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Although cities were not new to Africa and the Americas, slave trading and imperialism produced a particular phenomenon: the modern colonial city. These new sites were supposed to broadcast the power and interests of colonial states and societies. Yet, Africans and people of African descent left indelible marks on modern urban life. Research has demonstrated that cities, even in the metropole, were transformed by enslaved women and men, immigrants, refugees, and laborers. These articles discuss the ways women and men shaped cities as property-owners, litigants, activists, and intellectuals and engaged broader questions of identity, belonging, and citizenship. People circulating through the Atlantic world also inhabited cities as gendered, sexual, and affective beings who actively conceptualized ideas about pleasure, morality, respectability, and desire. These articles on New Orleans, Louisiana; East London, South Africa; Marseille, France; and Dakar, Senegal reveal unique approaches that integrate gender and urban studies in an Atlantic world context that considers connections between Africa, the Americas, and Europe. This introduction discusses the shared themes and contributions to the scholarship the authors make while pointing to potential new directions in research.

Soon after Marc Kojo Tovalou Houénou hurried from his tour of the United States to the French West African colony of Dahomey in 1925 to be at his dying father's side, the French governor there launched an inquiry to find out whether Houénou was the French citizen he claimed to be. Houénou had been born in Dahomey in 1887, but had spent most of his life studying and residing in France. Alhough he had only returned to Dahomey briefly in 1921, with his father's death in 1925, Houénou wanted to claim what he saw as his rightful position as chef de famille or head of his extended family in Dahomey. With this title, Houénou would have gained administrative control over his father's expansive wealth in land and property in several towns in Dahomey, and would have been the official representative for his family, especially in interactions with the French colonial government. However, Houénou was already emerging as a thorn in the side of French colonial authorities because of a series of critical articles he had written in Paris about French colonialism. Therefore, when Governor Gaston Fourn found that Houénou had, in 1915, obtained his French citizenship rights, literally permission “to enjoy (jouir) the rights of French citizen,” why was the governor relieved?