Louise Bourgeois Essay Prize

Haby Ka is a first-year PhD student in French Studies, focusing on the politics of representation, freedom, and subjectivity in francophone Africa. She currently works as a Research Assistant under the supervision of Dr Richard Roberts for the Senegal Liberation Project at CESTA. Prior to Stanford, Haby completed a BASc in Political Philosophy at Quest University, where she wrote her dissertation on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.  This work was awarded the honours thesis distinction for academic excellence. Haby then received a master’s in Political Thought & Intellectual History from the University of Cambridge with a dissertation examining Frantz Fanon’s writings on freedom and female agency in colonial Martinique and Algeria. This summer, Haby will conduct archival work on gender representation and print cultures in post-independent Senegal, through a research fellowship awarded by the Stanford Center for African Studies. Haby’s paper “The Citizenship Question in Colonial Algeria and the Cremieux Decree of 1870” explores France’s assimilationist project through a focus on Jewish and Muslim actors, countering a long historiographic tradition of placing these two groups in comparative perspective. As Haby shows, discussions of citizenship must be seen in their broader historical and political contexts.  Debates about French citizenship were less about religion and assimilation, she argues, than about colonial stability and security.