Entangled Postcolonial Futures: Malagasy Marriage Migrants and Provincial Frenchmen
Entangled Postcolonial Futures: Malagasy Marriage Migrants and Provincial Frenchmen
This chapter examines the complex chain of social and historical practices by which Malagasy women fashion a future in France enabled by French family reunification laws. In particular, I focus on Malagasy women who seek to raise themselves out of poverty by marrying working-class and rural French men as a means to obtain French nationality and relative prosperity. Drawing upon ethnographic work in both Madagascar and southwestern France, I analyze how Malagasy women seek to build new futures through a combination of intermarriage, domestic labor in the family business, and, increasingly, as service workers who care for France’s aging population. I argue that even as they “whiten” their offspring by bearing métis children, and despite their contributions to hard-to-fill niches in French society and economic life, they also contribute to a new racialized class formation that traps them at the bottom of the French economic ladder.
Keywords: Madagascar, migration, marriage, domestic labor, racialization
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