Episodes

  • Benjamin P. Davis, "Choose Your Bearing: Édouard Glissant, Human Rights, and Decolonial Ethics" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)
    Apr 3 2025
    Benjamin P. Davis’s Choose Your Bearing: Édouard Glissant, Human Rights and Decolonial Ethics (Edinburgh University Press 2025) provides one of the first readings, in English or French, of Édouard Glissant as an ethical theorist. What do we in the West owe those who grow our food, sew our clothes and produce our electronics? And what have we always owed one another, but forgotten, avoided, or simply disregarded? Looking back on nearly a century of colonial war and genocide, in 1990 the poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant appealed directly to his readers, calling them to re-orient their lives in service of the political struggles of their time: ‘You must choose your bearing.’ Informed by the prayer camps at Standing Rock, and presenting Glissant alongside Stuart Hall, Emmanuel Levinas, Simone Weil, Enrique Dussel, Gloria Anzaldúa and W. E. B. Du Bois, this book offers an urgent ethics for the present – an ethics of risk, commitment and care that together form a new sense of decolonial responsibility. A sequel to the book, Another Humanity: Decolonial Ethics from Du Bois to Arendt, is forthcoming this year. Benjamin P. Davis is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Hispanic Studies at Texas A&M University and a Fellow at the Center on Modernity in Transition. He is the author of Simone Weil’s Political Philosophy: Field Notes from the Margins (Rowman & Littlefield 2023) as well as Choose Your Bearing: Édouard Glissant, Human Rights, and Decolonial Ethics (2023) and a sequel, Another Humanity: Decolonial Ethics from Du Bois to Arendt (2025), both published by Edinburgh University Press. Tim Wyman-McCarthy is a Lecturer in the discipline of Human Rights and Associate Director of Graduate Studies at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights and the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. He can be reached at tw2468@columbia.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies
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    57 mins
  • Bruce L. Vernarde, "The Miracles of Mary in Twelfth-Century France" (Cornell UP, 2024)
    Mar 27 2025
    Murder in a cathedral, horrific illnesses and deformities, narrow escapes from injury and death, a vengeful dragon, a wandering eyeball, a bawdy monk and other sinners redeemed—the accounts of miracles performed by the Virgin Mary gathered and translated in The Miracles of Mary in Twelfth-Century France (Cornell UP, 2024) provide vivid glimpses into medieval life and beliefs. Bruce L. Venarde provides fluent translations of the first five collections of Marian miracle narratives from France, written in the second quarter of the twelfth century and never before available in English. The stories recorded in these collections—by Herman of Tournai; Hugh Farsit; Haimo of Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives; John, son of Peter; and Gautier of Compiègne—offer descriptions of travel, living conditions, medical knowledge, conflict between and among lay and religious authorities, and the burgeoning cult of the Virgin Mary, which had only recently become important in Western Europe. Including notes, tables, and maps that orient and illuminate the texts, The Miracles of Mary in Twelfth-Century France makes these riveting tales available to readers seeking a view into the medieval past. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies
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    1 hr and 10 mins
  • Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, "The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It" (Basic Books, 2024)
    Mar 20 2025
    A panoramic new history of the revolutionary decades between 1760 and 1825, from North America and Europe to Haiti and Spanish America, showing how progress and reaction went hand in hand. The revolutions that raged across Europe and the Americas over seven decades, from 1760 to 1825, created the modern world. Revolutionaries shattered empires, toppled social hierarchies, and birthed a world of republics. But old injustices lingered on and the powerful engines of revolutionary change created new and insidious forms of inequality. In The Age of Revolutions (Basic Books, 2024), historian Nathan Perl-Rosenthal offers the first narrative history of this entire era. Through a kaleidoscope of lives both familiar and unknown-from John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Napoleon to an ambitious French naturalist and a seditious Peruvian nun-he retells the revolutionary epic as a generational story. The first revolutionary generation, fired by radical ideas, struggled to slip the hierarchical bonds of the old order. Their failures moulded a second generation, more adept at mass organizing but with an illiberal tint. The sweeping political transformations they accomplished after 1800 engrained forms of inequality and racial hierarchy in modern politics that remain with us today. A breath taking history spanning three continents, The Age of Revolutions uncovers how the period's grand political transformations emerged across oceans and, slowly and unevenly, over generations. Nathan Perl-Rosenthal is a professor of history at the University of Southern California. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the Nation, and the Los Angeles Times. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies
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    1 hr and 2 mins
  • Holly Grout, "Playing Cleopatra: Inventing the Female Celebrity in Third Republic France" (LSU Press, 2024)
    Mar 19 2025
    Questions about the meaning of womanhood and femininity loomed large in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French culture. In Playing Cleopatra: Inventing the Female Celebrity in Third Republic France (LSU Press, 2024), Dr. Holly Grout uses the theater—specifically, Parisian stage performances of the Egyptian queen Cleopatra by Sarah Bernhardt, Colette, and Josephine Baker—to explore these cultural and political debates. How and why did portrayals of Cleopatra influence French attitudes regarding race, sexuality, and gender? To what extent did Bernhardt, Colette, and Baker manipulate the image of Cleopatra to challenge social norms and to generate new models of womanhood? Why was Cleopatra—an ancient, mythologized queen—the chosen vehicle for these spectacular expressions of modern womanhood? In the context of late nineteenth-century Egyptomania, Cleopatra’s eroticized image—as well as her controversial legacy of female empowerment—resonated in new ways with a French public engaged in reassessing feminine sexuality, racialized beauty, and national identity. By playing Cleopatra, Bernhardt, Colette, and Baker did more than personify a character; they embodied the myriad ways in which celebrity was racialized, gendered, and commoditized, and they generated a model of female stardom that set the stage for twentieth-century celebrity long before the Hollywood machine’s mass manufacture of “stars.” At the same time, these women engaged with broader debates regarding the meaning of womanhood, celebrity, and Frenchness in the tumultuous decades before World War II. Drawing on plays, periodicals, autobiographies, personal letters, memoirs, novels, works of art, and legislation, Playing Cleopatra contributes to a growing body of literature that examines how individuals subverted the prevailing gender norms that governed relations between the sexes in liberal democratic regimes. By offering employment, visibility, and notoriety, the theater provided an especially empowering world for women, in which the roles they played both reflected and challenged contemporary cultural currents. Through the various iterations in which Bernhardt, Colette, and Baker played Cleopatra, they not only resurrected an ancient queen but also appropriated her mystique to construct new narratives of womanhood. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s episodes on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies
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    49 mins
  • Andrew Janiak, "The Enlightenment's Most Dangerous Woman: Émilie Du Châtelet and the Making of Modern Philosophy" (Oxford UP, 2024)
    Mar 18 2025
    The Enlightenment's Most Dangerous Woman: Émilie du Châtelet and the Making of Modern Philosophy (Oxford UP, 2024) introduces the work and legacy of philosopher Émilie Du Châtelet. As the Enlightenment gained momentum throughout Europe, Châtelet broke through the many barriers facing women at the time and published a major philosophical treatise in French. Due to her proclamation that a true philosopher must remain an independent thinker rather than a disciple of some supposedly great man like Isaac Newton or René Descartes, Châtelet posed a threat to an emerging consensus in the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment's Most Dangerous Woman highlights the exclusion of women from colleges and academies in Europe and the fear of rupturing the gender-based order. Andrew Janiak is Professor of Philosophy and Bass Fellow at Duke University. Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies
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    47 mins
  • Kirsten L. Scheid, "Fantasmic Objects: Art and Sociality from Lebanon, 1920–1950" (Indiana UP, 2022)
    Mar 9 2025
    In Fantasmic Objects: Art and Sociality from Lebanon, 1920–1950 (Indiana UP, 2022), Kirsten L. Scheid offers a striking study of both modern art in Lebanon and modern Lebanon through art. By focusing on the careers of Moustapha Farrouk and Omar Onsi, forefathers of an iconic national repertoire, and their rebellious student Saloua Raouda Choucair, founder of an antirepresentational, participatory art, Scheid traces an emerging sense of what it means to be Lebanese through the evolution of new exhibition, pedagogical, and art-writing practices. She reveals that art and artists helped found the nation during French occupation, as the formal qualities and international exhibitions of nudes and landscapes in the 1930s crystallized notions of modern masculinity, patriotic femininity, non-sectarian religiosity, and citizenship. Examining the efforts of painters, sculptors, and activists in Lebanon who fiercely upheld aesthetic development and battled for new forms of political being, Fantasmic Objects offers an insightful approach to the history and formation of modern Lebanon. Yasemin Ipek is an anthropologist, teacher, researcher, and author who is passionate about pursuing peace, love, truth, and justice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies
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    1 hr and 32 mins
  • Ethan Kleinberg, "Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought" (Stanford UP, 2021)
    Mar 8 2025
    In this rich intellectual history of the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic lectures in Paris, Ethan Kleinberg addresses Levinas's Jewish life and its relation to his philosophical writings while making an argument for the role and importance of Levinas's Talmudic lessons. Pairing each chapter with a related Talmudic lecture, Kleinberg uses the distinction Levinas presents between "God on Our Side" and "God on God's Side" to provide two discrete and at times conflicting approaches to Levinas's Talmudic readings. One is historically situated and argued from "our side" while the other uses Levinas's Talmudic readings themselves to approach the issues as timeless and derived from "God on God's own side." In Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought (Stanford UP, 2021), Kleinberg asks whether the ethical message and moral urgency of Levinas's Talmudic lectures can be extended beyond the texts and beliefs of a chosen people, religion, or even the seemingly primary unit of the self. Touching on Western philosophy, French Enlightenment universalism, and the Lithuanian Talmudic tradition, Kleinberg provides readers with a boundary-pushing investigation into the origins, influences, and causes of Levinas's turn to and use of Talmud. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies
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    1 hr and 21 mins
  • Deborah Reed-Donahay, "Sideways Migration: Being French in London" (Routledge, 2025)
    Mar 3 2025
    Sideways Migration: Being French in London (Routledge, 2025) examines the relationship between migration and socioeconomic status. In particular, it charts a set of middle-class aspirations that lead people to move to a nearby nation that is similar in wealth and social indicators - a type of horizontal relocation that it terms "sideways migration." It chronicles the experiences of a diverse group of French middle-class citizens who moved to London during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Based on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork over a ten-year period, this book engages at length with their strategies of emplacement through the lens of Pierre Bourdieu's concept of social space. Against a backdrop of heightened anxieties about immigration, the disruptions of the Brexit process and, more recently, a pandemic, it shows how middle-class migration is affected by processes of dislocation and relocation, settling and unsettling, and the search for belonging. This book points to new directions for understanding transnationalism among middle-class migrants through its consideration of the French emigration apparatus and the role of the multisite French nation in the lives of its citizens living abroad. It will be key reading for scholars and students interested in emigration and migration from anthropology, sociology, geography, political science, history, and international studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies
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    32 mins