Chapter 1 surveys contested meanings and experiences of multiraciality in French West and Equatorial Africa, with a focus on childhood and citizenship, from the late nineteenth century to the interwar years circa 1930 – years marked by the expansion and consolidation of colonial rule. Two tropes – métis as child and métis as French citizen – influenced how métis and their maternal communities and French society grappled with the meaning of multiraciality. French colonial personnel, missionaries, settlers, jurists, and government officials in metropolitan France debated the meaning of "métis" and their social and legal status, as well as what resources should be provided for their upbringing and education by the French state and Catholic Church. People who described themselves (or children across French Africa) as métis used the term to assert their belonging and rights to French society, despite the colonial state highlighting their difference. In claiming to be French, métis individuals and kin articulated porous conceptions of race, culture, and legal status, even as the French tried to centralize colonial rule around rigid boundaries of race and culture, black and white, citizen and native.

Chapter 3 investigates the French nationality decrees promulgated in 1930 and 1936, which recognized the claims métis people had been making for decades: they were French and entitled to French legal status. These new legal pathways to French citizenship and demarcations of parameters of belonging were tied to concepts of how race and multiracial identity mapped onto French legal status. The decrees codified multiracial people as a specific category in French colonial thought and society, but within the context of how multiracial people themselves claimed multiracial selfhoods. The claims of métis people who petitioned for citizenship deepened the debates about race and racial identity and changed the very idea of Frenchness. The burden of proof on petitioners hinged on questions of paternity and French cultural competency. However, maternal kin and African communities played an essential role in the legal process. Métis obtainment of French citizenship was consequential for hierarchies of status within African societies. At the same time, it both contested and created hierarchies of social and legal status and privilege based on changing racial thought.

This chapter engages with the tensions between periphery and centre that are displayed by all forms of world crime fiction but that are especially telling in crime fiction in French. The notion of ‘French crime fiction’ is analysed, including the tensions inherent in Frenchness itself (the Francophone debate) and those between literature and genre fiction. Case studies include the nouveau roman, especially Michel Butor’s Passing Time, which stages the rules of crime fiction while simultaneously mapping them overseas; the nexus formed by Albert Camus’ The Outsider and Kamal Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation; the territorial and literary double spaces of Didier Daeninckx’s Murder in Memoriam; and questions of decapitation in Georges Simenon’s Maigret and the Headless Corpse and Marguerite Duras’s L’Amante anglaise. Additionally, the relationship between France, the Caribbean and Québec is traced in the genre-bending works of Maryse Condé, Patrick Chamoiseau, Fred Vargas and Anne Hébert. Through these texts, their points of intersection and their generic and geographical movements, crime fiction in French will be shown to exemplify the mobilities of world crime fiction.