In the Summertime

A Summer Selection

Reviews

■Vincent Vilmain, "The Birth of Race"
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.
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■Béatrice Damian-Gaillard, "Pornography Under the Lens"
Alongside the usual reductive condemnations, studies on pornography have increased in the academic world. Florian Vörös examines the field’s key texts, which reveal the diversity of productions and uses of pornography and analyse the emotional experiences pornography awakens as well as the hierarchies it shapes and recreates.
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■Isaac William Martin, "Deplorable, Yourself"
Most analysts have portrayed Trump as the candidate of economically insecure white Americans. Sociologist Isaac Martin discards this “economic anxiety thesis” as inaccurate: most poor white people won’t vote on Tuesday. This explanation has much less to do with the data than with a long American tradition of blaming racism on the white poor.
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■Vincent Boyer, "The Importance of Being a Dog"
Do animals have a moral life in the same way as humans do? The philosopher Alice Crary argues that they are visible bearers of moral qualities, as literature suggests. But can values be the object of empirical observation?
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■Neil Davie, "Guilty of Being Poor"
In La Prison des Pauvres, Jacques Carré considers the history of poverty and poor relief in England between the 17^th and early 20^th centuries, focusing in particular on the complex evolution of the workhouse system. Often dreaded by paupers for its harsh discipline, it dominated English responses to poverty for several centuries, and was not abolished until after World War Two.
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■Marie Gaille, "Immodest Modesty“”
The Renaissance reinvented modesty – that contradictory passion which reveals while hiding. In a masterful book, Dominique Brancher shows how this art of circumvention spanned a variety of knowledge, especially medical knowledge, in the sixteenth century.
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■Samuel Hayat, "The Colonial Margins of Citizenship"
By studying political and legal debates over citizenship through the prism of the colonial situation in the nineteenth century, in the metropole as well as the colonies, Silyane Larcher proposes a new genealogy of citizenship and asks us to rethink how the French Republic was constructed.
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■Denis Matringe, "The Kamasutra and its Audiences"
The Kamasutra, written in the third century, is not only an erotic work: it is also a treatise on the art of living for comfortable city-dwellers, whatever their caste or sexuality—and whether they are stallions, bulls, or hares, elephants, mares, or does.
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