U. professor receives American Historical Association book award

Emily Marker, an associate professor in the Department of History at Rutgers—Camden, recently earned the George Louis Beer Prize for her book "Black France, White Europe: Youth, Race, and Belonging in the Postwar Era," according to a press release.

The American Historical Association presents the award annually to recognize quality literary works about European international history from 1895 onward.

Marker said her work analyzes French imperial conquests in West Africa and France's recovery as a central force in Europe following World War II.

"That was the question for me. How did France go about negotiating or navigating ... its (conflicting) European and colonial culture," she said.

Marker said she found overlaps between these contrasting visions among French and African youth and their education systems. She said she noticed shared cultural, social and political interests between youth in France and youth in French Africa.

The educational systems taught an image of a white and Christian Europe, while a concurrent perspective of a "raceless" and secular Europe was also rising at the time, she said. Both of these views for a postwar Europe alienated a predominantly Black and Muslim French Africa, she added.

"The way that European integration was imagined in this early period was as a sort of cultural identity project," Marker said.

To reach this conclusion, Marker studied curricula, academic policies, youth group documentation and students' written works from French and European Union archives in France, Belgium, West Africa and Italy, she said. Marker said she focused on high school, university and postgraduate-aged individuals ranging from 15 to 30 years old between 1940 to 1960.

Today, the ideas developed to criticize anti-racism in the 1940s and 1950s continue to impact European politics, she said. Additionally, racial and religious ideals at the time informed the relationship between race and religion in modern France and Europe. She said people are more aware of these parallels due to the rise of far-Right populist groups in Europe.

"When most people think about Africana studies, they think about the Americas. And so, I think changing the geography of how we think about global Black experience (is) to recenter Europe as a key place where Black people live," she said.

Marker said she hopes Rutgers students know that Black European studies are a dynamic, important field, noting an insufficient academic focus on the discipline at the Camden campus.

"I would say that the arguments for this book, for my book, were really developed dialogically in conversation with a wide network of colleagues in French history, in European history, in African history, in Black studies, in other disciplines, and it does actually take a village to write a book," she said.