Another Kind of Black *

In anthropological and literary terms, métis(se) and métissage are generally associated with France, French-speaking Canada and certain Francophone countries such as Senegal. However, as a cultural discourse it has antecedents within colonial histories with distinctively diverse demographic and nationalistic terrains. Ann L. Stoler asserts that:

Although conventional historiography defines sharp contrasts between French, British and Dutch colonial racial policy and the particular national metropolitan agendas from which they derived, what is more striking is that similar discourses were mapped onto vastly different social and political landscapes. ¹