New Books In French Studies

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on his manuscript. Additionally, his book will be Open Access (OA) since the date of publication. We discuss with him how do MOPR and OA work, how he managed to combine both of them and how these initiatives can contribute to the democratization of knowledge. You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/ Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices w

In his 1924 biography of Mahatma Gandhi, writer Romain Rolland embraced the Gandhian philosophy of non-violence and decried the “dictators of Moscow” and the “idolatrous ideology of the Revolution.”  Seven years later, in a startling reversal, Rolland expressed his support for the USSR and confidence in Soviet leaders:  “The builders had to dirty their hands; we have no right to act like we are disgusted.” What accounts for this striking about-face? How did Rolland, and other French leftists, come to celebrate and actively promote the authoritarian regime of Joseph Stalin? In Generation Stalin:  French Writers, the Fatherland, and the Cult of Personality, Dr. Andrew Sobanet examines the intellectual trajectories of Rolland, Henri Barbusse, Paul Eluard, and Louis Aragon, and their role in the rise of Stalinism and the cult of Stalin in France from the 1930s through the 1950s.  His book also sheds light on contemporary global politics with the recent rehabilitation of Stalin’s image in Russi

In The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press 2018), Geraldine Heng collects a remarkable array of medieval approaches to race that show the breadth and depth of the kinds of racial thinking in medieval society. In creating a detailed impression of the medieval race-making that would be reconfigured into the biological racism of the modern era, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages reaches beyond medievalists and race-studies scholars to anyone interested in the long history of race. Throughout the study, Heng treats race-making as a repeating tendency to demarcate human beings through differences that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental. Thus constituted, these categories are then used to guide the differential apportioning of power. Scholars working in critical race studies have clearly demonstrated that culture predisposes notions of race. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages reaffirms that insight by examining the era before

Columbia University press has just released a new translation of a work by philosopher Alexandre Kojève, simply titled Atheism, translated by Professor Jeff Love. Considered to be one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant and unconventional thinkers, Kojève was a Russian émigré to France whose lectures on Hegel in the 1930s galvanized a generation of French intellectuals. Although Kojève wrote a great deal, he published very little in his lifetime, and so the ongoing rediscovery of his work continues to present new challenges to philosophy and political theory. Written in 1931 but left unfinished, Atheism is an erudite and open-ended exploration of profound questions of estrangement, death, suicide, and the infinite that demonstrates the range and the provocative power of Kojève’s thought.Ranging across Heidegger, Buddhism, Christianity, German idealism, Russian literature, and mathematics, Kojève advances a novel argument about freedom and authority. He investigates the possibility that there is not any

What does it mean to do a “microhistory” of a concept? Stefanos Geroulanos pursues just such a project in the 22 chapters of Transparency in Postwar France: A Critical History of the Present (Stanford University Press, 2017). A rich and complex history of France in the decades after 1945, the book is as intellectually packed as it is methodologically adventurous. Organized roughly chronologically from the end of the war to the 1980s, the book follows numerous objects, themes, and paths, coming together as a web of thinkers, metaphors, and values that referred and responded to transparency in distinctive ways in the French context. In France as nowhere else, transparency was a particular type of problem, a notion regarded with deep skepticism, suspicion even, for much of the postwar period.An intellectual history that considers the work of anthropology, political and economic theory, scientific, literary and cinematic texts, Transparency chases the concept well beyond the kinds of philosophical discourses that

We know quite a bit about the physical signatures of urban “modernity” foisted upon Paris by Baron Haussmann in the late nineteenth century — the broad boulevards, networked infrastructures, connected apartment houses, and assorted monuments — but little scholarship has seized on its precursors in the half-century prior. In Ideals of the Body: Architecture, Urbanism, and Hygiene in Postrevolutionary Paris (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), Sun-Young Park turns to another modernity, recovering a daunting array of Romantic and especially post-Napoleonic interventions — less spectacular but arguably more complex — on mobile Parisian bodies and the everyday spaces that host them. Park considers military gymnasia, schools, barracks, leisure gardens, and other spaces purpose-built to inculcate vigor in both individuated physical bodies and, their proponents hoped amid specters of national decline, in the French body politic. Each of these spaces, Park shows, a “threshold” between fully private and fully public

Experiencing a major crisis from different viewpoints, step by step:  the Suez crisis of 1956— one of the major crises of the 1950s offers a potential master class in statecraft and the politics of strategy. It was an explosive Middle East confrontation capped by a surprise move that reshaped the region for many years to come. It was a diplomatic confrontation between the world’s two major colonial powers (France & Britain) and a major third-world country (Egypt), as well as a conflict between the world’s premier Arab country (Egypt) and Israel. A confrontation that riveted the world’s attention. And it was a short but startling war that ended in unexpected ways for every country involved.Six countries, including the two superpowers, had major roles, but each saw the situation differently. From one stage to the next, it could be hard to tell which state was really driving the action. As in any good ensemble, all the actors had pivotal parts to play. Among the world-renown figures involved were Sir An

Charles de Gaulle is one of the greatest figures of twentieth century history. If Sir Winston Churchill was (in the words of Harold Macmillan) the "greatest Englishman In history", then Charles de Gaulle was without a doubt, the greatest Frenchman since Napoleon Bonaparte. Why so? In the early summer of 1940, when France was overrun by German troops, one junior general who had fought in the trenches in Verdun refused to accept defeat. He fled to London, where he took to the radio to address his compatriots back home. “Whatever happens,” he said, “the flame of French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished.” At that moment, Charles de Gaulle entered history. For the rest of the war, de Gaulle insisted he and his Free French movement were the true embodiment of France. Through sheer force of his personality and the grandeur of his vision of France, he inspired French men and women to risk their lives to resist the Nazi occupation. Usually proud and aloof, but almost always confident in

With Paris as the organizing locus of his new book, Du moyen âge à nos jours, expériences et représentations de la folie à Paris [From the Middle Ages to Today, Experiences and Representations of Madness in Paris], Benoît Majerus uses an impressively wide range of visual sources, from religious images and architectural photographs to neuroleptic advertisements and administrative maps. These images are integrated into the text and function not only as illustrations, but also as images with their own story to tell.  Majerus’ narrative arc follows the twists and turns of madness in a city long associated with mental pathogens and their cures and reveals how the history of psychiatry can be told differently through the lens of visual culture.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sometimes a book can take inspiration from a (not so) simple map. At the end of his previous book, Queer French: Globalization, Language, and Sexual Citizenship (Routledge, 2007), Denis Provencher discusses a map of “gay Paris” drawn by Samir, one of his French interlocutors of North African descent. Samir’s queer urban landscape left out most of the Marais, an area typically considered a center of gay life in the French capital. A follow-up to that 2007 study in some ways, Queer Maghrebi French: Language, Temporalities, Transfiliations (Liverpool University Press, 2017) is also much more. This new book explores the biographies, experiences, cultural work, and activisms of men of Maghrebi origin, men who were either born in or immigrants to contemporary France. Exploring the workings of culture, religion, community, and kinship, the book engages and intervenes in the fields of queer theory, gender studies, ethnography, linguistics, and cultural studies. Combining analysis of a variety of cultural texts—includ

Denis Diderot has long been regarded as one of the leading figures of the French Enlightenment, thanks to his editorship of the influential multi-volume Encyclopédie. As Andrew S. Curran explains in his biography Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely (Other Press, 2019) however, this was just one product of his wide-ranging literary efforts. The son of a cutler, Diderot underwent training for a life in the church, only to abandon it for an uncertain literary career. Initially finding success as a translator, his early works gained Diderot both acclaim and led to his imprisonment for several months. It was soon after his release that Diderot began work on the Encyclopédie, a years-long project that proved an important vehicle for spreading many of the ideas of the Enlightenment. Curran demonstrates that editing the Encyclopédie served as a way for Diderot to advance his views while avoiding the brunt of the controversy they engendered, with many of his later, often radical works not published until many years

Paola Bertucci's Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (Yale University Press, 2018) is an innovative new look at the role of artisans in the French Enlightenment.  As savants attempted to appropriate leadership of the mechanical arts while deriding artisans as mere laborers, some of these refashioned themselves as artistes, capable of blending craft knowledge with intellectual esprit.  Through the little studied and understood Société des Arts, these advertised their service and utility to the state and French economic and imperia expansion.  As they fought for official appointments and academic recognition, they help solidify key the Enlightenment concept of technological progress.  Through the eyes and experiences of artistes, the Enlightenment appears much less the product of intellectual breakthroughs, and instead, a reflection of the political economic strategies of artisans as they defined their role within the French empire.Lance C. Thurner r

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

People sometimes forget—if they are even aware—that France’s empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries included a colonial presence in South Asia, a presence that at one time rivaled that of the British. Danna Agmon’s A Colonial Affair: Commerce, Conversion, and Scandal in French India (Cornell University, 2017) zooms in on the 1716 arrest and conviction of a Tamil commercial agent and employee of the French East India Company, a legal case that resonated throughout the empire for decades, even centuries, afterward. The “Nayiniyappa Affair” at the heart of this microhistory is Agmon’s way into a complex web of interests and fractures: the aims and actions of French traders, missionaries, and administrators, as well as the roles and agency of indigenous subjects and intermediaries. Moving from colonial Pondicherry to metropolitan France and back again, A Colonial Affair focuses on a local story and context with much broader implications for how we think about the workings of imperial power, authority,

While the history of the Second World War and Jewish persecution in France has been widely studied, the return of survivors in the aftermath of deportation and genocide has not received sufficient attention. With Stealing Home: Looting, Restitution, and Reconstructing Jewish Lives in France, 1942-1947 (Oxford University Press, 2017), Shannon Fogg, Professor and Chair of the Department of History and Political Science at Missouri S&T, fills this void. Drawing from government archives, Jewish associational files, as well as victim accounts and testimonies, Fogg pulls the reader into complex and dynamic history of destruction, dispossession and recovery. She reveals the great extent to which French authorities and civilians participated in looting and spoliation. Moreover, Fogg works against the commonly accepted narrative that Jews were passive victims to destruction who silently returned to the remaining tatters of their prewar lives, arguing that survivors were active participants in the restitution proce

Following a 2011 meeting of the annual Mediterranean Workshop at the University of Minnesota, Patricia Lorcin (a co-convener) approached Todd Shepard (one of the workshop participants that year) about editing a volume focused on the Mediterranean in the modern period. From the beginning, these two editors of French Mediterraneans: Transnational and Imperial Histories (University of Nebraska Press, 2016) envisioned a collection that would bring together authors whose work pushes against the boundaries of French and European history (from outside of and within these regional fields). Analyzing the history of the Mediterranean as geographic, social, cultural, political, intellectual, and discursive space from the nineteenth century to the era of decolonization, the book offers a critical history of the region understood in its transnational and imperial complexity. The volume is organized in three parts. Focused on maps and mapping, the first includes essays by Ali Yaycioglu, Ian Coller, Andrew Arsan, and Spence

In Organic Resistance: The Struggle over Industrial Farming in Postwar France (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Venus Bivar documents the development of agriculture in post-1944 France. Through the Second World War, France’s agriculture was comparatively backward next to those of its neighbors and geopolitical rivals. The French government undertook a major program of “modernization” to encourage the consolidation of landholdings, increases in the productivity of agricultural labor, and the application of capital-intensive technologies. In this it was successful—at least to the extent that France became one of the world’s leading exporters of agricultural goods. However, as Bivar documents, this transformation was not without considerable resistance: plenty of farmers were unable or unwilling to change, and the transformation of the French countryside generated intense debates about the nature of quality in food and agriculture, and its relationship to the people and land of France. Venus Bivar is A

Schizophrènes au XXe siècle: des effets secondaires de l’histoire [Schizophrenics in the Twentieth Century: The Side Effects of History] is a strong argument in support of the history of psychiatry “from below.” Using vast archival resources and ample patient files, Hervé Guillemain demonstrates convincingly how schizophrenia in France was a socially constructed category—one that circumscribed and further stigmatized individuals who were already marginalized and left behind in a changing political, economic, and social landscape. Guillemain follows the surprising twists and turns proffered by his sources, and in so doing, reveals to us an untold and unexpected history of those youth and young adults who tried to take “a leap forward, but failed.” While focusing primarily on France, this book nevertheless surpasses its geographic boundaries and will undoubtedly be engaging for all those interested in the schizophrenia diagnosis.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the heart of Laila Amine’s book is a crucial question: where is Paris? This question may be surprising for anyone who can readily point to the French capital on a map. Geography is, after all stable, is it not? Postcolonial Paris: Fictions of Intimacy in the City of Light (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018) shows that space and place are anything but stable. Amine focuses on the literal margins of Paris, and on the literary and artistic works that are produced in or about those margins. Rather than reproduce the well-worn trope of the banlieue, the outskirts of Paris, as a tragic space whose inhabitants are unable to integrate so-called French values, Amine carefully examines the work of writers and artists who have engaged with the space and have produced pointed critiques of structural inequality and the legacy of colonialism that calls into question traditional French narratives of cultural and religious alterity. Postcolonial Paris makes the rare and much-needed move of reading across the works of No

This spring and summer, the workers of the Société nationale des chemins de fer français (SNCF) staged a series of rolling strikes, slowing and shutting down the country’s major lines of travel and transport. It wasn’t the first time that France’s cheminots (railway workers) have taken a stand, and it certainly won’t be the last. Another major strike is scheduled for early October of this year. In Ordinary Workers, Vichy and the Holocaust: French Railwaymen and the Second World War (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Ludivine Broch examines the history of railway worker resistance and collaboration during the Occupation years. The project departs from a fundamental question about the role the national railways (and their personnel) played in the Holocaust in France. The resulting book is an in-depth labour history that considers class struggle and wartime economic pressures, complicating moral questions about what the cheminots did and didn’t do to enable and/or impede persecutions, deportations, and genocide