Books & ideas

The Prolonged Suffering of the Syrian People

Leyla Dakhli — 2024-10-15T07:30:00Z

Arrests, torture, massacres: the Assad clan has been tormenting the Syrian people for the past 50 years. This major collective work provides conclusive evidence of the violence to which Europe turns a blind eye.

The World on a Plateau

Raphaël Morera — 2023-11-30T07:00:00Z

The Larzac plateau is famous and paradoxical: as the scene of an emblematic struggle against the state, but also because its economy is a model of integration within global capitalism. Philippe Artières retraces its history.

The Arab Spring: Ten Years After

Khalid Lyamlahy — 2023-02-14T08:05:00Z

What remains of the Arab Spring? By gathering diverse and heterogeneous material related to the uprisings and analyzing circulation and transformation dynamics at a transnational level, this edited volume uses archives to rethink both the memory and contemporary significance of the revolutions.

Slave Ship Rebellions

Thomas Mareite — 2019-11-21T08:00:00Z

In 1841, the Creole, an American ship with 139 enslaved people onboard, was hijacked at sea by a group of determined rebels in their midst. Kerr-Ritchie's book sheds new light on this iconic episode of the Revolutionary Atlantic in the 19^th century, telling a tale of successful self-emancipation.

The color of France's “yellow vests”

Aurélien Delpirou — 2018-12-17T07:00:00Z

Jacquerie, revolt of the peripheries, or revenge of the working class? The initial analysis of the “yellow vest” (gilets jaunes) movement has unleashed sociological prejudices. Yet this movement reflects not so much a France split in two as a multiplicity of territorial interdependencies.

The Forgotten of the National Story

Déborah Cohen — 2017-06-15T07:00:00Z

The popular history of France told by Michelle Zancarini-Fournel is the history of often hidden individual figures and political struggles. By filling our “memory gaps,” Zancarini-Fournel also suggests another narrativity.

1839 or the Odyssey of Freedom

Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch — 2016-12-15T08:00:00Z

Abducted in Africa, detained in Cuba, the slaves aboard the Amistad ship organised a rebellion in 1839, before reaching the United States where they were subsequently imprisoned. The survivors were ultimately taken back to Sierra Leone, following a long publicity tour set up to pay for their homeward journey.

The Tender Indifference of the World: Revisiting Albert Camus

Marylin Maeso — 2015-05-28T05:30:00Z

In an innovative study that returns Albert Camus' early works to their rightful place in the canon, Laurent Bove suggests we should view Camus as a philosopher of immanence and of acquiescence to the joy of the world. This reading is enlightening as far as Camus' thoughts on history are concerned, but tends to gloss over the ruptures that run though his work, which is driven with multiple tensions.

Ferguson and the New Black Condition in the United States

François Bonnet & Clément Théry — 2014-11-24T09:23:00Z

Michael Brown's death and the Ferguson unrest signal a change in the condition of Black people in American society since 2000. This new condition is marked by the culmination of the penal state's power over Black people's lives, and an increase in socio-economic inequalities between races.

Hybristanbul

Jean-François Pérouse — 2014-02-03T08:00:00Z

The Gezi park uprising of June 2013 emerged in protest against a planned urban development project proposed by the Turkish government as part of its wider policy of attempting to revive the country's glorious Ottoman past, despite the fact that Turkey is now a modern republic. J-F. Pérouse takes a look at the country's ambitious urban transformation.