Infinite latinité: French imperial discourse between LAfrique latine and America Latina

This essay examines the way the French discourse of Latinité serves as an organizing narrative of racial hierarchization in the national/imperial constructs of LAfrique Latine and América Latina. By tracing the permutations and evolutions of Latin identity across these two contexts, I argue, we can appreciate Latinité as a field of what Shu-Mei Shih calls "racial triangulation," in which racial stratifications inhere in response to a panoply of markers both within and beyond national contexts. In this sense Latinité productively alters frameworks for the study of race, nation, and imperialism according to national and linguistic divisions.