Seven women stand at the center of Joseph-Gabriel's account of mid-twentieth-century decolonization, figures whose contributions later analysis has tended to shrink or miss altogether. Some were wounded by German torpedoes, some held in concentration camps, some declared enemies of the Vichy state.

Working from archives in France, Haiti, Martinique, and the United States, Joseph-Gabriel places these women at the heart of anticolonial movements and argues that they formulated a decolonial citizenship — more capacious than what was on offer precisely because it answered the intersecting oppressions they met in the French empire.

Citizenship in their hands became a way of claiming attachment to several political and cultural worlds at once: France, Africa, the Caribbean, the diaspora, the global South. Joseph-Gabriel reads this as pushing the idea past the boundaries of both nation-state and empire, toward Pan-African, Pan-Caribbean, and global South identities grounded in a feminist practice of anticolonial resistance.