For Lise Schreier, Ph.D., there is much to be learned from an especially heinous practice that thrived in Europe from the mid-15th century to the early 19th century: child-gifting, the act of bringing dark-skinned children from Ghana, Senegal, and India to Europe, and offering them as presents to high society women.

In “Toying with Blackness,” a talk she presented on Jan. 19 at Fordham Law’s Center on Race, Law & Justice, Schreier, an associate professor of French, shared some of the research that she’s been conducting as part of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant toward publication of a book, Playthings of Empire: Child-Gifting and the Politics of French Femininity.

In the story, a black girl named Raïssa is “rescued” from a black abuser and given to a white French girl named Mady. Raïssa is portrayed as grateful for being rescued from her abuser, and Mady is thrilled to have a new “toy.”

“But the story doesn’t end here, because as you know, there is no such thing as a free gift. In exchange for her new plaything, the French girl is expected to behave in very specific ways. More to the point, the black ‘toy’ is what turns her into a proper, obedient French citizen,” Schreier said.

One of the things Schreier finds interesting here is the fact that Mady was not the only little girl to get a gift. Her young readers also got a gift: the magazine itself.

“We all know how it works: if you behave, you get a toy. If you don’t, no present for you. It’s important to realize that the story of the black child being gifted to the white child was itself a present to good little French girls.”

One baffling aspect of Blanche et Noire was that it was ostensibly set in the 1920s, even though slavery was abolished in France by then, said Schreier. And Saint-Domingue, where Raïssa was supposed to come from, had become independent and was already renamed Haiti by then. Schreier said this deliberate amnesia about the past is further proof that blacks’ lives didn’t really matter in France—even in the early 20th century.

“The idea that you can have a fictional character [in the 1920s]and decide that she’s a slave, and then have another character buy her and offer her as a toy, is depicted as completely normal,” she said.

“Add the fact that the black character is not only an object but is also ahistorical. That tells us a lot about the ways in which blacks were objectified at various levels and for a very specific purpose, which is educating French girls.”

Little of this history is known in the United States, Schreier said. The conversation among attendees following her Jan. 19 presentation therefore focused on the different ways in which slavery was practiced on the two continents. As such, the images from Lisette are often unsettling to American audiences.

“When you talk about children’s literature—which is connected with tenderness, presents, family, and domesticity—you don’t necessarily think about racial subjection.

“And yet these are very powerful hidden mechanisms,” she said, “so it’s even more important to understand them.”

WHO GAVE IT: The New York State Department of Health
WHO GOT IT: Edward Dubrovsky, PhD, professor of biology
HOW MUCH: $77,005
WHAT FOR: A grant to explore the role of mutations in a gene called ELAC2 in prostate cancer

Orthodox Christian Studies

WHO GAVE IT: The Carpenter Foundation combined with a Fordham Faculty Fellowship
WHO GOT IT: George Demacopoulos, PhD, the Fr. John Meyendorff & Patterson Family Chair of Orthodox Christian Studies
HOW MUCH: $30,000
WHAT FOR: A yearlong sabbatical for his project, “Colonizing Christianity: Prejudice and Sex in the Crusader East”

Art History

WHO GAVE IT: National Endowment for the Humanities
WHO GOT IT: Nina Rowe, PhD, associate professor of art history
HOW MUCH: $50,400
WHAT FOR: To complete a book on late medieval illuminated World Chronicle manuscripts

Arts and Sciences

WHO GAVE IT: Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities
WHO GOT IT: Eva Badowska, PhD, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and doctoral candidate in philosophy Joseph Vukov
HOW MUCH: $2,000
WHAT FOR: A grant to study how Fordham graduate students perceive their education in the context of the University’s mission

Graduate School of Education

WHO GAVE IT:  Marie Noelle Chynn, GSS ’60 and Kuo York Chynn, M.D
WHO GOT IT: Graduate School of Education
HOW MUCH: $104,000
WHAT FOR: Dr. J.T. Vincent Lou Memorial Endowed Fellowship

Irish Studies

WHO GAVE IT:  Mary Brautigam, TMC ’74, and Richard Brautigam, FCRH ’73
WHO GOT IT: Irish Studies
HOW MUCH: $6,000
WHAT FOR: Four Irish Cultural Events in the Spring of 2016

Engineers Without Borders

WHO GAVE IT:  Mary Jane McCartney, TMC’ 68 and George McCartney, FCRH ’68, LAW ’72
WHO GOT IT: Engineers Without Borders
HOW MUCH: $13,000 challenge grant
WHAT FOR: A challenge grant that raised $27,000 to support EWB’s trip to Uganda to build fish farms

Physics

WHO GAVE IT:  Christa and John Reddy, FCRH ’77
WHO GOT IT: Department of Physics and Engineering Physics
HOW MUCH: $10,000
WHAT FOR: Supplies for Experiments

Other major grant-winners last year included:

• Yilu Zhou, PhD, professor of information sciences, who received a National Science Foundation grant to research age recommendations on mobile apps;
• Winnie Kung, PhD, associate professor of social work, who received a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study the impact among Asian survivors and rescuers exposed to the World Trade Center attack; and
• Lise Schreier, PhD, associate professor of French, who won a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for her research on the 18th-century practice of “child-gifting.”

The grant will allow Lise Schreier, PhD, an associate professor of French, to devote the 2016-17 academic year to completing research on her forthcoming book, The Playthings of Empire: Child-Gifting and the Politics of French Femininity.

“A grant such as this is significant for the Department of Modern Languages and Literature because it makes us visible as strong researchers,” said Schreier, whose specializations include 19th-century French literature, French colonialism, and race and racism.

“We are a research-oriented department with a variety of courses. Teaching language is a pathway to understanding various cultures.”

Schreier, a native of Saint-Étienne, France, is studying the 18th-century phenomenon of child-gifting, the practice of purchasing or kidnapping dark-skinned children in Senegal, Algeria, India, and the Ottoman Empire as travel souvenirs and fashion accessories for upper-class French women.

Archival material about child-gifting is scant, and few scholars have undertaken research on the practice. Schreier’s own investigation has required some creative thinking as she shifted from letters to literature to artwork searching for clues of these children’s existence.

Some evidence came from mentions of the children in letters between wealthy French women. “Other information comes up in places like letters to tailors, which shows how these children were dressed, where they lived in the castles, how much money was spent on them,” she said.

Schreier is also interested in later references to child-gifting that appear in books assigned to French schoolchildren, which often involved a young character who was given a dark-skinned child as a gift. She argues that even after the abolition of slavery in France, when the actual practice of child-gifting ended, these stories served to inculcate colonial ideals in young French citizens.

The message of the books, Schreier said, was that “the French had to raise their children in such a way as to make them good, strong colonial citizens. This started in schools—particularly with girls, who were used to reading books about dolls, reading how to interact with a doll, raise a doll, educate a doll.

“These young readers, already used to being responsible for a doll, would be given a book in which an African boy was gifted to a French child in place of a doll. The inference they were expected to make was that it was normal to take care of a black child, just like a doll. When they’re older, it was hoped, they’d already be used to thinking of colonial subjects as their responsibility.”

This also points to the significant role that women played in advancing French colonialism, Schreier contends.

“From paintings of Old Regime noblewomen adorned with flattering attestations to their wealth, to 1870s moralistic novels featuring women advancing the Third Republic’s ‘civilizing mission’ with the loyal help of their dark-skinned charges, the child-gift motif articulated evolving models of femininity in a trans-national France,” she wrote in the grant narrative.

The NEH is an independent federal agency created as a result of the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965. Of the more than 1,200 applications each year, less than 7 percent of applicants receive one of the coveted grants.

The population of France is 60 million. The world population of French speakers, on the other hand, is roughly 260 million. So when studying the history of the French language, it behooves one to spread a net much wider than France itself.

Lise Schreier, Ph.D., associate professor of French, knows this well. Schreier’s research into the history of colonialism focuses on France, but also on Haiti, a country that financially supported a third of France’s population before it won its independence in 1804. The complex ties between the two countries are not widely understood, she said.

“This relationship was not taught in France, and it was not taught in the States, and I realized there was this huge part of French studies that is still being erased,” she said. “Once I realized this, it helped me to understand what I had to do next.”

Schreier believes that integral to the study of a nation’s language is the nation’s history as well. Her compass for what direction to take her research is the classroom, and, in the case of Haiti, the result was “Francophone Caribbean Literature,” a class she developed and taught last year in response to the 2010 earthquake.

“Whatever I do, I also want to use and discuss in class,” said Schreier. “It is important to not limit ourselves to a pretty image of France, and sometimes that’s what students arrive with.

“Of course it’s really interesting to study French, but there’s also a very complex history that they need to be aware of.”

Her current research, for a book tentatively titled The Playthings of Empire: Exoticized Children and the Politics of French Femininity, 1780-1895, explores one of the ugliest aspects of French history: The custom of offering African children as travel souvenirs to French women.

It was a practice that started in the 15th and 16th centuries and became much more common in the 17th century. By the 19th century, it had ended, but it lived on as fiction, with an important twist. In 1879, required reading in many French schools described how African children were offered up as gifts to French children, not grown women. The idea was that, to become fully realized adults, the children needed a “toy” to practice with.

“This practice was real before the ‘glorious days’ of French colonialism, and then it disappeared,” said Schreier. “But then it came back as a fictional narrative in schools. So tens of thousands and of French children read these books and were taught that what they should do is teach African children to become ‘civilized.’ Even when they became adults, several generations of French people considered all Africans as children.”

Finding examples of the texts that detail both the original practice, and the later fictionalized one, required a great deal of detective work. In addition to archives, she found source material at flea markets and in the attics of private homes. (“You might find one line in one letter, saying ‘Yes, I have one of those children,’” she said.)

Schreier actually discovered one image for the book after she was done with her research. The painting, of a woman with a dark-skinned child, was hanging in a castle two hours outside of Paris that she was visiting while on vacation.

“It gave me an entirely new direction because I knew that this woman had had one of these children, and I could look at her correspondence, and continue building my list,” she said.

This project follows her first book, Seul dans l’Orient lointain. Les voyages de Nerval et Du Camp, (Pub. de l’Université de St. Etienne, 2006), which, in English, translates as Alone in the Orient (Nerval and Du Camp’s travels). In that tome, she explored a curious 19th century phenomenon: Most French authors at the time traveled to places like Egypt, Lebanon and Syria, and although they were most often accompanied by others, they systematically claimed to have traveled alone.

The writer Lamartine was a good example. While he claims in his writings to have bravely traveled alone to Jerusalem, his cook was writing letters back home about how Lamartine was seasick, tyrannical with his entourage, and generally making life difficult for his retinue of helpers. Lamartine’s wife and only child also accompanied him on the trip (the couple’s child died during the journey, a catastrophe not mentioned in the travelogue).

Schreier surmises that, at that time, the Middle East and Africa were viewed as spaces where young French artists could come of age, but for that to manifest itself, the artists had to be on their own.

Once again, research took Schreier to unexpected places, because much of her sourcing relied on private papers.

“That book was one of those cases where you literally have to go to the head librarian, knowing what type of wine she likes, and then go to her house and put the bottle on her table. You see the piles of letters on her desk, and you know that you have to talk your way through, to get your chance to see them. That takes a lot of convincing,” she said.

What kind of wine did the librarian like?

“It was a very good Bordeaux. I spent a lot of money on that, but it worked,” she said.