Minayo Nasiali

Minayo Nasiali

Minayo Nasiali

Associate Professor

Email: mnasiali@history.ucla.edu

Office: 5274 Bunche Hall

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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.

 

Field of Study

Modern Europe

Subfield

Imperialism, Racial Capitalism, Migration

Publications

Book

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.