Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the material and social practices Senegalese soldiers deployed to make barracks or trenches feel like home during World War I. Soldiers used these practices to reinforce or renegotiate their personal relationships in Senegal and their political positions within the French Empire.

Paper long abstract:

This paper argues that inhabiting military barracks and trenches led Senegalese soldiers, and their French military superiors, to renegotiate the relationship between displacement, home, and colonial political categories. World War I transformed official and popular understandings about who belonged where in the French Empire. In the unprecedented migration between West Africa and France that occurred during the war soldiers, relatives, and French officials sought to manage or take advantage of the displacement fostered by wartime recruitment. Mobilizing thousands of soldiers across Senegal and placing them into government-managed spaces made the material and moral well-being of Senegalese individuals a state priority in a way it had never been before. While many suffered immeasurably due to the coerced separation from their families and the violence of military life, some tried to use opportunities provided by military mobility to redefine their social and political positions within colonial society. Specifically, this paper examines how material practices were key to the way soldiers, their families, and French officials understood the new political and social relationships military migration produced. In barracks and trenches, the way soldiers wrote letters, cooked meals, slept on beds, wore clothes, or created prayer spaces fostered new homemaking strategies that changed notions of what material and affective well-being meant for these Senegalese soldiers, and who was responsible for supporting that well-being. These negotiations made managing displacement key to reinforcing or challenging the divisions and hierarchies of colonial society in both France and Senegal.