race

Secularisation is often presented as a Western model that was exported during decolonisation; but according to M. A. Meziane, it was in fact spread by colonialism itself as an instrument of domination.

What motivated French colonisers to found schools in the Maghreb and Subsaharan Africa? Carole Reynaud-Paligot shows how their superiority complex ended up overcoming their meritocratic ideals and dreams of diversity.

As protests against racism break out all over the world following the murder of George Floyd, Books & Ideas gathers a selection of texts examining the history of these multifaceted discriminations and of the struggles for racial justice.

A new anthology provides French translations of key texts in the field of Critical Race Theory, as it has developed over the past 40 years in the United States. They help us to understand the decisive role played by legal discourse and practice in the social, historical, and cultural construction of race.

The flourishing history of the relationship between race and health has recently turned to the origins of medicine in the United States and the decisive role played by enslaved Africans, both dead and alive. A history of duress, from which their voices nevertheless emerge.

Few histories of the African American fight for equality manage to shed their ideological bias. Caroline Rolland-Diamond offers an impressive overview that goes beyond oppositions to highlight the structuring lines of a two-century-old struggle that continues today.

In his incisive, concise and stimulating book, the sociologist Rogers Brubaker examines the reasons why, in the United States today, social acceptance of transgender situations has no equivalent in “transracial” cases.

Retracing the genealogy of the idea of human ‘races’, Claude-Olivier Doron returns to the role of the Enlightenment, and particularly Buffon, in the emergence of monogenistic racial thought. He examines how the idea of ‘race’ and the affirmation of universalism appeared concomitantly.

In recent years there has been an increase in the number of studies by jurists, anthropologists and sociologists on the resurgence of the biological concept of race in medical research, the medico-legal field and genealogy. They have shown how DNA data that is seemingly of the utmost neutrality and technicality is in fact bringing into play a whole set of sociopolitical and economic values, choices and relationships.

Though race is socially constructed, it nonetheless really exists: consequently, Magali Bessone argues, the concept of race must be taken into consideration when fighting racism. But what positive content can be given to the “critical republicanism” she advocates?

How is history relevant to current debates about race, economic inequality or the national narrative? A renowned historian of urban crises and segregation, Thomas Sugrue proposes an answer that emphasizes both the value of passion and that of careful scholarship. Historians can and should engage in public debate, but on their own terms.

Winner of the 2013 David Pinkney Book Prize, Alice L. Conklin’s most recent book takes us on a journey leading to the establishment of ethnology in France and its colonies. Through a biographical approach, she shows how the “general science of man” evolved in the 19^th century from the obsessive search for universal laws.

The recent biography of Malcolm X provides us with a compelling intellectual history of the charismatic leader. Marable’s critical reevalution of Malcolm’s biography traces his ideas back to a long history of social and religious movements within African American society.

Obama cannot fully inscribe himself in a traditional vision of African American racial politics as the struggle of slave-descendants for equality. He is better approached as a participant of today’s global reality. His trajectory invites a reconsideration of the connections Americans—and particularly African Americans—have maintained with other countries, continents and people.

Youth gangs are often discussed but rarely investigated. In an ethnographic study that examines families, schools, and the street, sociologist Marwan Mohammed reconstructs the principles according to which these groups are formed in the Paris region.

In the United States starting in the 1950s, schizophrenia ceased being a malady of rural and idle whites, to become increasingly associated with blacks coming from the inner cities. This over-diagnosis is related to the struggle for civil rights and the foregrounding of militants who were judged to be aggressive.

The history of the American census is also that of the institutionalization of racial and ethnic categories. In a detailed study of the practices of classifying the U.S. population from 1790 to 1940, the historian Paul Schor demonstrates the instability of the categories produced and the way in which forms of classification of blacks were extended to other categories.

At a time when a supposedly “post-racial” America is becoming increasingly polarized over its first black president, historian Thomas Sugrue proposes a badly needed perspective on Obama’s attempts to negotiate between color blindness and race consciousness. Despite the depth of his historical perspective, he understates how destructive Obama’s religious moralism is for the cause of racial progress.