identity reflect those changes? Ultimately, what does it mean to be French, and to what extent does republican universalism exemplify or reify the essence of the nation? Feminist and postcolonial theories have posed fundamental challenges to the idea of France as one and unified. The two approaches, while certainly not the same, have much in common. Both antislavery and feminism have a heritage that reaches back at least to the eigh

Pendant l'entre-deux-guerres, Paris a vu s'épanouir une culture noire sous des formes diverses: musique, danse et arts plastiques. La «négrophilie» qui en résulta coexistait pendant ces années folles avec le développement par des étudiants et ouvriers noirs d'un discours anti-impérialiste. Affichant leur mécontentement par le biais de journaux clamant l'indépendance ou l'assimilation, ces individus préparaient la Négritude et plus tard la décolonisation. Quelques femmes se faisaient entendre dans un journal en particulier, qui cherchait à limiter les méfaits du colonialisme en prônant l'assimilation et la réforme. La série SLOTFOM du Centre des archives d'outre-mer nous permettra de découvrir qu'avec leurs consoeurs françaises de La Dépêche Africaine, les sœurs martiniquaises Jane et Paulette Nardal ont su prôner les thèmes de l'interpénétration des races, des sexes et des classes à Paris. Ces femmes ont découvert l'avantage que leur donnait leur sexe dans les tentatives de communication entre métropolitains et coloniaux. Non seulement ont-elles trouvé un moyen de s'exprimer avec leurs journaux, mais encore ont-elles su entraîner d'autres, blancs ou noirs, ouvriers ou révolutionnaires, à les imiter.

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