Minayo Nasiali
Biography
I received my bachelor’s degree in History from Stanford University in 2003 and began graduate training at the University of Michigan in 2004. I completed my doctoral studies in 2010, specializing in Modern French History and Empire. From 2010-2011, I was a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the UC Berkeley Department of History.
My book, Native to the Republic: Empire, Social Citizenship, and Everyday Life in Marseille since 1945, was published by Cornell University Press in 2016. It shows how local-level debates about belonging and the built environment have shaped a discriminatory system of welfare in Modern France.
My new project builds upon my scholarly interest in Modern European Imperialism, but shifts focus from landscapes to seascapes. Currently titled, Sea Traffic: A Clandestine History of Shipping, Exploitation, and Rebel Sailors Across Empires, this study explores the maritime world of African and Afro-European seafarers in the first half of the twentieth century. Focusing in particular on their trans-imperial mobilities, my research explores how sailors from French and British Africa engaged with and circumvented systems of economic and political coercion.
Publications
Book
- Native to the Republic: Empire, Social Citizenship and Everyday Life in Marseille since 1945. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2016.
Articles
- “A Working Alias: African Seafarers and Fungible Identities across European Empires in the Twentieth Century,” International Journal of Maritime History 36, No. 1 (February 2024): 91-106.
- “An Inconvenient Expertise: French Colonial Sailors and Technological Knowledge in the Union Française,” French Politics, Culture, & Society 37, No. 1 (Spring 2019): 117-138.
- “Trouble on the Docks: Strikes, Scabs and the Colonial Question in Marseille’s Port Neighborhoods,” Special Issue, Sex and the Colonial City, Journal of Urban History 42, Issue 5 (September 2016): 900-918.
- “Citizens, Squatters and Asocials: The Right to Housing and the Politics of Difference in Post-Liberation France,” The American Historical Review 119, Issue 2 (April 2014): 434-459.
- “Ordering the Disorderly Slum: ‘Standardizing’ Quality of Life in Marseille Tenements and Bidonvilles, 1953-1962,”Journal of Urban History 38, Issue 6 (November 2012): 1021 – 1035.
Book Chapter
- “By Land or By Sea: Marins Indigènes and Maritime Economies of Race and Labor,” in Sylvain Pattieu, Emmanuelle Sibeud, and Tyler Stovall (eds.), The Black Populations of France: Histories from Metropole to Colony (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2021): 90-102.
