Pattern of human activity and symbolism associated with France and its people
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7 episodes with frenchness
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2 episodes with frenchness
3 episodes with frenchness
2 episodes with frenchness
2 episodes with frenchness
2 episodes with frenchness
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/european-studies
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/new-books-network
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/gender-studies
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/performing-arts
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
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
Annie, Ella & André talk about an incredible, and incredibly chaotic, Olympic tournament. We review how the tournament went for all six Spirit players, then discuss the Olympics from the opening ceremony to some of our favorite events! We also check-in on the new Spirits and how different the team might look once they get back to NWSL regular season play. We also discuss the upcoming friendly match versus Arsenal, the USL Super League, and whether some short-term Spirit signings showed enough to stick around. Please subscribe, rate, and review! ==================== Follow Us on Twitter Pod - @HeySpirits Annie - @AnneEinDC Ella - @ellabrockway André - @838_carlisle ==================== Track: Fungible — Hiracutch [Audio Library Release] Music provided by Audio Library Plus Watch: https://youtu.be/ILkTHxSNenI Free Download / Stream: https://alplus.io/after-rain
Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we continue our series on Beyond Good & Evil. We talk about a number of the game's systems, compare it with Zelda, and engage with the level design and characters. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. Sections played: Past the Factory Issues covered: who said that line, characterization and Frenchness, aesthetics, cosmic horror and the Domz, Hub, lacking symmetry to promote alienness, diagetic design in its systems, the first trailer, a world you want to hang out in, quirky aesthetic, the camera and when you get control, night and day between two camera systems, the PC port, the "Zelda bucket," modularity and object-orientedness in Zelda games, clockwork, the photojournalism of it, doing things because the narrative demands it and not systematically, stealth vs combat, giving your companions power-ups, companions in combat, two-heart buddies, lock and key enemies, being able to bolt on mechanics, air hockey, keys that aren't keys through the characters, committing to the characters, The Myth of Zelda, making real statements, forgiving and fail-forward stealth, great camera framing, photojournalism as heroic act, the themes of information control and propaganda, what's with Alpha Section, keys that you can use in the inventory, Ubisoft and politics (Cuba, Myanmar and... Montana), tackling universal themes with story specifics to avoid preachiness. Games, people, and influences mentioned or discussed: The City of Lost Children, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Zootopia, Star Wars, Rayman, Jean-Luc Godard, Jerry Lewis, Artimage, Starfield, No Man's Sky, Spider-Man 2, Double Fine, Mario 64, Tomb Raider, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Remi Lacoste, Mark Haigh-Hutchinson, Final Fantasy IX, Psychonauts, Tim Schafer, Mortal Kombat, Grim Fandango, Shufflepuck, Anachronox, George Orwell, 1984, The Last Express, Omikron: The Nomad Soul, David Cage, Metal Gear (series), Aleksandr Solzhenitzen, Andrei Sakharov, Final Fantasy VI, Kirk Hamilton, Aaron Evers, Mark Garcia. Note: Mark HH's (Agent HH!) camera book did not debut until 2009 Next time: Past the Slaughterhouse Twitch: brettdouville or timlongojr, instagram:timlongojr, Twitter: @devgameclub Discord DevGameClub@gmail.com
Our Aussie invasion continues with this week's guest, film critic and podcaster extraordinaire, Blake Howard, the mastermind of One Heat Minute Productions. Blake joins us to talk about unhealthy relationships with movies and his love for the films of 1970, from the gallows humor of “M*A*S*H” to the working class heroism of “Five Easy Pieces” to the unequalled cool (and Frenchness) of “Le Cercle Rouge.” Become a member for Bonus Episodes, personal stories of working in the industry, and yes - EVEN MORE MOVIES. https://plus.acast.com/s/a-very-good-year. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Our relationship with our parents and, more widely, with our ancestors' stories are some of the most formative & influential connections in many people's lives, both for good and bad. The impact of this relationship can be felt in so many different ways, not least of which in artistic expression. With me today is Violaine Huisman, a French author based in New York who recently became the Director of Cultural Affairs at the Alliance Française. She's the author of a trilogy of novels about her and her family. The first is called The Book of Mother published in 2018 and translated into English last year, the second is called Rose désert (translated maybe as “Desert Pink”) published in 2019 but not yet translated, and the third is Les monuments de Paris (“The Monuments of Paris”) which will be published this year. In this episode, Violaine and I cover a wide array of topics – the structure and linearity of her novels, the existential question of ‘Frenchness' and being a ‘French author in New York', and of course we speak of Marcel Proust, as well as some of the other major influences in her writing. It was a real pleasure to speak with Violaine about this powerful, family-driven trilogy which I absolutely recommend. In today's interview, we discussed Les Essais, by Michel de Montaigne (1580), a wide-ranging collection of essays, originally written in ‘Middle French', Saxifrage, by Catherine Cremnitz (1993) – Violaine's mother's own autobiography, and 10:04, by Ben Lerner (2014), a modern book of auto-fiction about a Manhattan-based author recently diagnosed with a life-threatening heart-condition. The best book Violaine has read in the last 12 months was Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo (1862), which tells the story of Jean Valjean and the other ‘miserable' characters of the early 1800s Paris underworld. The book she would take to a desert island was the Bible. Finally, a book that changed her mind was In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (first published in 1913), about its narrator's life and childhood, and his reflections on the persistence of memory. Lit with Charles loves reviews. If you enjoyed this episode, I'd be so grateful if you could leave a review of your own, and follow me on Instagram at @litwithcharles. Let's get more people listening – and reading!
On the 16th October 2023, I met with Claire Launchbury and Charles Forsdick to discuss the recent publication of Transnational French Studies (Liverpool UP, 2023), a collection of essays that draws attention to the diverse objects of study and methodologies that can be brought to bear on French cultural production. This is the latest in the “Transnational Modern Languages” series published by Liverpool University press. The series furnishes frameworks and concrete examples of how to study languages and cultures through their interactions, rather than as isolated national traditions. It is especially of note that Transnational French Studies has been conceived as a handbook for students of French (at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels). The key objective of the volume is to define the core set of skills and methodologies that constitute the study of French culture as a transnational, transcultural and translingual phenomenon. Written by leading scholars within the field, chapters demonstrate the type of inquiry that can be pursued into the transnational realities - both material and non-material - that are integral to what is referred to as French culture. The book is divided into four sections: Languages, Spaces, Temporalities and Subjectivities. These follow a detailed introduction written by the editors that comprehensively explains and situates “transnationalism” and its reception within contemporary French Studies. The collection moves smoothly from literature to sociolinguistics to videogames and comics. In addition to its diverse subject matter, the edition makes a major contribution to French Studies by drawing attention to the complex ways that monolingualism can become conflated with monoculturalism in our discipline. Forsdick and Launchbury in their introduction stress that the “nation is a keyword that all students of France must interrogate in its historic and semantic complexity”. The collection's historical breadth expands social scientific definitions of “transnationalism” and historicizes both “Frenchness” and the French language's (and cultures') evolutions. Individual essays explore histories of migration, flows of ideas and goods to demonstrate that “transnationalism” is not a contemporary phenomenon but a cultural disposition that extends back centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
On the 16th October 2023, I met with Claire Launchbury and Charles Forsdick to discuss the recent publication of Transnational French Studies (Liverpool UP, 2023), a collection of essays that draws attention to the diverse objects of study and methodologies that can be brought to bear on French cultural production. This is the latest in the “Transnational Modern Languages” series published by Liverpool University press. The series furnishes frameworks and concrete examples of how to study languages and cultures through their interactions, rather than as isolated national traditions. It is especially of note that Transnational French Studies has been conceived as a handbook for students of French (at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels). The key objective of the volume is to define the core set of skills and methodologies that constitute the study of French culture as a transnational, transcultural and translingual phenomenon. Written by leading scholars within the field, chapters demonstrate the type of inquiry that can be pursued into the transnational realities - both material and non-material - that are integral to what is referred to as French culture. The book is divided into four sections: Languages, Spaces, Temporalities and Subjectivities. These follow a detailed introduction written by the editors that comprehensively explains and situates “transnationalism” and its reception within contemporary French Studies. The collection moves smoothly from literature to sociolinguistics to videogames and comics. In addition to its diverse subject matter, the edition makes a major contribution to French Studies by drawing attention to the complex ways that monolingualism can become conflated with monoculturalism in our discipline. Forsdick and Launchbury in their introduction stress that the “nation is a keyword that all students of France must interrogate in its historic and semantic complexity”. The collection's historical breadth expands social scientific definitions of “transnationalism” and historicizes both “Frenchness” and the French language's (and cultures') evolutions. Individual essays explore histories of migration, flows of ideas and goods to demonstrate that “transnationalism” is not a contemporary phenomenon but a cultural disposition that extends back centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/caribbean-studies
On the 16th October 2023, I met with Claire Launchbury and Charles Forsdick to discuss the recent publication of Transnational French Studies (Liverpool UP, 2023), a collection of essays that draws attention to the diverse objects of study and methodologies that can be brought to bear on French cultural production. This is the latest in the “Transnational Modern Languages” series published by Liverpool University press. The series furnishes frameworks and concrete examples of how to study languages and cultures through their interactions, rather than as isolated national traditions. It is especially of note that Transnational French Studies has been conceived as a handbook for students of French (at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels). The key objective of the volume is to define the core set of skills and methodologies that constitute the study of French culture as a transnational, transcultural and translingual phenomenon. Written by leading scholars within the field, chapters demonstrate the type of inquiry that can be pursued into the transnational realities - both material and non-material - that are integral to what is referred to as French culture. The book is divided into four sections: Languages, Spaces, Temporalities and Subjectivities. These follow a detailed introduction written by the editors that comprehensively explains and situates “transnationalism” and its reception within contemporary French Studies. The collection moves smoothly from literature to sociolinguistics to videogames and comics. In addition to its diverse subject matter, the edition makes a major contribution to French Studies by drawing attention to the complex ways that monolingualism can become conflated with monoculturalism in our discipline. Forsdick and Launchbury in their introduction stress that the “nation is a keyword that all students of France must interrogate in its historic and semantic complexity”. The collection's historical breadth expands social scientific definitions of “transnationalism” and historicizes both “Frenchness” and the French language's (and cultures') evolutions. Individual essays explore histories of migration, flows of ideas and goods to demonstrate that “transnationalism” is not a contemporary phenomenon but a cultural disposition that extends back centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies
On the 16th October 2023, I met with Claire Launchbury and Charles Forsdick to discuss the recent publication of Transnational French Studies (Liverpool UP, 2023), a collection of essays that draws attention to the diverse objects of study and methodologies that can be brought to bear on French cultural production. This is the latest in the “Transnational Modern Languages” series published by Liverpool University press. The series furnishes frameworks and concrete examples of how to study languages and cultures through their interactions, rather than as isolated national traditions. It is especially of note that Transnational French Studies has been conceived as a handbook for students of French (at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels). The key objective of the volume is to define the core set of skills and methodologies that constitute the study of French culture as a transnational, transcultural and translingual phenomenon. Written by leading scholars within the field, chapters demonstrate the type of inquiry that can be pursued into the transnational realities - both material and non-material - that are integral to what is referred to as French culture. The book is divided into four sections: Languages, Spaces, Temporalities and Subjectivities. These follow a detailed introduction written by the editors that comprehensively explains and situates “transnationalism” and its reception within contemporary French Studies. The collection moves smoothly from literature to sociolinguistics to videogames and comics. In addition to its diverse subject matter, the edition makes a major contribution to French Studies by drawing attention to the complex ways that monolingualism can become conflated with monoculturalism in our discipline. Forsdick and Launchbury in their introduction stress that the “nation is a keyword that all students of France must interrogate in its historic and semantic complexity”. The collection's historical breadth expands social scientific definitions of “transnationalism” and historicizes both “Frenchness” and the French language's (and cultures') evolutions. Individual essays explore histories of migration, flows of ideas and goods to demonstrate that “transnationalism” is not a contemporary phenomenon but a cultural disposition that extends back centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies
Rachel Gillett's At Home in Our Sounds: Music, Race, and Cultural Politics in Interwar Paris (Oxford University Press, 2021) explores the world of the French "Jazz Age" in the years after the First World War. Tracing the common ground and differences between communities of African American, French Antillean, and French West African artists who lived, performed, and interacted with one another in the French capital during the 1920s and 30s, the book asks questions about Blackness, Frenchness, colonialism, racism, identity, and solidarity through a focus on the experiences of a diversity of historical actors and sources. Connecting the rich and complex world of entertainment to social and political change and resistance, the book draws attention to class and gender as well as race to think through issues of nationalism, transnational movement and exchange, and anti-colonialism. Its chapters work with a range of materials including police records, recordings, biography and autobiography, and a wealth of images of/from the diverse Parisian cultural life the era. Pushing beyond the well-established history of white responses to Black musical forms (Jazz and the Biguine) during this period, the book emphasizes the perspective of Black observers, including the famous Nardal sisters of Martinique, who commented on the varied cultural and political effects of artists and performances. The book will be a fascinating read for anyone interested in the history of music, race, and exchanges across the Atlantic, including different points within the French empire during this period. And the legacies of this moment continue to resonate in France and beyond a century later. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and empire. She is the founding host of New Books in French Studies, a channel launched in 2013. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Rachel Gillett's At Home in Our Sounds: Music, Race, and Cultural Politics in Interwar Paris (Oxford University Press, 2021) explores the world of the French "Jazz Age" in the years after the First World War. Tracing the common ground and differences between communities of African American, French Antillean, and French West African artists who lived, performed, and interacted with one another in the French capital during the 1920s and 30s, the book asks questions about Blackness, Frenchness, colonialism, racism, identity, and solidarity through a focus on the experiences of a diversity of historical actors and sources. Connecting the rich and complex world of entertainment to social and political change and resistance, the book draws attention to class and gender as well as race to think through issues of nationalism, transnational movement and exchange, and anti-colonialism. Its chapters work with a range of materials including police records, recordings, biography and autobiography, and a wealth of images of/from the diverse Parisian cultural life the era. Pushing beyond the well-established history of white responses to Black musical forms (Jazz and the Biguine) during this period, the book emphasizes the perspective of Black observers, including the famous Nardal sisters of Martinique, who commented on the varied cultural and political effects of artists and performances. The book will be a fascinating read for anyone interested in the history of music, race, and exchanges across the Atlantic, including different points within the French empire during this period. And the legacies of this moment continue to resonate in France and beyond a century later. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and empire. She is the founding host of New Books in French Studies, a channel launched in 2013. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies
Rachel Gillett's At Home in Our Sounds: Music, Race, and Cultural Politics in Interwar Paris (Oxford University Press, 2021) explores the world of the French "Jazz Age" in the years after the First World War. Tracing the common ground and differences between communities of African American, French Antillean, and French West African artists who lived, performed, and interacted with one another in the French capital during the 1920s and 30s, the book asks questions about Blackness, Frenchness, colonialism, racism, identity, and solidarity through a focus on the experiences of a diversity of historical actors and sources. Connecting the rich and complex world of entertainment to social and political change and resistance, the book draws attention to class and gender as well as race to think through issues of nationalism, transnational movement and exchange, and anti-colonialism. Its chapters work with a range of materials including police records, recordings, biography and autobiography, and a wealth of images of/from the diverse Parisian cultural life the era. Pushing beyond the well-established history of white responses to Black musical forms (Jazz and the Biguine) during this period, the book emphasizes the perspective of Black observers, including the famous Nardal sisters of Martinique, who commented on the varied cultural and political effects of artists and performances. The book will be a fascinating read for anyone interested in the history of music, race, and exchanges across the Atlantic, including different points within the French empire during this period. And the legacies of this moment continue to resonate in France and beyond a century later. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and empire. She is the founding host of New Books in French Studies, a channel launched in 2013. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
Rachel Gillett's At Home in Our Sounds: Music, Race, and Cultural Politics in Interwar Paris (Oxford University Press, 2021) explores the world of the French "Jazz Age" in the years after the First World War. Tracing the common ground and differences between communities of African American, French Antillean, and French West African artists who lived, performed, and interacted with one another in the French capital during the 1920s and 30s, the book asks questions about Blackness, Frenchness, colonialism, racism, identity, and solidarity through a focus on the experiences of a diversity of historical actors and sources. Connecting the rich and complex world of entertainment to social and political change and resistance, the book draws attention to class and gender as well as race to think through issues of nationalism, transnational movement and exchange, and anti-colonialism. Its chapters work with a range of materials including police records, recordings, biography and autobiography, and a wealth of images of/from the diverse Parisian cultural life the era. Pushing beyond the well-established history of white responses to Black musical forms (Jazz and the Biguine) during this period, the book emphasizes the perspective of Black observers, including the famous Nardal sisters of Martinique, who commented on the varied cultural and political effects of artists and performances. The book will be a fascinating read for anyone interested in the history of music, race, and exchanges across the Atlantic, including different points within the French empire during this period. And the legacies of this moment continue to resonate in France and beyond a century later. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and empire. She is the founding host of New Books in French Studies, a channel launched in 2013. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-studies
Rachel Gillett's At Home in Our Sounds: Music, Race, and Cultural Politics in Interwar Paris (Oxford University Press, 2021) explores the world of the French "Jazz Age" in the years after the First World War. Tracing the common ground and differences between communities of African American, French Antillean, and French West African artists who lived, performed, and interacted with one another in the French capital during the 1920s and 30s, the book asks questions about Blackness, Frenchness, colonialism, racism, identity, and solidarity through a focus on the experiences of a diversity of historical actors and sources. Connecting the rich and complex world of entertainment to social and political change and resistance, the book draws attention to class and gender as well as race to think through issues of nationalism, transnational movement and exchange, and anti-colonialism. Its chapters work with a range of materials including police records, recordings, biography and autobiography, and a wealth of images of/from the diverse Parisian cultural life the era. Pushing beyond the well-established history of white responses to Black musical forms (Jazz and the Biguine) during this period, the book emphasizes the perspective of Black observers, including the famous Nardal sisters of Martinique, who commented on the varied cultural and political effects of artists and performances. The book will be a fascinating read for anyone interested in the history of music, race, and exchanges across the Atlantic, including different points within the French empire during this period. And the legacies of this moment continue to resonate in France and beyond a century later. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and empire. She is the founding host of New Books in French Studies, a channel launched in 2013. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts
Rachel Gillett's At Home in Our Sounds: Music, Race, and Cultural Politics in Interwar Paris (Oxford University Press, 2021) explores the world of the French "Jazz Age" in the years after the First World War. Tracing the common ground and differences between communities of African American, French Antillean, and French West African artists who lived, performed, and interacted with one another in the French capital during the 1920s and 30s, the book asks questions about Blackness, Frenchness, colonialism, racism, identity, and solidarity through a focus on the experiences of a diversity of historical actors and sources. Connecting the rich and complex world of entertainment to social and political change and resistance, the book draws attention to class and gender as well as race to think through issues of nationalism, transnational movement and exchange, and anti-colonialism. Its chapters work with a range of materials including police records, recordings, biography and autobiography, and a wealth of images of/from the diverse Parisian cultural life the era. Pushing beyond the well-established history of white responses to Black musical forms (Jazz and the Biguine) during this period, the book emphasizes the perspective of Black observers, including the famous Nardal sisters of Martinique, who commented on the varied cultural and political effects of artists and performances. The book will be a fascinating read for anyone interested in the history of music, race, and exchanges across the Atlantic, including different points within the French empire during this period. And the legacies of this moment continue to resonate in France and beyond a century later. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and empire. She is the founding host of New Books in French Studies, a channel launched in 2013. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music
Rachel Gillett's At Home in Our Sounds: Music, Race, and Cultural Politics in Interwar Paris (Oxford University Press, 2021) explores the world of the French "Jazz Age" in the years after the First World War. Tracing the common ground and differences between communities of African American, French Antillean, and French West African artists who lived, performed, and interacted with one another in the French capital during the 1920s and 30s, the book asks questions about Blackness, Frenchness, colonialism, racism, identity, and solidarity through a focus on the experiences of a diversity of historical actors and sources. Connecting the rich and complex world of entertainment to social and political change and resistance, the book draws attention to class and gender as well as race to think through issues of nationalism, transnational movement and exchange, and anti-colonialism. Its chapters work with a range of materials including police records, recordings, biography and autobiography, and a wealth of images of/from the diverse Parisian cultural life the era. Pushing beyond the well-established history of white responses to Black musical forms (Jazz and the Biguine) during this period, the book emphasizes the perspective of Black observers, including the famous Nardal sisters of Martinique, who commented on the varied cultural and political effects of artists and performances. The book will be a fascinating read for anyone interested in the history of music, race, and exchanges across the Atlantic, including different points within the French empire during this period. And the legacies of this moment continue to resonate in France and beyond a century later. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and empire. She is the founding host of New Books in French Studies, a channel launched in 2013. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies
Rachel Gillett's At Home in Our Sounds: Music, Race, and Cultural Politics in Interwar Paris (Oxford University Press, 2021) explores the world of the French "Jazz Age" in the years after the First World War. Tracing the common ground and differences between communities of African American, French Antillean, and French West African artists who lived, performed, and interacted with one another in the French capital during the 1920s and 30s, the book asks questions about Blackness, Frenchness, colonialism, racism, identity, and solidarity through a focus on the experiences of a diversity of historical actors and sources. Connecting the rich and complex world of entertainment to social and political change and resistance, the book draws attention to class and gender as well as race to think through issues of nationalism, transnational movement and exchange, and anti-colonialism. Its chapters work with a range of materials including police records, recordings, biography and autobiography, and a wealth of images of/from the diverse Parisian cultural life the era. Pushing beyond the well-established history of white responses to Black musical forms (Jazz and the Biguine) during this period, the book emphasizes the perspective of Black observers, including the famous Nardal sisters of Martinique, who commented on the varied cultural and political effects of artists and performances. The book will be a fascinating read for anyone interested in the history of music, race, and exchanges across the Atlantic, including different points within the French empire during this period. And the legacies of this moment continue to resonate in France and beyond a century later. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and empire. She is the founding host of New Books in French Studies, a channel launched in 2013.
Vincent is in Paris, but Le Grand Fromage is definitely not on strike. This week's show has all the elements of a classic LGF episode, but with added Frenchness!
For the French, cheese is a symbol of Frenchness. They've been eating great cheeses for a long time here, some of the most famous were being made thousands of years ago. In this episode we consider some of the most famous cheeses as well as some of the stinkiest, weirdest and frankly gross cheeses that France produces. One of them is officially the smelliest cheese in the world, one has creatures living inside (which apparently adds flavour), one was loved by a King so much it contributed to him losing his head – yes that's you Louis XVI. It's not just a slice of cheese, when it's French, it's also a slice of history and we explore some of the fantastic legends, stories and fun facts in this fun and fascinating homage to French fromage. And in the Q&A section we answer a question from a lady in Melbourne who says she read that France has banned UFOs! Is it true – or not? Find out more in this fun episode... Follow us: On Twitter On Instagram On Facebook On The Good Life France's website On Paris Chanson's Thanks for listening!
In 2010, the French gastronomic meal was protected as a part of UNESCO's intangible cultural heritage – and the food was only part of the package. To discuss some of the other elements so entwined in this bastion of Frenchness is Camille Drozdz, the product designer and ceramicist behind Ici l'Atelier and a co-host of TERRE/MER terroir-based retreats in the South of France. She's here to discuss a phrase closely linked to that oh-so-French passion for food – but rather than talk about what's in the dishes, she's interested in the dishes themselves. Art de la table. Join us on Patreon: patreon.com/parisundergroundradio Find Us OnlineWebsite: https://www.parisundergroundradio.com/navigatingthefrenchFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/parisundergroundradioInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/parisundergroundradio/Credits Host: Emily Monaco. @Emily_in_France; Website: http://www.tomatokumato.com and http://www.emilymmonaco.comProducer: Jennifer Geraghty. @jennyphoria; Website: http://jennyphoria.comMusic Credits Édith Piaf - La Vie en Rose (DeliFB Lofi Remix)
John's Waldorf Salad had plenty of Waldorfs. Quinno doesn't understand chocolate on a charcuterie board. Vincent dipped a TimTam in espresso. French/Australian détente in action.
Ever wondered what makes the French so… well French?! Janine Marsh, resident of northern France, author of three books about life in France for a frequently baffled expat and the editor of magazine and website The Good Life France chats to Olivier Jauffrit, a Frenchman who lives in London about how to be French. Is it dunking your croissants in a cup of hot chocolate, the weird and many rules of etiquette around cheese, and how you say oh la la? Touching on some of the quirk aspects of Frenchness, this is a laugh out loud episode and a whole lot of fun.And in the Q&A section we answer a question from a resident of Pennsylvania, USA "Do French men still wear the beret?" Find out more in this fun episode...Follow us: On Twitter On Instagram On Facebook On The Good Life France's website On Paris Chanson's Thanks for listening!
The crew takes a quick trip to the sex beach to discuss gayness in movies, extreme Frenchness and lake ghosts in 2013's STRANGER BY THE LAKE! www.swimfanspod.com
Episode 3/5: Liberty, Equality, Diversity In this third episode, we are in Paris to look at what it means to be French. What defines Frenchness in a country where a quarter of the population are either immigrants or have immigrant heritage? It is a question that seems to come up in every presidential campaign and inevitably leads to heated debate and by default much tension and soul-searching. Immigration is a particular concern of the far-right candidates Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour who talks about ‘assimilation' rather than ‘integration' of all immigrants. It is also an important factor in the campaign of right-wing candidate Valérie Pécresse and is dividing an already disunited left. At a Zemmour rally on the ouskirts of the capital, we meet Ludovic, son of a Malaysian immigrant, who says he is "proud to be French and fully assimilated". We also hear from Assa Traore, France-born of Malian parentage, whose brother Adama died while being arrested by police in 2016. It was France's George Floyd moment and exposed the systemic racism that many believe still prevails in French life. Narrator & translator: Barney SpenderCreator in French: Antoine Boyer Original music: Clémence Reliat et Nicolas Vair Engineer: Christophe RobertIllustrator: Julie PereiraMarketing and communication: Laurent Nicolas, Coline SalloisEditor: Guy JacksonEditor-in-chief: Michaëla Cancela-Kieffer An AFP Audio podcast.
The French would love for you to believe they're all descended from the Gauls, and as a society have fairly assimilationist views of what makes someone French. Dr. Gemma King is here to help shed some light on a term that might appear to be purely descriptive of a multiplicity of identities within the tapestry of Frenchness but actually has some built-in connotations of purity and what it means to be truly French: d'origine.gemmasking.com@gemma_s_kingJoin us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/parisundergroundradioFind Us OnlineWebsite: https://www.parisundergroundradio.com/navigatingthefrenchFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/parisundergroundradioInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/parisundergroundradio/Credits- Host: Emily Monaco. @Emily_in_France; Website: http://www.tomatokumato.com and http://www.emilymmonaco.comProducer: Jennifer Geraghty. @jennyphoria; Website: http://jennyphoria.comMusic CreditsÉdith Piaf - La Vie en Rose (DeliFB Lofi Remix)
3 February 2022Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:The Colonial Predicament of Colonized Bodieshttps://hessische-theaterakademie.de/de/ringvorlesungAny of the Arab-looking girls in some postcards sent from Algeria in the early 20th century, could have been my ancestor. In 1850, a British traveler who visited one of the embroidery schools in colonized Algeria reported: “there were several little Jewesses squatting most amicably among the Mauresques, conspicuous only by their simpler robe of colored stuff and a conical cap of red velvet, tipped with gold lace.” The photographs I have of my grandmother in Algeria, taken a few decades later, show her already as a French-looking woman, a Jewish Arab who has learned the lesson of Frenchness these schools were established to impart. Where did my great-great grandmother, who was a native Algerian and could have been one of these girls, disappear to? This lesson of Frenchness, standardization, eradication has a name in French: laïcité. The term “secularism” doesn't quite capture the stripping bare the worldliness, or being-in-the-world, of a person, which laïcité requires. Part of solving the “Jewish question” in Europe required the refashioning of Jews as secular Europeans (who could still be “Jews” at home) before they could go in public. With the French conquest of Algeria, the Jews were singled out from the Arabs and were made into a “problem,” forced to get rid of what identified them as indigenous, so that a few decades later the colonial regime could reward them for their efforts with the gift of French citizenship. The lecture will explore some aspects of the colonial predicament of the decolonization of bodies.The Colonial Predicament of Colonized Bodieshttps://www.uni-giessen.de/fbz/fb05/atw/aktuelles/un-settled-performance-protection-and-politics-of-insecurityAriella Aïsha Azoulay, professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature, film essayist and curator of archives and exhibitions. Her books include: Potential History – Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019), Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (Verso, 2012), The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008) and From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950 (Pluto Press 2011). Among her films: Un-documented: Unlearning Imperial Plunder (2019), Civil Alliances, Palestine, 47-48 (2012). Among her exhibitions Errata (Tapiès Foundation, 2019, HKW, Berlin, 2020), and Enough! The Natural Violence of New World Order, (F/Stop photography festival, Leipzig, 2016).
À Table: Recipes For Cooking + Eating The French WayBy Rebekah Peppler Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.Rebekah Peppler: I'm Rebekah Peppler and my book is called À Table: Recipes For Cooking + Eating The French Way.Suzy Chase: In 2015 you started splitting your time between Paris and Brooklyn, which became Paris and LA and then Paris full time. How did that evolve?Rebekah Peppler: So basically I was living correct in New York in 2015, and I had started to kind of get this just like gut feeling that I needed a change. Um, and that change wasn't going to happen in New York. And I, at the time was working quite regularly as a food stylist primarily, um, but had wanted to get back into writing as kind of my primary profession. And so I decided that I would split time between New York and another city and I really wasn't sure where it was going to be. It was actually between LA and Paris kind of just popped up out of the blue. I had spent a little time there just on a holiday. I swapped my apartment in Brooklyn with a teacher in Paris and just lived there for, for six weeks, trying to get an idea of if I wanted to even make that move and I would say like two weeks in, I was absolutely not, not for me. Um, I didn't have any French at the time and it, it didn't feel like the right city. And then about three weeks in my kind of mindset changed completely. And I was like, you know what, actually, this is, this is exactly what I want to be doing. And so I started splitting my time between Paris and New York. And then, um, and then it became Paris and LA, uh, for a brief moment in time. And then it became Paris kind of totally however you are reaching me while I'm in LA. And so I don't think I've really shed that Paris LA commute quite yet, but all of my stuff lives in Paris, which is, which is a very exciting thing for me to, uh, to feel a kind of concrete home in one place.Suzy Chase: The subtitle of this cookbook is Recipes For Cooking + Eating The French way. So the phrase recipes for cooking, I know how I interpreted it as, like achievable, delicious recipes for the home cook, but what were you thinking?Rebekah Peppler: Oh, I actually never even thought about that. Um, how it could be interpreted in a different way for me. Uh, the subtitle kind of was born out of the fact that when I first pitched this book, um, and I know that you've spoken to quite a few authors. So, you know, that kind of proposal starts prior to writing the book and is sold. Um, it was more centered around gathering in my head and kind of like gathering around the table, eating together, cooking together. And it also evolved into me wanting to be able to say, you know, just cooking and eating the French way because, you know, I lived alone in Paris at the time and I was sometimes just cooking for one and sometimes I was cooking for two and sometimes I was cooking for eight. And so I didn't want to kind of pigeonhole it into a cooking only for a big group of people and then, um, fortuitously, when the book came out, we were still in the middle of the pandemic. And so it actually, um, translated even better than I could have ever imagined when I was kind of shifting in the beginning stages book.Suzy Chase: What does eating the French way look?Rebekah Peppler: Like for me personally, kind of eating the French way is just kind of enjoying your food and enjoying the moment that you're in and opening a bottle of wine or pouring an Apéritif, whether that be alcoholic or non alcoholic to usher in your night and really like kind of living in the moment and enjoying the things that you have and if you're around people, the people that are around you and the conversation that is flowing. And that to me is eating the French way.Suzy Chase: These 25 new French recipes that are in the cookbook were developed along the way back when you used to host impromptu weekly gatherings. À Table is the mirror image of the weekly dinner parties that you described in the beginning of the cookbook. As I leaf through the book, I feel like I'm right there and your grand Paris apartment with a suze sour in my hand, I see myself in a floral suit with Gucci pumps, kicking my head back, laughing with some interesting arty people and sharing life stories over delicious food. Please tell me if that's how it really is, right?Rebekah Peppler: Yes, you've, you've described it so perfectly and beautifully. Um, and I, and I do hope that that will become reality once again, um, as you mentioned, yes, the recipes were developed along the way. And also the images in the book feature, all the people that gather around my table and France anyway. And so they're all friends who have been at my dinners, the recipes were developed and tested in my kitchen and in friends kitchens around the world, if we're talking about kind of the Sunday nights, which is how this book started, um, was just kind of, I had people over for Sunday suppers, I would start the start time a little early, like around 6:00 PM, which is not your classic French way of doing things, but it's, um, it's my way of doing things. Uh, and so everybody kind of comes in the door at different moments. Everybody has a different kind of idea of what a start time at 6:00 PM really means, but by 7:00 PM, everyone's there and they have a drink in their hand. I have a beautiful balcony area. And so we're usually out there in good weather drinking and snacking and chatting, and then kind of getting rid of the stress of the day, um, in order to be able to then go inside. If the weather is again still nice, the doors remain open, and sit down and share a meal together. And yeah, the light, as you can see in the pages of the book, Joann Pai, our photographer shot it so beautifully, the lightest stunning in France and it really does create this kind of magical feeling when you're sitting around a table together.Suzy Chase: You can find me on the balcony. That's all I have to say.Rebekah Peppler: Exactly.Suzy Chase: À Table is the cookbook that is getting me excited to have dinner parties again. What are some of your tips for gathering in the modern way, minus the pressed linens, floral arrangements and babysitters.Rebekah Peppler: When you think of kind of the way that entertainment guides were set out in earlier day is it was very much like to do lists, do this at this time, this, at this time, this two days before, press your linens, fresh flowers on the table, et cetera. For me, I think that the way that we gather and the way that we will gather again, very, very soon, hopefully is intimate. If there are parents in the group of which there are in my life, um, sometimes the kids come with sometimes they don't, but there's not this need to kind of exclude the flower arrangements. There might be some beautiful flowers I see at the farmer's market that day that I grab and kind of throw in a vase or that someone brings to me and I grab again and throw in a vase, but it's not going to be meticulously set out the linens 100% in my life are never pressed because I don't have the inclination to spend the time doing that. And that allows space to gather more often and with less pressure and more of a, like, you know, come over at 6:00 PM, I'll have a drink like oh yeah, will you grab a couple bottles of sparkling water to bring up that kind of thing. It feels, it just feels more familiar. And also the way that we, that we do this now with the people that we love,Suzy Chase: Can you describe your Nicoise Salad for a crowd on page one 55? It looks amazing.Rebekah Peppler: Thank you. I love this recipe and this image. We wanted it to have a little bit of a garden party feel for lack of better descriptor and my incredible food styling assistant. Lena had this brilliant idea. She was like, what if we just stand in the doors, leading out to the balcony with these branches that you randomly have in your house and pass this light through this beautiful kind of mid day sun that was coming into the apartment. So this was actually shot in my apartment in Paris. And the light kind of gives you an idea that you're outside kind of in dappled light. The recipe itself is I think I say in the head note, it's kind of a choose your own adventure. And it absolutely is that I give a recipe for the vinaigrette and then the salad is kind of a list of ingredients that can kind of come and go as you have and what season you're in. And, um, what you prefer. I would say for me, the non-negotiables are like the handful of salted capers. And of course the nicoise olives, I think that punch of, of salty briny earthiness anchors the salad really nicely. And then when I'm serving it, what I kind of also mean by choose your adventure is only the ingredients that are kind of laid out on this platter itself. But the way that people, uh, at the table are making it, it's kind of, uh, you choose, if you like potatoes more than the other person, there's more potatoes on your plate. If you don't want eggs, you don't have to have them. Um, and I kind of let it be a kind of grab and go, as you will affair instead of opening the can of tuna for the photo, I want it to kind of just like throw it on the plate like I would when I'm throwing a dinner party and like open it last minute and everybody just kind of reaches in with a fork and grabs what they want. And I think that's the hope that I have for many of these recipes that are more shareable is that there's not this intent placed on having everything look perfect or be quote unquote, beautiful. I find beautiful is often found in the imperfect, um, and in the messy and in the like green being that rolls off and is covered in vinegarette and gets the tablecloth all dirty because that's what you want to have a washer for. That's I hope what the embodiment of at least this Nicoise For A Crowd is it's make a big platter and let everybody grab stuff. And it's a fun, interactive experience for everyone. And of course, if you're serving nicoise and you also drink wine and I highly recommend a very cold, wonderful Rosé, because that's what you would be drinking in France. If you were in nice having any nicoise salad.Suzy Chase: In France, there's an added and basically mandatory apéritif hour. So can you talk a little bit about that?Rebekah Peppler: Absolutely. So that was the subject of my first book, Apéritif and I delve very deeply into it in that book, but it is also a huge part of À Table because it is a huge part of the French table and cooking and eating and drinking the French way. And so the hour of Apéritif or Aperol hour or just Aperol is this time of day, that is very special. It kind of demarcate the end of the workday and the start at the evening and allows you to kind of transition from you are having a stressful day from kind of the busy-ness and the craziness and the intensity of the day, turn that kind of part of your brain off and switch into the evening. So it's usually a drink it's often alcoholic, although the culture of Apéritif extends to everybody. So as many of my French friends have told me, they would go to Aperol hours as children and they would have a special drink and that was non-alcoholic, but still very special to them. And so whatever is special to you can be an Aperol drink and I always kind of make that very clear. So you have a drink and then you always have something to snack on next to it. It can be a big snack or a little snack. It can be, often is a basket of potato chips or a little like crunchy salty things, olives that kind of variety in order to kind of whet your appetite and open up your palate for the rest of the night.Suzy Chase: How do you make shrimp cocktail French"Rebekah Peppler: Shrimp Cocktail, but Make It French. That's one of my favorite recipe titles. I had fun with with a lot of them, but that one was a good one. So to make it French, I just added this instead of the kind of classic cocktail sauce is this French remoulade that you're dipping shrimp in.Suzy Chase: One time when Dorie Greenspan was on this podcast, I asked her what I would get when I arrived at her house in Paris. And she said she would serve me Gougères. And on page 80, you have a recipe for XL Gougères. Can you tell me about these beauts? They're gorgeous.Rebekah Peppler: It's so funny when you said Dorie and what she would serve you. I was like, Oh, well it's Gougères it's Dorie's signature and I've been very fortunate to partake in many Gougères in her house in Paris and hers are incredible. My particular XL Gougères recipe in À Table is actually inspired by the bakery down the street from me has the most insane, massive Gougères that you, they kind of, they come out of the oven. I've timed this now sometime between like 10 and 11:30 in the morning. And so I, before I had a washer in my apartment, which I would walk down many, many, many flights of stairs to do my laundry at this laundromat. And it was right across the street from my favorite bakery. And so I would drop my stuff in the laundry. I would time it. So I would get there around the time that the Gougères would come out of the oven and then I would walk over and get myself this massive Gougères. And that would be my breakfast. And I've been wanting to make them at home ever since. And so at the bakery, they have a couple options. You can get them with like chorizo in them. You can get them the kind of standard traditional way, or you can get them with blue cheese. And so I decided to add crumbled blue cheese into, into my rendition an ode to my favorite bakery in Paris.Suzy Chase: This line you wrote is very deep, somewhere on your Instagram, but it goes.There's also a feeling of it being hard to truly ever be fully known because it's intensely hard to be your full, true self through constant interpretation and translation on both sides. I want to hear more about that.Rebekah Peppler: That that's in reference to my first relationship in France with this wonderful French woman. I felt very open to be my full self when I moved to France, because I didn't know anyone. And I was meeting people for the first time. And I think that's such an opportunity to kind of show yourself as, as you are in that moment, without all these kinds of things that people have placed on from knowing you for, for years or, or for your entire life. And so when I moved to Paris, I really like showed my true self and made my friends there with the person that I was. But at the same time, that like deeper nugget of like who you very much are realized in communication. And if you can't effectively communicate, or if there's misunderstandings or if you're, you know, in French, if you mispronounce a word, it can kind of mean something completely different. So this one, c'est pas mal which means, uh, literally it's not bad but me ex would, I would cook for her. And I was like, Oh, do you like it? And c'est pas mal. And I'm like, oh, that's not bad. That's like, I think that's like, I think that might be a diss on my cookie. And I'm like, I think I'm pretty good at this. Like, this is kind of part of my job. And I kind of let it go a few times. It just kept happening. And finally, I can't remember if it was her or if it was another friend who's a French speaker who kind of translated the translation for me. So when you say, c'est pas mal it's actually like, oh, this is great. Like, this is good. Like I like this. And when you say, c'est bon which means it's good and this all depends on inflection as well, but it can often mean it's okay. Like, it's, it's good. It's, it's like solid enough, but c'est pas mal is like, oh, this is, this is actually great. Like it's really good. And it was actually for expressing excitement. And so that was just one of the kind of lighthearted miscommunication moments that I had early on in my first kind of French/American relationship there.Suzy Chase: You wrote keep your bacon, egg, and cheese, your bloody mary, your Pedialyte, when I'm hung over, I make a wedge salad. I'm dying to hear about your wedge salad.Rebekah Peppler: Yeah, it's true. That head note comes from a very, honest place. That's what I, that's what I make when I'm hung over. And it does not matter where I am in the world. I crave like that kind of blue cheese dressing situation and like fresh lettuce with like bacon, which you're still, you know, you're getting in your bacon, egg, and cheese. I see the allure. And so for the version in À Table, I do a sucrine wedge and sucrine are just these beautiful, like small lettuces that are quite sweet and kind of look a little bit like a very small romaine with a very hardy crunch. And so they were kind of the perfect wedge that is also French. And then I top it with lardons. You can use bacon, shallots, radishes, and then the dressing has blue cheese, of course in it. But I also use a little bit of creme fresh to kind of heighten the Frenchness of it all.Suzy Chase: Your Instagram is amazing and I adore your photos from Paris, your food shots, your apartment drinks, the poems you post. I really like appetite from Paulann Petersen and your journey with COVID. I have to say you were so open about it. How was it opening up on social media and how are you feeling today?Rebekah Peppler: Thank you for all the compliments, but, especially bringing up the COVID experience. So I got sick with COVID very early on in the pandemic, March, 2020, you know, at the time we were told the symptoms were coughing and fever and that it would take two weeks and you'd be done unless you had to go to the hospital. And so after two weeks I was still very sick and it just kind of kept going. And then, I decided dark sharing a little bit about it. My main reason was because I wasn't seeing anyone else like me sharing this experience. And I knew that other people must be going through what I was going through. I thought that it would be important to kind of share it as the process goes along. I definitely was, you know, very careful and kept things private and kept things pretty professional. If you can put it that way, I was very much like a list-maker of like what my symptoms are and what I'm going through. And then talked a little bit about kind of the emotional unrest that was happening alongside that. But yeah, it just felt very important to share. And then as my kind of COVID progressed into long COVID, I felt like there were a lot of people reaching out to me, both friends and people I had not met previously who either were going through similar things or had questions or were just recently sick or on the other hand, no one in their life had gotten sick with COVID and I was their one touch point that felt really special for me to kind of hear when people would say, like, I'm more careful because of the story that you've been telling. And I hope that that, that translated into something that kept them at least a couple other people safe and not having to go through the same experience that I did and so many others did. I'm not fully better. I still have lingering symptoms you know, there's still so much that I used to be able to do that. I can't, but I have progressed so much in my recovery when I looked back at how sick I was, um, it's astonishing to me how articulate I was able to be, but also, and the stub tails into the question that you asked and kind of ties it back into À Table a little bit I had sent my manuscript for the book two weeks prior to kind of getting sick. And then I still had to go through all the phases that a cookbook goes through, design edits, you know, cover proofs and all these things. And so months into kind of being sick, I kind of gathered all my energy up and rested for days in advance and we finished some of the shots that we needed to finish. When I look back on both the posting that I did on Instagram and this book itself, it's a real testament to sheer force of will to get it done and love for the project itself and now when I see those images that we shot, when I was still very sick, it fills me with quite a bit of joy and gratitude for being able to kind of have those tucked into the book.Suzy Chase: A lot of people were thankful because when I was reading that I saw a very, very thoughtful PSA that you were writing along with these evocative photos. I want to say they were gorgeous photos, but you were really sick at the time, but there was just something beautiful about the photos and very thoughtful about what you're writing. Like you were letting people know this is what I'm going through, and I'm going to help you out too.Rebekah Peppler: To touch on your comment on how beautiful the photos were first thank you so much. But also I think that that just speaks to the fact that there is beauty in life. And I think that's something that I came back to many times, and I won't say that it was always this clear cut or easy for me to kind of admit, but life is beautiful and I feel very grateful for getting to continue with itSuzy Chase: In À Table I was reading, reading, reading, and got to page 200 where you wrote, there's a lot of chicken in this book and I'm fine with it. And I was just thinking, this is amazing there's so much chicken in this book. So last night for dinner, I made your recipe for Chicken Confit. Why Chicken Confit and not Duck Confit. And can you describe this recipe and why all the chicken?Rebekah Peppler: Absolutely. Yes, there is a lot of chicken in this book and I am very much fine with it. As you know, Duck Confit is a classic French dish that however duck is harder to find and it's more expensive. And to be honest for me, as much as I love Duck Confit I don't want to eat it all the time. Let's not like that's a, that's a very rich meal. And so after writing the Chicken Confit, I realized that it's, it's still rich. I mean, it's got, you know, five to six cups of olive oil that the chicken is cooking in and you should be using that olive oil for drizzling on other things and all that fun stuff. After you've used it for the Chicken Confit, it's still kind of reads light. It reads spring-like, there's leeks in it, there's a pod of garlic, which is amazing, and you can like smash that on bread, and like eat it as a, like a little toast the next day without any chicken at all. So that's kind of why I wrote the recipe as chicken rather than duck. I tested this recipe many times, but one time here in Los Angeles, actually with two of my friends, Alexis and Jamie, and I remember all of us just kind of like descending on the oil dredging our bread and it also, I think we had a baguette at that time and it's just, it's so flavorful and delicious and the chicken is I don't want to speak poorly of the chicken because it's very good, but the oil is for me where it's at.Suzy Chase: Now for my segment called Last Night's Dinner, where I ask you what you had last night for dinnerRebekah Peppler: Last night, we actually, um, picked up takeout as we kind of talked about a little bit. I'm still kind of dealing with the long COVID and I had a Thai Spice Soup from Night + Market Song, this really lovely spicy soup for dinner and kind of helped like nourish my body and make sure that I wasn't getting too run down. It was great. We got it with coconut rice and then I kind of go in and out of bouts of, of drinking and when I'm not feeling as well and that's what kind of, one of the triggers, my particular COVID experience. And so I've been drinking a lot of Ghia, which is this like wonderful non-alcoholic aperitif with just a little sparkling water and Meyer lemon and my partner had a glass of wine and I only looked at it like slightly longingly. And then I returned to my, to my drink.Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?Rebekah Peppler: Very easy if you know how to spell my name but I'm @RebekahPeppler on Instagram. It's R E B E K A H P E P P L E R. And I am also www.RebekahPeppler.com.Suzy Chase: This cookbook gives me so much hope and joy for people gathering together again. And I'm so glad you're feeling better. And thanks so much, Rebekah for coming on Cookery by the Book Podcast.Rebekah Peppler: Thank you so much for having me and for your, for your wonderful thoughtful questions. It's been a true pleasure.Outro: Subscribe over on CookerybytheBook.com. And thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.
www.loulabellesfrancofiles.comWay way back in LFF episode 2 we were all introduced to some terrific music by an unknown musician Romain Dupré who is also an old school friend of our favourite French correspondent Sarah Zwick.Romain Dupré chatted to me in this episode about his life in France, about how Paris is changing through this COVID period, and about his hopes for helping his community to heal after this strange stage of history is over. Romain was concerned about his English, but I found listening to his strong French accent strangely comforting. To me it was as though there is something that this virus can't take away, and that is the strength and spirit of the French people, their stoicness, their Frenchness. There is a rawness in this chat that I don't normally find. Romain was clearly wanting me to hear about the REAL Paris. About how the world actually is for them all right now. I loved hearing about his first experience with rock and roll when his mother put on an album "The Best of The Doors" and how with a broken amplifier it was incredibly loud with the music actually shaking his little child body to its core. He loved it and was sold.Romain is a man who loves to visit his family in Bayonne even tough he's not a fan of travel. He adores and plays with his children, gives extra time to his students he teaches at high school and follows his heart with his music. It takes a lot of courage to do an interview in your second language, as well as a hefty amount of trust. I'm thrilled that Romain agreed to chat to me.This is a glimpse into a real French life, which is rare. Not an ex-Pat, not a tourist, not a francophile. I find talks with all those categories of people to be wonderfully fulfilling and terribly important to our continued knowledge and understanding of France. However, this chat enabled me to see a different Paris, not the history or the excitement we all crave from France, but the daily challenges and conversely the triumphs. The ordinary and simultaneously fabulous.I now more than ever can't wait to return...
The preface to Robin Mitchell's new book, Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France (University of Georgia Press, 2020) moves me. In it, the author tells the story of her first research trip to Paris and the profound moment of her encounter with a plaster cast of Sarah Baartman's body at the Musée de l'Homme. It is riveting, personal, and honest, the perfect entry into a book that is all of these things. Exploring the cultural production of French representations of three extraordinary Black women (Baartman, Ourika, and Jeanne Duval), the book interrogates the visual and literary imaginaries that white French men and women developed in relationship to these women's lives and bodies. Subjected to a perverse "scientific" fascination, Baartman's body became "famous" throughout and beyond France as white gazes and fantasies sexualized and pathologized her for years until she died. Brought to France from Senegal by the Maréchal Prince de Beauvau, Ourika became the subject of what Mitchell characterizes as a cultural consumptive "mania" that both emulated and rejected her story and the possibilities of her "Frenchness". The lover and common law wife of poet Charles Baudelaire, Jeanne Duval lived an entire life in France, but could never be "French enough." Marked and minoritized by their racial difference, all three women became sites of fixation and memory for a white population seeking/needing constant shoring up of their gendered and racialized identities, and a society haunted by loss and defeat in the wake of the Haitian Revolution. The book is so beautiful, so clearly written, so overflowing with injustice, meaning, and feeling. And Mitchell's voice is there throughout, finding and honouring the voices and lives of these women. It is a book for everyone. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, ‘“No Hiroshima in Africa”: The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara' appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads on the unceded traditional territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) peoples known as Vancouver, Canada and hopes all listeners are keeping healthy and safe at this difficult time in our world. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The preface to Robin Mitchell's new book, Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France (University of Georgia Press, 2020) moves me. In it, the author tells the story of her first research trip to Paris and the profound moment of her encounter with a plaster cast of Sarah Baartmann's body at the Musée de l'Homme. It is riveting, personal, and honest, the perfect entry into a book that is all of these things. Exploring the cultural production of French representations of three extraordinary Black women (Baartmann, Ourika, and Jeanne Duval), the book interrogates the visual and literary imaginaries that white French men and women developed in relationship to these women's lives and bodies. Subjected to a perverse "scientific" fascination, Baartmann's body became "famous" throughout and beyond France as white gazes and fantasies sexualized and pathologized her for years until she died. Brought to France from Senegal by the Maréchal Prince de Beauvau, Ourika became the subject of what Mitchell characterizes as a cultural consumptive "mania" that both emulated and rejected her story and the possibilities of her "Frenchness". The lover and common law wife of poet Charles Baudelaire, Jeanne Duval lived an entire life in France, but could never be "French enough." Marked and minoritized by their racial difference, all three women became sites of fixation and memory for a white population seeking/needing constant shoring up of their gendered and racialized identities, and a society haunted by loss and defeat in the wake of the Haitian Revolution. The book is so beautiful, so clearly written, so overflowing with injustice, meaning, and feeling. And Mitchell's voice is there throughout, finding and honouring the voices and lives of these women. It is a book for everyone. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, ‘“No Hiroshima in Africa”: The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara’ appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads on the unceded traditional territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) peoples known as Vancouver, Canada and hopes all listeners are keeping healthy and safe at this difficult time in our world. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The preface to Robin Mitchell's new book, Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France (University of Georgia Press, 2020) moves me. In it, the author tells the story of her first research trip to Paris and the profound moment of her encounter with a plaster cast of Sarah Baartmann's body at the Musée de l'Homme. It is riveting, personal, and honest, the perfect entry into a book that is all of these things. Exploring the cultural production of French representations of three extraordinary Black women (Baartmann, Ourika, and Jeanne Duval), the book interrogates the visual and literary imaginaries that white French men and women developed in relationship to these women's lives and bodies. Subjected to a perverse "scientific" fascination, Baartmann's body became "famous" throughout and beyond France as white gazes and fantasies sexualized and pathologized her for years until she died. Brought to France from Senegal by the Maréchal Prince de Beauvau, Ourika became the subject of what Mitchell characterizes as a cultural consumptive "mania" that both emulated and rejected her story and the possibilities of her "Frenchness". The lover and common law wife of poet Charles Baudelaire, Jeanne Duval lived an entire life in France, but could never be "French enough." Marked and minoritized by their racial difference, all three women became sites of fixation and memory for a white population seeking/needing constant shoring up of their gendered and racialized identities, and a society haunted by loss and defeat in the wake of the Haitian Revolution. The book is so beautiful, so clearly written, so overflowing with injustice, meaning, and feeling. And Mitchell's voice is there throughout, finding and honouring the voices and lives of these women. It is a book for everyone. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, ‘“No Hiroshima in Africa”: The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara’ appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads on the unceded traditional territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) peoples known as Vancouver, Canada and hopes all listeners are keeping healthy and safe at this difficult time in our world. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The preface to Robin Mitchell's new book, Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France (University of Georgia Press, 2020) moves me. In it, the author tells the story of her first research trip to Paris and the profound moment of her encounter with a plaster cast of Sarah Baartmann's body at the Musée de l'Homme. It is riveting, personal, and honest, the perfect entry into a book that is all of these things. Exploring the cultural production of French representations of three extraordinary Black women (Baartmann, Ourika, and Jeanne Duval), the book interrogates the visual and literary imaginaries that white French men and women developed in relationship to these women's lives and bodies. Subjected to a perverse "scientific" fascination, Baartmann's body became "famous" throughout and beyond France as white gazes and fantasies sexualized and pathologized her for years until she died. Brought to France from Senegal by the Maréchal Prince de Beauvau, Ourika became the subject of what Mitchell characterizes as a cultural consumptive "mania" that both emulated and rejected her story and the possibilities of her "Frenchness". The lover and common law wife of poet Charles Baudelaire, Jeanne Duval lived an entire life in France, but could never be "French enough." Marked and minoritized by their racial difference, all three women became sites of fixation and memory for a white population seeking/needing constant shoring up of their gendered and racialized identities, and a society haunted by loss and defeat in the wake of the Haitian Revolution. The book is so beautiful, so clearly written, so overflowing with injustice, meaning, and feeling. And Mitchell's voice is there throughout, finding and honouring the voices and lives of these women. It is a book for everyone. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, ‘“No Hiroshima in Africa”: The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara’ appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads on the unceded traditional territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) peoples known as Vancouver, Canada and hopes all listeners are keeping healthy and safe at this difficult time in our world. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The preface to Robin Mitchell's new book, Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France (University of Georgia Press, 2020) moves me. In it, the author tells the story of her first research trip to Paris and the profound moment of her encounter with a plaster cast of Sarah Baartmann's body at the Musée de l'Homme. It is riveting, personal, and honest, the perfect entry into a book that is all of these things. Exploring the cultural production of French representations of three extraordinary Black women (Baartmann, Ourika, and Jeanne Duval), the book interrogates the visual and literary imaginaries that white French men and women developed in relationship to these women's lives and bodies. Subjected to a perverse "scientific" fascination, Baartmann's body became "famous" throughout and beyond France as white gazes and fantasies sexualized and pathologized her for years until she died. Brought to France from Senegal by the Maréchal Prince de Beauvau, Ourika became the subject of what Mitchell characterizes as a cultural consumptive "mania" that both emulated and rejected her story and the possibilities of her "Frenchness". The lover and common law wife of poet Charles Baudelaire, Jeanne Duval lived an entire life in France, but could never be "French enough." Marked and minoritized by their racial difference, all three women became sites of fixation and memory for a white population seeking/needing constant shoring up of their gendered and racialized identities, and a society haunted by loss and defeat in the wake of the Haitian Revolution. The book is so beautiful, so clearly written, so overflowing with injustice, meaning, and feeling. And Mitchell's voice is there throughout, finding and honouring the voices and lives of these women. It is a book for everyone. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, ‘“No Hiroshima in Africa”: The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara’ appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads on the unceded traditional territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) peoples known as Vancouver, Canada and hopes all listeners are keeping healthy and safe at this difficult time in our world. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The preface to Robin Mitchell's new book, Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France (University of Georgia Press, 2020) moves me. In it, the author tells the story of her first research trip to Paris and the profound moment of her encounter with a plaster cast of Sarah Baartmann's body at the Musée de l'Homme. It is riveting, personal, and honest, the perfect entry into a book that is all of these things. Exploring the cultural production of French representations of three extraordinary Black women (Baartmann, Ourika, and Jeanne Duval), the book interrogates the visual and literary imaginaries that white French men and women developed in relationship to these women's lives and bodies. Subjected to a perverse "scientific" fascination, Baartmann's body became "famous" throughout and beyond France as white gazes and fantasies sexualized and pathologized her for years until she died. Brought to France from Senegal by the Maréchal Prince de Beauvau, Ourika became the subject of what Mitchell characterizes as a cultural consumptive "mania" that both emulated and rejected her story and the possibilities of her "Frenchness". The lover and common law wife of poet Charles Baudelaire, Jeanne Duval lived an entire life in France, but could never be "French enough." Marked and minoritized by their racial difference, all three women became sites of fixation and memory for a white population seeking/needing constant shoring up of their gendered and racialized identities, and a society haunted by loss and defeat in the wake of the Haitian Revolution. The book is so beautiful, so clearly written, so overflowing with injustice, meaning, and feeling. And Mitchell's voice is there throughout, finding and honouring the voices and lives of these women. It is a book for everyone. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, ‘“No Hiroshima in Africa”: The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara’ appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads on the unceded traditional territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) peoples known as Vancouver, Canada and hopes all listeners are keeping healthy and safe at this difficult time in our world. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Let's bid adieu to 2020 with a heartwarming tale of sitting on a small-town jury. Did you know adieu means "to God"? So when we bid adieu to 2020, we're really saying, "To God with 2020," when maybe what we really mean to say is "To hell with 2020." Which would be to bid "en enfer" to 2020. But if we said that no one would know what we were talking about except the French, and who really cares about them? I mean, I like their baguettes and some of their cheeses, but if I'm being honest, I can live without the rest of it. All that Frenchness over there. And if you think about it, the hard outer part of a baguette is pretty rough on the gums and hard palate, so that doesn't leave much to recommend France or the French. Okay. Rural juror. Here it is. Oh, and near the end I say, "I had to try to laugh," when what I meant to say was I had to try NOT to laugh. Selah.
First-time guest Kamille joins us for a conversation about Tiny Pretty Things, Netflix's new Center Stage-with-teens ballet thriller (?), and while she watched the whole thing, neither she nor the fulltime panel thinks it's good. But aside from the wretched VO, suspect acting, unwelcome parallels to 13 Reasons Why and decided un-Frenchness of cartoon villain Lauren Holly, is TPT a good time-waster? Not to worry: we found you some definite time-wasters when we went Around The Dial with The Wilds and 12 Dates Of Christmas, panned Deliciousness, and helped you cut down that HBO-documentary backlog with a watch-skip index of recent prestige true crime. We couldn't help but wonder if Sex & The City's fourth-season premiere was the Canon's soulmate. Boots Riley and Jharrel Jerome won (for now), Ellen and Ellen lost (again), and Suley wassailed us with a TV/Christmas song Game Time. Don't let the dorm mother catch you listening to an all-new Extra Hot Great! GUESTS
First-time guest Kamille joins us for a conversation about Tiny Pretty Things, Netflix's new Center Stage-with-teens ballet thriller (?), and while she watched the whole thing, neither she nor the fulltime panel thinks it's good. But aside from the wretched VO, suspect acting, unwelcome parallels to 13 Reasons Why and decided un-Frenchness of cartoon villain Lauren Holly, is TPT a good time-waster? Not to worry: we found you some definite time-wasters when we went Around The Dial with The Wilds and 12 Dates Of Christmas, panned Deliciousness, and helped you cut down that HBO-documentary backlog with a watch-skip index of recent prestige true crime. We couldn't help but wonder if Sex & The City's fourth-season premiere was the Canon's soulmate. Boots Riley and Jharrel Jerome won (for now), Ellen and Ellen lost (again), and Suley wassailed us with a TV/Christmas song Game Time. Don't let the dorm mother catch you listening to an all-new Extra Hot Great!SHOW TOPICSTiny Pretty ThingsATD: The WildsATD: DeliciousnessATD: 12 Dates Of ChristmasATD: HBO true-crime documentariesThe Canon: Sex & The City S04.E01: The Agony and the Ex-tacyWinner and Loser of the WeekGame Time: The Caroling Burnett ShowSHOW NOTESKamille Washington on TwitterKamille's podcast (with past guest Christina Tucker) Unfriendly Black HottiesTara's Pennyworth piece on DeciderThe Quaid In Full podcastTara and Sarah talk about their 90210 book on the People Still Read Books podcast...and about Northpole on Dave And Jeb Aren't MeanSarah's HBO-docs coverage at PrimetimerThe Mark And Sarah Talk About Songs Patreon pagePhoto: NetflixDISCUSSIONTalk about this episode on its dedicated page on ExtraHotGreat.comTweet at us @ExtraHotPodcast on TwitterWe are @ExtraHotGreat on InstagramSUPPORT EHG ON PATREONThe EHG gang have been recording this podcast for almost a decade now. In podcasting terms, that makes us positively Methuselahian. Since the start of EHG, our listeners have asked if we had a tip jar or donation system and we'd look at each other and say surely that is a joke, people don't pay other people to do podcasts. We'd email them back "Ha ha ha, good one, Chet" and go about our business. Now we are told this is a real thing that real nice people do. Value for value? In today's... See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
I first met Lauren Collins about fifteen years ago, when we were both working at The New Yorker. I noticed her immediately—The New Yorker can be a quiet place, but she was friendly and effervescent—she even asked me out for drinks! But she was also very focused. She radiated energy––like a blonde, Tasmanian devil, but much more charming and polite. (She grew up in the south, in Wilmington, North Carolina—that may explain it.) In 2010, The New Yorker sent Lauren––who was by then a staff writer––to live and write in London. She met a Frenchman there, Olivier, who would become her husband. She moved to Geneva for him—and then she made an even bigger sacrifice: she started to learn French. Her book about that, When in French: Love in a Second Language, was named one of The New York Times’s 100 Notable Books of 2016. Soon, she moved to Paris, where she still lives today with her husband and her two little children, writing about current events and the enigmas of language, culture and identity that she runs into every day across the Atlantic. I talked with Lauren in May, over Zoom, about life in Paris under “le confinement,” which is what the French call lockdown—and about the mysteries of Frenchness that she's still decoding.
Francis is a business consultant, author, and speaker. He is the founder of The Human Company and The Squircle Academy. As a consultant, he has worked with companies as Siemens, Maybelline, Loreal, Ralph Loren, and many many more. In this episode, we talk about Francis’s path, opera singing, Frenchness, sustainability, and being cool with being a work in progress. Francis's book Squircle: A New Way To Think For A New World is available on Amazon https://www.squircleacademy.com/ #HereToStay #ImmigrantsAreEssential www.WeTheAliensPod.com Follow us on Facebook and Instagram. And on Twitter @WeTheAliensPod Music: "My country" courtesy of Ben Bostick. www.benbostick.com
Roe & Rory take a look at 2002's romantic drama thriller Unfaithful. Aside from netting Diane Lane an Oscar nomination, it also manages to offer a more complex and interesting examination of infidelity than most Hollywood movies. Until, well, it doesn't. Digressions include how sorry the third party should be about their role in cheating, the problematic panic defence, & the Venn diagram intersection of Frenchness and smugness.
David Ginola was one of the most exciting and daring wingers of the nineties, dazzling supporters of Newcastle United and Spurs with his tremendous skill and devilish good looks. On the latest episode of the 90's Football Hall of Fame podcast, Ste McGovern and Peter Henry are joined by football writer and podcaster Stephen Tudor to talk about Ginola's legacy in the Premier League, why he was reviled in his native France, how he ended up in the North East, and what made him so entertaining on the pitch. We also talk about his unrelenting Frenchness and the effect he had on middle-aged 'heterosexual' men at the time. You can avail of a £20 bonus when opening an account with Football Index by using the code “FF20”. Music used: Union - Let's Do It (ITV Football theme) Virtua Striker 2 theme song Ginola - Julian Marc Stringle TheFootballFaithful.com
What does that even mean? No, I am not talking about becoming a French citizen. In this episode, I discuss how I've come to the conclusion that the best way to experience life in Paris and lead a happy and successful expat life here is to create my own kind of Frenchness.
Chandler & Jacob talk about their love of cinema, their contempt of Godard and begin their odyssey to watch every film on the British Film Institute’s Best Movies of all-time list.
In August, America marked 400 years since the arrival of the first Africans in 1619, which started the institution of slavery. In France, observers are questioning whether there are lessons to be learned for France’s African community. In a brightly lit room of the American library in Paris, members of the public pour in for a conference exploring the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first Africans to the British colony of Virginia. The guest speaker, a civil rights expert and playwright, is yet to arrive. When she does, Gloria J. Browne-Marshall, apologises profusely, blaming her lateness on her taxi driver who got lost and then wanted to overcharge her. Her humour dispels the mood of the topic she’s come to discuss. But from the get go, she insists upon celebration and not defeat. “I want to thank my ancestors. Without their perseverance, I wouldn’t be here,” she tells the audience. Ongoing struggle In August of 1619, some 20 indentured Africans arrived in the colony of Jamestown, Virginia, after being kidnapped from their villages in present-day Angola. “They arrive and they learn the economy, the language, culture, and they actually progress, and then once the law takes effect and they’re enslaved, from there we have this fight, this ongoing fight for 400 years, so there’s a lot to commemorate.” Browne-Marshall, a professor of constitutional law at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, had just returned from a trip to Angola. “I went back to Angola. I wanted to know more about these first Africans, and I discovered Queen Nzinga. Not only did she rule but she went to battle and stood up to Portuguese slave traders,” she comments. Choose to fight By highlighting the brave achievements of the Angolan warrior queen and others like her, Browne-Marshall attempts to reclaim some of the dignity lost during the slavery era, which she has documented on extensively. “We all have choices. Are we going to go on with the programme even if it is oppressive to others, or are we going to stand our ground and fight? Queen Nzinga did, and that really inspired me.” Her research has also focused on recent battles for equal rights, including that of Mum Bett, the first enslaved African American to file and win a freedom suit in Massachusetts. “Just as Mum Bett became Elizabeth Freeman by pushing against those that would oppress her, we have to continue pushing forward. We can’t sit down and believe that the battle is over.” Same battle Yet the battle may be more difficult depending on what side of the Atlantic you’re on. “I’ve been in the same company for over twenty years and have never been promoted,” a female engineer from Martinique tells the audience. “I think the US has enabled black people to have more opportunities than here in France,” she says. To which Browne-Marshall replies “Are you demanding the freedom and that you be treated fairly?” echoing the words of former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Another female member points out differences between slavery in the United States and France. If the enslavement of Africans began in 1619 in the US, it would not begin in France until 1642. Moreover, it would eventually be abolished here in 1848, after initially being reinstated in 1802, while America would follow suit in 1865. For Browne-Marshall, both countries have similar undertones. “In both, you see protests every day. People are protesting for higher wages, they are protesting for other things. Why aren’t people of African descent protesting for full inclusion?” Identity conundrum Such identity politics hit a raw nerve in France where the notion of "Frenchness" is associated with a common set of values as opposed to colour or origin. Furthermore, critics point out that flagging up the differences between communities runs the risk of forging a common identity between them at the expense of a national identity, and thereby legitimising racial divisions that activists want to abolish. “Assimilation doesn’t mean giving up your soul,” argues Browne-Marshall. “The French, of all people are the ones everyone knows will stand up for their culture. So, why can’t people in the African diaspora stand up and say I am proud of my heritage as an African in this country, and I’m French?” The issue of French identity came to the fore during last year’s World Cup, where some commentators joked that the tournament had been won by an African team, due to the fact that 19 of its 23 players were of African descent. Civil rights in France The debate is a complex one, but for Browne-Marshall it should not distract from the legacy of slavery, which still lingers in enduring inequities in opportunity for the children of migrants or whose family generation emigrated to France. "I think that France needs to have a civil rights movement,” she reckons, referring to the decades-long struggle for equal rights for African-Americans led by figures such as Martin Luther King. “Fighting for your freedom and not waiting for it to be handed down to you, is something so powerful for the spirit and so necessary,” she said. This is the third part of RFI's series on France's diasporas. Subscribe on iTunes or Google podcasts. To listen to this episode, hit the Play button above
In August, America marked 400 years since the arrival of the first Africans in 1619, which started the institution of slavery. In France, observers are questioning whether there are lessons to be learned for France's African community. In a brightly lit room of the American library in Paris, members of the public pour in for a conference exploring the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first Africans to the British colony of Virginia. The guest speaker, a civil rights expert and playwright, is yet to arrive. When she does, Gloria J. Browne-Marshall, apologises profusely, blaming her lateness on her taxi driver who got lost and then wanted to overcharge her. Her humour dispels the mood of the topic she's come to discuss. But from the get go, she insists upon celebration and not defeat. “I want to thank my ancestors. Without their perseverance, I wouldn't be here,” she tells the audience. Ongoing struggle In August of 1619, some 20 indentured Africans arrived in the colony of Jamestown, Virginia, after being kidnapped from their villages in present-day Angola. “They arrive and they learn the economy, the language, culture, and they actually progress, and then once the law takes effect and they're enslaved, from there we have this fight, this ongoing fight for 400 years, so there's a lot to commemorate.” Browne-Marshall, a professor of constitutional law at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, had just returned from a trip to Angola. “I went back to Angola. I wanted to know more about these first Africans, and I discovered Queen Nzinga. Not only did she rule but she went to battle and stood up to Portuguese slave traders,” she comments. Choose to fight By highlighting the brave achievements of the Angolan warrior queen and others like her, Browne-Marshall attempts to reclaim some of the dignity lost during the slavery era, which she has documented on extensively. “We all have choices. Are we going to go on with the programme even if it is oppressive to others, or are we going to stand our ground and fight? Queen Nzinga did, and that really inspired me.” Her research has also focused on recent battles for equal rights, including that of Mum Bett, the first enslaved African American to file and win a freedom suit in Massachusetts. “Just as Mum Bett became Elizabeth Freeman by pushing against those that would oppress her, we have to continue pushing forward. We can't sit down and believe that the battle is over.” Same battle Yet the battle may be more difficult depending on what side of the Atlantic you're on. “I've been in the same company for over twenty years and have never been promoted,” a female engineer from Martinique tells the audience. “I think the US has enabled black people to have more opportunities than here in France,” she says. To which Browne-Marshall replies “Are you demanding the freedom and that you be treated fairly?” echoing the words of former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Another female member points out differences between slavery in the United States and France. If the enslavement of Africans began in 1619 in the US, it would not begin in France until 1642. Moreover, it would eventually be abolished here in 1848, after initially being reinstated in 1802, while America would follow suit in 1865. For Browne-Marshall, both countries have similar undertones. “In both, you see protests every day. People are protesting for higher wages, they are protesting for other things. Why aren't people of African descent protesting for full inclusion?” Identity conundrum Such identity politics hit a raw nerve in France where the notion of "Frenchness" is associated with a common set of values as opposed to colour or origin. Furthermore, critics point out that flagging up the differences between communities runs the risk of forging a common identity between them at the expense of a national identity, and thereby legitimising racial divisions that activists want to abolish. “Assimilation doesn't mean giving up your soul,” argues Browne-Marshall. “The French, of all people are the ones everyone knows will stand up for their culture. So, why can't people in the African diaspora stand up and say I am proud of my heritage as an African in this country, and I'm French?” The issue of French identity came to the fore during last year's World Cup, where some commentators joked that the tournament had been won by an African team, due to the fact that 19 of its 23 players were of African descent. Civil rights in France The debate is a complex one, but for Browne-Marshall it should not distract from the legacy of slavery, which still lingers in enduring inequities in opportunity for the children of migrants or whose family generation emigrated to France. "I think that France needs to have a civil rights movement,” she reckons, referring to the decades-long struggle for equal rights for African-Americans led by figures such as Martin Luther King. “Fighting for your freedom and not waiting for it to be handed down to you, is something so powerful for the spirit and so necessary,” she said. This is the third part of RFI's series on France's diasporas. Subscribe on iTunes or Google podcasts. To listen to this episode, hit the Play button above
Sarah Churchwell celebrates various leading men of the silver screen, from the 1930s and 1940s. Charles Boyer played killers and gigolos, conmen and psychopaths. He was good at romantic comedy and his Frenchness made him debonair and suave. But it was the voice that was the giveaway - 'deep and purring, with a heavy French accent'. It encouraged this writer's early penchant for escapism. Producer: Duncan Minshull
PILOT Episode of Just Over Twenty: a podcast hosted by #itunuspeaks where she explores topics of interest as she navigates life as a millennial.
Literary Loitering | Cultural Anarchy with Books and The Arts
This week Graham and Andrew discover that they may not be the bastions of sanity and elegance that they thought they were as Producer Rob is away, so they now have free reign to take the show in a more studied and genteel direction. Unfortunately their inner cultural anarchists disagreed with their decision. Alongside all of those shenanigans our intrepid duo are confused about the unusual U.S. renaming of Stuart Turton’s novel The Seven Deaths of Elizabeth Hardcastle, discover the ultimate in Frenchness, investigate some of Shakespeare’s possible inspirations, wonder why anyone would want to do a historical re-enactment of the funeral of Princess Diana, and all sorts of other stuff. If you've enjoyed this podcast, then please follow us on Twitter @TGS_TheGeekShow or on other social media by searching for [The Geek Show](http://thegeekshow.co.uk). If you want to show your support then head over to [Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/thegeekshow) and give whatever you can. Alternatively, we have a shop up and running so head over to [The Geek Shop](http://thegeekshow.co.uk/thegeekshop/) and partake in some of our lovely wares. Thanks, and until next time, don't read anything we wouldn't! #LiteraryLoitering #TheGeekShow #Books #Novels #TheArts #Theatre #News #Reviews #Podcasts #CulturalAnarchy #Culture #StuartTurton #TheSevenDeathsOfElizabethHardcastle #PrixRenaudot #RenaudotPrize #France #Shakespeare #PrincessDiana #TimFarron #LiberalDemocrats #GeneralElection #ReflectionsOnAHashtag
Truffaut responds to the Frenchness of his debut by making an "American" movie, and it's very silly and tragic and violent. Just like America!
In this episode of #ElectricVuvuzela we elevate small talk into a much bigger talk about diving - its moral and aesthetic - racism in football which seemingly the players avoided in Russia, but some faced at home and the Frenchness of the French team (spoiler: we aren't disputing it). To tie these concepts from the top level of the world's football together, we talk about many examples from grassroots and this actually might be one of the highlights of this whole conversation because you can hear arguments from all angles everywhere to follow the professionals, but should you be keen to hear how life is by the pitch-side of the new multi-cultural Europe for its young people - well, for that you have to check out this episode of the Electric Vuvuzela.
Talking Tactics discuss the World Cup hangover, and what has happened while we were away. Cristiano Ronaldo left Real Madrid for Juventus. Liverpool bought Alisson (bad for Karius). Chelsea hired Sarri. Willian to Barcelona rumours seem odd, or do they? Marital vs. Mourinho. Ozil retires from Germany because of criticism he felt stemmed from his religion / ancestry; in addition to that, we talk about the France national team, and their perceived “Frenchness,” or lack thereof, depending on who is asked. - Please check our Patreon page, and think about supporting us! https://www.patreon.com/join/talkingtactics We take on a few of your questions, and throw in some extra bits as well. *Rate us five stars on Apple Podcasts!* http://getpodcast.reviews/id/1127264410 Talking Tactics Special Coup de tête: https://bit.ly/2DXSMVk Follow Talking Tactics https://twitter.com/TaIkingTactics Follow us https://twitter.com/HaveHopeHut https://twitter.com/AnkaMan616 https://twitter.com/DanielTiluk Recommended Read(s) Lukaku on Lukaku: https://bit.ly/2t6H7kh
Claire's guest is Alicia Drake, author of the Paris-set coming of age novel I Love You Too Much. They discuss something of Alicia's writing process, the Frenchness of her novel, and its themes – among them loneliness, the ache to belong, and what happens when beauty fades. Books Mentioned in this Episode: I Love You Too Much, by Alicia Drake The Beautiful Fall: Fashion, Genius, and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris, by Alicia Drake The Horseman, by Tim Pears The Wanderers, by Tim Pears Anything Is Possible, by Elizabeth Strout Bookshop Girl, by Chloe Coles How to Rob a Bank, by Tom Mitchell Unconventional, by Maggie Harcourt Theatrical, by Maggie Harcourt How Do You Like Me Now?, by Holly Bourne How to be Famous, by Caitlin Moran Unscripted, by Claire Handscombe ***** Support Claire on Patreon to get bonus content and personalised book recommendations. Buy Brit Lit Podcast merch to show your love for your podcast and help support it. Pre-order Claire's novel, Unscripted, help make the book happen, and get rewards too. For daily news and views from British books and publishing, follow the Brit Lit Blog. Questions? Comments? Need a book recommendation? Email Claire at britlitpodcast@gmail.com ***** The Brit Lit Podcast Instagram / Twitter / Facebook / Website Claire Twitter / Facebook / Blog / Novel Alicia Drake Twitter / Facebook / Instagram / Website
This episode brings you not just one, but two French guys! Fellow Frenchman, Florian Guéret, comes by to chat about what it feels like to be a Frenchman living in Canada. We discuss citizenship, accents, kids, politics, stereotypes... Serious topics but in a very not serious way. And we make fun of French AND Canadian people. Also, Florian does an Australian accent like no one else.
You need to watch Julia Ducournau's Raw. Ben Eller and Steven Spratling think you should. We make the best of the worst Buzzfeed quiz we've ever done. We get into Frenchness and cannibalism. We also record one of the best horror movie podcasts ever recorded. Music by Ben Eller
Eva Green made her film debut in 2003's "The Dreamers", where she and her brother lure an American student in Paris into some really dodgy, not-okay, erotic shenanigans. Now that is one big pile of wank. Richard revels in the ultra-heightened Frenchness of Eva Green. Jonathan vents his frustrations about the film's politics, pacing and pretentiousness. Hear them discuss abusive directors, auteur theory, arthouse cinema and the connections with the #MeToo movement on this episode. To lighten things up, there is also "the world's most boring porn review".
Olivia Durand is an Oxford scholar researching neo-Frenchness in the cities of New Orleans and Odessa. Olivia has lived in the United States as a Fulbright scholar and in the Ukraine working for the French Foreign Office. A doctoral researcher with the Department of Global and Imperial History at Oxford University, Olivia is also vice-president and treasurer of the MCR at Pembroke College.
Things just keep getting worse for the Hamburglar. First his ex-employer placed a huge bounty on his head, then he had to find a way to improbably escape two of fiction's greatest manhunters-for-hire, and now that he somehow managed to pull that off, his life is in danger once again. All he did was steal the wrong cheeseburger -- John Wick's cheeseburger, to be precise. And during his escape from the authorities, he also managed to smash a potted plant that happened to be the best friend of Léon, the Professional. So now the Hamburglar has graduated from loudmouth mercs in various states of undress to cold-blooded hit men whose targets simply do not escape. The Hamburglar can hole up in as many secure safehouses protected by as many goons as he wants. There will still only be one question: Which master assassin will get to him first, leaving the other to experience the cold, empty sensation of revenge blue-balls? Miles returns from his hiatus of happiness to explain all the things he didn't like about John Wick 2, Colin enlightens us about coincidentally-named game designers and the undeniable Frenchness of Jean Reno, Kit and MeganBob debate the viability of pencils as impromptu murder devices, and Dan shows the advocates what happens when their bosses don't like them...
Jacob L. Shapiro and Xander Snyder discuss what is and isn't important about the French elections and what is at stake for Europe. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0 TRANSCRIPT: Jacob L. Shapiro: Hello everyone, and welcome to another Geopolitical Futures podcast. This week I am joined by one of our new analysts, Xander Snyder. We're happy to have you Xander. Xander Snyder: Thanks, this will be fun. JLS: We're hoping to just have a conversation today about what's been going on in France, and I want to be conscious of not ascribing too much influence to Marine Le Pen and to the hysterics around the election itself because, as we often write at GPF, elections don't matter that much and individuals matter even less. But I think that this election in particular does say some very important things about what's going on in Europe right now. So just to kind of rehash for those who need rehashing of it, the French election happens in two rounds. So the first round is sort of a wide group of different parties and people, and if somebody gets 50 percent in the first round, they win, but that almost never happens. So the first round is to whittle it down to two people, and then in the second round you get two people who face off against each other in a runoff, and you go from there. So the first round this year was remarkable in the sense that none of the establishment candidates from establishment parties did particularly well. The two leading vote-getters were Emmanuel Macron who started his own new party, which is nominally progressive or centrist, it sort of depends on what day of the week it is how you want to describe it. And then Marine Le Pen who is the head of the National Front, which is a party that has been around since the '70s, which is considered a right-wing nationalist party. It's not the greatest way of describing it if you actually look at their platform, some of the economic policies might be described as more left wing. What's really “right wing” about them is their nationalism and what some people would call their racism, although I think that Marine Le Pen has tried very hard to purge the party of some of those more negative influences. The two other leading vote-getters were Fillon, who was sort of the conservative candidate that everybody thought was going to win and was beset by scandal after scandal such that he just couldn't get his momentum going, and Jean-Luc Melenchon, who was sort of the far-left Bernie Sanders of France who did much better than people thought. He got 19.6 percent of the vote but not enough to get to the second round. So that's where we are right now. The second round takes place on May 7 and really this is going to be a vote between in some ways a pro EU candidate and an anti-EU candidate. Le Pen has said she wants to renegotiate the relationship with the EU as soon as she gets in, and if there's not a successful renegotiation, she wants to put it to a referendum and hopefully leave. Macron is really promising policies more of the same. So one of the reasons this is so important to talk about, it's less because of France, more because of what this says about the state of Europe. So that's sort of where we are, right this second. Xander, I thought it might be a useful thing to start off by talking the tension between individuals and between geopolitics. I know that as somebody who has started recently with us and has been doing a lot of training on this, that it's sometimes hard to see the boundary there. How do you see the relationship between Le Pen and the French elections. XS: I think you wrote two pieces recently on what's going on in France. One was a Reality Check and the other was a Deep Dive that placed this election in greater geopolitical context and they're worth reading. I think an interesting distinction that you drew was whether or not Le Pen controls her constituency or her constituency controls her. And it's an important distinction because you say this could be the difference between the National Front becoming a reanimation of some of the really bad things that happened in 20th century Europe versus it just becoming a 21th century political party that's just trying to balance and find a way to essentially stay in power, which is why Le Pen has been exorcising some of the more radical elements of her party to try to get to where she is right now. So, I'd actually be curious just to start off to know a little bit more about what you meant by that distinction. Who's controlling who and why does that matter in a geopolitical sense? In a sense, that's greater than just the election. JLS: The reason that matters for me is because I am thinking about trying to define what was really bad about 20th century Europe and what really might have geopolitical significance. For me, in 20th century Europe, that was really the rise of fascism and the rise of totalitarianism. If you read a lot of the literature about totalitarianism in general, Hannah Arendt is the one I've studied most closely but these ideas are not specific to her. Totalitarianism and fascism and communism, even as Stalin used it, it was not about the man. The ideology sort of ended up privileging the role, but these were mass movements and you couldn't have the move towards totalitarianism and towards fascism if you hadn't had the creation of a mass movement. So in some ways, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, these people were spawns of these mass movements that broke down all previous ties and which created this new mystical sense of what the nation was. And it had some relationship to reality, but it also tried to break things apart so there wasn't Prussia and Bavaria and all the stuff anymore. There was the romantic Teutonic Knight marching around in the forest type stuff, and there were these ideas about in some cases purity. And all of these things that developed were a result of the mass movement itself. So when I say it matters whether Le Pen is leading her constituents or her constituents are leading her, it actually has nothing to do with Le Pen, nothing to do with what power she would or wouldn't have if she came into office. I think she would actually be more limited in carrying out some of her more radical policies that people don't like or people are vocal about not liking. But the real issue here is, is French society or are there parts of European society that are breaking down to the point where you can see the type of mass movement that happened in the 1930s and the early 1940s and had people gravitating towards these forms of government that ended up perpetrating all of these wars and all of these horrors that really Europe and most of the Western world has been afraid of since? Does that answer the question? XS: I think it does. It jumped out to me because I think it hints at a deeper issue in social sciences generally, which is teasing out causality when you can't do a double-blind study. It is very difficult, what's causing what. And so you get to this point where, for example, Le Pen and the National Front, it's difficult to tell if her actions are just a symptom of these trends you are talking about or if she has some degree of control over them. Which do you think it is? JLS: Well I think that Le Pen is a creation of her time and of her constraints. I mean, you can't think about Le Pen and not think about her father who is a Holocaust denier who really was the person who was in charge of putting the National Front on the map. You can't think about him and not think about his experiences in the French Algerian war. You can't think about the French Algerian war without thinking about France's history as an empire and its history of colonialism and its battles with Great Britain. You can't think about that stuff without thinking about Napoleon and the French Revolution and we're sort of right back at the beginning of all this stuff, right? So I think that Le Pen really is just an individual manifestation of a larger thing. There would be no Le Pen if there wasn't high unemployment in France and if there wasn't stagnant GDP growth in France and if it wasn't that in the northeast of France, a lot of the industrial production centers are suffering. They look across the border to Germany, and they see that Germany has historically low unemployment rates and that, thus far, the Germans have been spared from the major ramifications of the 2008 financial crisis. So I really do think that she is a creation of her time and a creation of her father and a creation of French geopolitics. And she is both enlivened by those things and completely restricted by them, and I think some of what Le Pen is doing is you can watch the individual try and strain against those things as much as possible. I mean, she kicked her own father out of the party. She's doing everything she can to purge the party of the parts that people might think are too radical because she is trying to be pragmatic. But A: She's going to have a hard time doing that, the second round polls if they are right say it's like a 62 to 38 margin. B: If she even got to power, we'd have to wait until legislative elections in June to see if she could even get some of the legislative support let alone the popular support for some of her approaches. And C: It's hard to forget who she is and who her father was and all of the things that they have said, and for a lot of people, that's not what it means to be French. So again, she's an interesting laboratory for thinking about what an individual can do and what the limits on an individual are. She's interesting because she's compelling and charismatic and in some ways able to articulate some of these issues better than anyone else. I think that's what makes her a powerful politician but I don't want to ascribe to her the force of a world historical person or somebody who by themselves is going to completely shape the way geopolitics is working. XS: Sure, it's not a juncture point per se, it is part of a larger trend. JLS: Yeah it's a much larger trend, and she's really just a small part in a much larger chapter. It's funny, I was being interviewed by an Australian newspaper a couple days ago and one of the things they asked me about Le Pen was they asked me if I thought the EU was going to fail. I sort of looked at the person strangely, and I said, look what does it mean for the EU to fail? From my perspective, it sort of already has. You've got the Hungarians and the Poles ignoring EU directives on refugees and migrants. You've got Britain saying sorry we're out, we don't want any part of this. The French themselves have been ignoring deficit rules from the EU for years. The Italians and Brussels are going back and forth on banking regulations and literally are fiddling while Rome is burning. So you have all these people ignoring EU directives. You have Germany sort of sitting there in it all in a very economically vulnerable situation. Le Pen is just one small chapter in this, and she represents the particular French chapter in this, which is an important one. France now is the second-largest economy in the EU, and in a lot of ways the EU was a French idea. It was them who wanted to build the EU to keep Germany where it was. To solve the problem that created all these wars in the European continent since 1870. So yeah she's a part of all of those things. She's a fairly small part of it and an interesting part of it. If she did come to power and if the National Front swept legislative elections, there might actually be something to say about this being in the immediate term important in the way that the EU demise carries out. But the demise is happening. It will happen with Le Pen or without Le Pen. If Macron sails into the presidency, I completely expect him to be equally blocked because France is very divided, and he'll have five years of status quo policies, and we'll be back here in 2022. We'll be talking about the same stuff and maybe Le Pen will even have a greater percentage of the vote. XS: So I think something that you mentioned a minute ago will give us kind of opportunity to dive in just a little bit more into how Geopolitical Futures thinks about the world. You kind of describe this person who is straining against all these domestic political pressures and just trying to figure just what options she actually has. Now at Geopolitical Futures, one of the things that we really focus on is this idea of constraints. We believe that people end up in power, parties end up in power because they are effective at understanding what steps they need to take to get there, right? And there's only so many options once they're there that they can take. So what we try to do a lot of the time is understand what those options are, what those constraints are and go from there, and that's what lets us have a little bit more insight into just describing the situation. What sort of constraints do you see Le Pen or Macron facing following the election that either would face regardless of who wins? JLS: Look either one of them is going to be stuck with a very difficult economic situation that has been building up over time, and I am not convinced that either one of them has the policies in their toolkit to solve it, and that's not an indictment of either of them. I just think that it's a particularly difficult structural situation that they're in, and it's not something that's going to be solved overnight. The problem is that it's a problem that has been developing for so long that people's patience is probably not in line with the things that have to be done to fix 10 percent unemployment and 25 percent youth unemployment and stagnant GDP growth and all these other things for a couple years. On the actual legislative level, again Macron's party is brand new. The National Front has made some headway but, in the last legislative elections, ended up not taking that many seats because the other parties banded together against them to keep them out. Le Pen has said she wants to take France out of the E.U. It's not exactly clear how that works. She could call a referendum, although either the court or the Parliament has to approve that step so it's not like she can just do it herself. Its less clear – does she need the approval of the population in some way to do it? Does she not? That's an open question. So those are all technical constraints in what they are doing. And then the broader constraints are that there was an internal logic to the EU. We've written a lot and George Friedman, who is our chairman and founder, has written a lot about the inherent, illogical nature of the EU in the sense that it wasn't quite completely taking everyone's sovereignty, but it still wanted to take a little bit of it away. But there was a logic behind the EU: It was this idea of, what is Germany's role in Europe going to be? There was this sense that if you could get Germany into an economic block that was beneficial for it, you would basically be controlling Germany's imperatives, and Germany's imperatives have always been to spread out over the Continent. That's what has really been the approximate geopolitical issue in Europe, basically since German unification in the late 19th century. Is a French president or if France leaves the EU, are they just going to ignore that or are they just going to run away from that? What is their relationship with Germany going to be from now on? Who is France going to trade with? What are the implications of the economy going to be if you start breaking those things down? Can the French really come back with a currency that quickly? These are all the sort of difficult constraints that make things happen now, and one other thing I would just throw on there is that the inertia is also a very powerful force. Brussels has been there for a long time. I think one of the reasons that George often says that he doesn't expect the EU to collapse, he sort of just expects it to go away into obsolescence, where they might still have meetings and they might still issue directives but everybody will kind of ignore them. We'll wake up one day and people will realize, ok there's an EU, but there's not really an EU. So I think those are all parts of constraints that both Macron and Le Pen face. In that sense, they're probably more similar to each other than they are to anyone else in France. XS: A metaphor that we've used before that I think is apt is that the EU has essentially allowed France post World War II to, like you said, control Germany's directives to a degree, keep them in a cage because there is this institution in which Germany has become essentially the most at least economically powerful country, but France is powerful military lets them play an outsized role in that institution as well. So looking beyond the elections, looking beyond what's going to happen in the next month or two, what are and what have France's historical imperatives on the Continent been, and how do they develop as the EU becomes a weaker institution? JLS: That's an interesting question. I would say that one of the things you have to think about in terms of France and Germany's relationship is that the EU was also built around a divided Germany, and one of the things we often talk about and write about is that a lot of these institutions that exist, exist because of inertia, what I was talking before about inertia. NATO is an anti-Soviet alliance. The EU's aim was partly to contain Germany, was partly also anti-Soviet, was about rebuilding Europe. But the EU also contained western Germany, right? Like for most of the EU and its predecessors, what we're talking about here is Germany that is divided into west and east. In some ways, the German model gets completely upended at German unification. Nobody was expecting the Soviet Union to fall, nobody was expecting German unification on that quick a scale. And once Germany unified, it set in motion an inevitable set of circumstances that lead us to this point where France and Germany are coming at each other with cross purposes. It was easier for France to deal with a Germany that was cut in half than it was for France to deal with a Germany that was whole even when Germany had to go through, you know, the economic struggles of reintegrating the east into it. So I mean, going forward on the Continent Germany and France have always been the two dominant players. The thing that I would say is Germany has large economic problems, demographic issues, internal issues in terms of people thinking about, well, Germany wasn't always Germany. It only unified in the 1870s. Is there any chance that some of the separatism that we've seen in other parts of Europe might come to Germany? France also I sort of look on as not necessarily a declining power but one which is really internally focused which has major domestic issues. They are not exactly about to go adventuring all over the place. You're right that they do have a powerful military, but it's pretty much maxed out right now with their deployments fighting ISIS in the Middle East and the stuff that they're doing in Mali and North Africa. I think this really gets to a shift in European history in the sense that what happens in the west will be less important than what happens in the east. When I look at Europe right now, the really dynamic economies and the really dynamic things that are happening in Eastern Europe. When you look at what's happening in Hungary, when you look at what's happening in Poland, you know I think that's the place where the future of Europe is really going to be decided. And that might sound a little bit strained, especially since we are so used to thinking about Germany and France being the main contenders on the Continent. But I really do see a much weaker Germany than we've had before, a weaker France that is much more inwardly facing. And when you have a weak Germany, when you have a weak Russia, there have been periods where Poland sort of rises and where these Eastern European powers have their day. So I think we're thinking about what the EU and what Europe is going to look like 10, 20, 30 years from now. In some ways, it's not so important whatever argument the French have with themselves about what it means to be French. In some ways, what's more important is what's happening in Eastern Europe, what is the relationship going to be between east and west, what is the relationship between a declining Germany and a declining Russia going to look like, how is France going to deal with that, how is the U.K. going to get involved. Those are some of the questions that I would see. But I would turn that question around on you Xander. How do you think about the future of the EU 20, 30 years out, considering some of the things we've talked about? XS: Yeah, I think something that we've written about that gives some insight into what's going to happen is this idea of nationalism, which isn't necessarily a good or a bad thing. I'm not ascribing a value judgement to it. But as we see the EU grow weaker, as we see Brussels increasingly issuing these orders that no one pays attention to, the idea of identity has crept back into politics in the EU in a powerful way. People are trying to understand their role in the EU, or well on the European continent, and as that trend progresses, I think we're going to see more attachment to national identity, and that could go a couple different ways. But this idea of multilateralism that has really prevailed in this period following World War II up until today. I think we'll sort of fade out as a period in history. Now how that impacts geopolitical interests on the Continent, I mean I guess you can argue that the existence of multilateral institutions don't ultimately change things. But as European countries begin to focus more inwardly on their own country, I think we will see a greater focus on national interest rather than continental interests, which is really what the focus had been, especially during the Cold War when Europe fell under the umbrella of U.S. protection. So I think we will see a refocusing on what it means to be French, for example, and therefore what is good for the French. JLS: Yeah I guess one of the things I would push back a little and just say that I don't think it's that multilateral institutions are not important, they can be very important. The deeper issue there is that the multilateral institutions have to have some kind of mission and some kind of purpose. And I think that, and this is one of the things also that France in particular helps articulate, which is that you know multilateralism and international institutions and all of these things were a big part of what happened in 2008. And I think people have a difficult time separating 2008 from the way that financial crisis spread across the world globally because everybody was so exposed to each other. Particularly in Europe, where a lot of these countries didn't have control over things like currency that most nation-states do because they are all tied into the E.U. They didn't have some of the tools that were necessary or the tools that most nation-states have at their disposal to respond to some of the economic problems. So the question then becomes, is there a purpose or is there some kind of ideological construct in which multilateral institutions can once again be seen as useful? I think one of the main reasons Le Pen has risen as far as she has in France is that nobody else really has any good policies or any good vision of what's going on. We talked a lot about constraints, and I am not saying that somebody needs a policy that's going to work, but I am saying that the opposing side needs to present some sense of confidence that it knows what it's doing and that it has a potential solution that it can produce. When I look at somebody like Macron, I described him in one of my pieces as an empty suit. I think you actually commented that I was judging him unfairly or that I wasn't being objective and I responded back to you, no, I am actually being objective. I have no idea what Macron stands for and most French citizens that I have talked to that are my friends also don't know what he stands for. He's called himself a progressive. Other people call him a centrist. I don't think that it makes much sense, you know being a moderate is actually, that means something. When you call someone a moderate, you are not saying they don't have any positions or that they're some kind of equal distance between one position and another position. Moderation is a particular kind of outlook on the world and can articulate in meaningful ways and approaches to problems that can give confidence. So I think the challenge for those who would favor multilateral institutions and for those who would favor a less narrow definition of the national interest especially in terms of economics and in terms of refugees and things like this, they have to somehow articulate solutions to the problems in a way that, A: projects confidence, and B: actually takes into account people in their own nation-state. A lot of times now I feel like nationalists have their solution, and it might be an imperfect one but at least they have a point. They have talking points and you know who Le Pen is and you know what you're going to get from Le Pen each time, whereas the others you don't really know what they stand for, what they would do if they got into office or whether they have any confidence that what they would do if they got into office would work in the first place. So I don't actually expect nationalism to always be as dominant as it is without any other ideological challenger. I certainly think it's winning the day right now, and I expect it to be very different going forward. But at a certain point, there's going to have to be some kind of political opposition to it. I am not sure what that looks like eventually, but I don't think it's just going to be all nationalism, all the time. I think the thing that nationalism has done though is that it has redefined the conversation towards the working class, the middle class. At a certain point, this becomes class based and not necessarily nation based because the people who are voting for these parties and are voting for the nationalist message are people who have gotten screwed over by the current economy and who the elites have just paid no attention to. The gulf between them is getting wider and wider, and so they turn to things like nationalism and patriotism because those are ideas that can give them pride and give them a way of articulating what the problem is. That was a little long winded but you started with multilateral institutions and sort of how I would respond to it. XS: Yeah I think that makes sense, I mean if you look at the impacts of the 2008 financial crisis. A lot of people all over the world saw that what had been effectively policy for a couple of decades really utterly failed them. So the question has been asked, well what's good for me? And the question that can follow that is, well who am I? Am I a European, am I middle class, American, who do I identify with and what does that imply in terms of policies that are going to be effective for my group, right? So I think that is certainly one of the trends that we're seeing brought out more clearly in this French election but also certainly in the U.S. and over the last couple of years. JLS: Well yeah, and this is actually one of the ways in which the distinction between right wing and left wing breaks down because really when we're talking about somebody like Le Pen or the National Front or any of these nationalist parties. What they're doing is they're defining the nation in a narrower sense. They want certain people to be excluded from the nation, they want there to be a very high barrier, a high bar in terms of what it takes to become a part of the nation. Once you are a part of the nation though, in a lot of ways they want the economic and security and political benefits that are afforded to you to be much more than most traditional right wing or liberal things would think of. That's why, when I say that if you read Le Pen's platform, if you read some of the policies of the National Front, you might expect them more in the far-left's positions. I mean, one of the things that Jean-Luc Melenchon shared with Le Pen was that he also wanted to take France out of the EU. So if you had elected this “far-right” candidate in Le Pen, not elected but if Le Pen had gotten through and Melenchon had gotten through, you would've had two anti-EU candidates, right? They would've been on completely different spectrums and the difference between them wouldn't have even been in terms of getting into the EU. It would've been… I am not actually sure, the difference would've I guess been on how to define the French nation and how France would deal with defining Frenchness. But again, I am just trying to tease out how this is a lot more complicated than people are making it out to be and the dividing lines that we had before are really stripping away. XS: Why does that matter? Why does it matter what Frenchness is? Because I think that on some level that's really the crux of the problem. We've certainly come back to this idea in our written pieces, but why is that aspect of identity playing such an outsized role now? JLS: Yeah I think about that sometimes, and I think that this is an important place to talk about the difference between a nation and nationalism. And so nationalism is an ideology. The nation is really a group of people who share a certain thing common. There are a lot of different definitions for it, but let's say a common language or ethnicity even principles can define a nation sometimes. It can be a very broad definition. I think one of the reasons nationalism as an ideology, as an organizing principle for how to govern, I think one of the reasons it's so effective is because it leverages something that is very real, which is the nation. There really wasn't nationalism, we can't speak about nationalism before the 17th and 18th centuries, but we can certainly speak about nations before the 17th and 18th centuries. So I think the point about, you know you asked what does it mean to or why is it important that you have to define what the nation is. I think that in some ways the reason that it's important is because nationalism has really won the day as a governing ideology. Nation-state is almost a synonym for state these days, and most countries in the world, not all of them but most, are nation-states. And people think in terms of the nation-state and nationalism as an organizing principle sort of, I mean they've accepted it without really thinking about it, without even really knowing it. Partly because you know it's responding to something real, and at that point if that's how you're going to organize things then defining who is in the nation is going to become incredibly important. And this has been important in different points throughout European history and throughout the history of nations and nationalism in general. I mean, the French Revolution – and you know more about the French revolution than I do I think Xander – but I mean the beginning of the French Revolution began with defining the nation, right? And the Third Estate had to define a vision of the nation and the way they defined it was everybody who was in the Third Estate was in the nation. So the aristocracy, maybe some of the clergy, were not going to be considered part of it because it became more important to talk about equality. One of the reasons equality becomes one of the defining things that the French Revolution pushes for is because of the way that the French society is structured beforehand and because of the particular economic things that they are responding to. So I think it's important, and I think that people are thinking about it because they are trying to figure out how to respond to problems. And if you are a government, you have to know who you're responsible for taking care of, who you are responsible for defending. So if you are the president of France, whether you are Le Pen or Macron, you have to have a sense in your mind of who it's your job to protect. For Le Pen, she's saying very clearly, I am sorry, it's very sad about these refugees and these migrants who don't have a home, that doesn't mean that I have to protect them. My job would be to be the president of France and to protect France, and I will protect France. And maybe protecting France means that I just can't let everybody in as much as I would want to and as much as, you know, it's a sad situation that they're in. So you know that's how she wants to define the nation, and because of that definition she pursues certain policies and people gravitate towards her because they feel, I don't know, that their society is under threat or their job opportunities are under threat. You know, now we're talking about the things that make it convincing. But I think that's why people are thinking so much about this because before you connect policies, you have to know who the policies are meant for. XS: Yeah and I think the example of the French Revolution is actually another nice example of constraints in action, right? Because if we think about how the French Revolution is romanticized – the phrase liberte, egalite, fraternite, that comes to mind – is this idea of these higher moral principles that were driving this big, this really critically important event in history. But, you know, you mentioned the Third Estate and identity. The reason that that group of individuals appealed to that idea of equality is because they were trying to gain political power to push back against essentially what was an increase in taxes that the nobility wasn't going to have to incur to the same degree, that was exacerbated by a food shortage, a crisis, due to a bad harvest. And so it's not like I mean some of these people probably had higher moral principles, but that framing would never have existed if those people were not stuck in that situation trying to solve that problem, so it's just another example of constraints. JLS: Yeah and I think one of the things to think about here is – and this one of the things that makes the United States different than those European countries and I know that Trump is in the same vein as Brexit and Le Pen but I also sort of think of him as separate because I can't really speak about the United States as a nationalist entity. And one of the reasons I have a hard time thinking about nationalism in the United States is because, first of all, you can't say the United States nation, that sounds kind of awkward, you sort of have to say the American nation. But the American nation really sprouts up out of nothing, and I shouldn't say nothing, right? Because what happens is you get a bunch of immigrants who come to the United States and fight wars or wipe out the native population. Point being that they haven't been here for time and memorial, you know? Like the United States was founded in 1776, and there weren't really people of the group that founded the United States there for much longer before it. Whereas when you are dealing with France, you are dealing with – and you know there wasn't always a France, certainly if you go back thousands of years, there's different iterations. If you are even talking about France around the Enlightenment, there's still different languages, there is no harmonized French system. But you are still dealing with people where there's a very deep and serious tie between the blood and between the land. This is one of the things that used to be in a lot of National Front discourse, which was that there is an innate relationship between your blood and between your land, and it's tied in this very particular way. So one of the interesting things to me about Trump is that he is, you know, putting America first and he's making America great again, but I think there is a real difference between what he's talking about and between what's happening in France because Trump can't make the same appeals to American nationalists that I think someone like a Le Pen in France or even, you know, the Brexit people in Britain can make to a British nation or to a French nation. When Trump was out there, what won Trump his election was connecting with working-class and middle-class voters and making them feel like they had a champion, like he was going to be their champion. A number of them were white I think, and that obviously plays into, that's maybe a counter to some of the things that I am saying. But again, I think that Trump had to be much more class based about it whereas in a country like France, in a country like Great Britain or even in a country like Germany, yes a lot of it is economic based and a lot of it is class based, but there's also this other element that just isn't there in the United States. XS: And that's because these countries have had so much more history shaped by geopolitical constraints to form these concepts of identity, is that what you're saying? JLS: It is, although I think one of the ironic things about that is, and I sort of, we talked about this a little bit at the beginning when we were talking about totalitarianism and fascism and how the mass movement creates this sort of mystical idealized version of the nation. Yes, all these countries do have longer histories and can go back further in time. At the same time though, like I said earlier, nationalism is really, we're talking about the 17th and 18th century so yes they go back in time and there is this conception of this relationship between the land and the people going back thousands of years and on a certain level its true. But even that is sort of constructive, right? It's maybe got a few extra hundred years in the hopper so maybe that's why it's more deeply felt. But, we're over and over talking about the same thing. I do think there is some difference though in the sense that the French can't remember a time when they weren't in France, whereas it's part of the American narrative or myth about itself that it got here and it was people fleeing from something and they wanted to create something based around principles rather than a shared type of nation. So yeah, that's sort of what I mean about that. XS: So I think that kind of lets us all tie it together and the last thought that I want to bring up is actually what you pointed out in your recent Reality Check, which I suggest people go take a look at, it's called “Declaration of the Rights of France.” It's at the end and rather you call out a conflict in the French constitution, I think it's in Articles 1 and 3, one of which is the idea of universalism and the right and equality of all men everywhere. And then later on that same page, there's this idea that the state, the nation needs to have sovereignty in order to enforce the rights of individuals in that state. So, one is rights of people in that state, the other is rights of people everywhere, right? And I think that kind of speaks to the distinction between nationalism and the nation that you're talking about. JLS: I would just jump in and say, it's actually not the constitution which tells you something about France. It's the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which is one of the great documents that comes out of the French Revolution, but it's not the French constitution. In the same way that the Declaration of Independence is not the American constitution, right? It's separate. And Article 1 does say men are born and will remain equal in rights, and then Article 3 says that the principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. So the first thing the French Revolution does is say, there are free and equal rights that everyone has by virtue of being a human being, right? And one of the things the French Revolution does is it declares this freedom and this equality for everyone as such just for being a human being, just for existing and breathing and being there. And within two articles, it gives that freedom away by saying all of this sovereignty is in the nation. And I think the reasons it does that is because it is impractical, it doesn't work to have everybody just being completely free all the time with no accountability with nothing. This goes back to Hobbes– it's life is nasty, brutish and short and the state of nature is not a fun thing – and Aristotle – man is a political animal, we come together because if we don't come together, there's going to be chaos and it's going to be nuts. So at the opening salvo of the French Revolution is that everyone is equal and it realizes very quickly that that's not going to work. I think that's true of most of the world's democracies, and it is really the tension within world democracy because the principles of the Enlightenment were this idea of, you know, you have rights and freedoms as a human being by virtue of being a human being and that got married to nationalism as it arose. They were almost two separate ideas. You had liberalism, sort of classically defined, and you had nationalism. And they came together, and they made the nation-state. That was what the marriage of those two things looked like. And they want to be able to have their cake, which is everybody is free by virtue of being a person, and yet they want to eat it too because they want everybody to have their own nation and their own right to their own nation. That sounds perfectly wonderful in principle, but in practice it gets a little bit difficult, right? Because if you're going to accept that hook, line and sinker, then Catalonia should have a nation if they want a nation. And Scotland should have a nation if they want a nation. And what do you do if you have two nations, let's say Israel and Palestine, who claim the same land and can create, you know, claims that maybe one side won't respect the other side's claims, but let's say both can present some kind of historical basis for their claim to a certain part of land, and it's the same land. What are you going to do? Are you going to divide the land up? What does your men are born and remain free and equal rights tell you to do when two different men claim the same land and that's sort of what Article 3 does, right? It says that, ok, sure we're all equal but the nation-state exists to protect that freedom and the nation-state means you give up some of your sovereignty to the nation-state because the nation-state is going to protect those freedoms for you within a defined limit. It's Churchill who said, I forget exactly what the quote is, but he's talking about democracy and it's the worst form of government except all the others. You know, liberal democracy is sort of like that – it's not perfect. It has all of these inner tensions, but I think the danger comes in anybody who thinks that it's only about the nation. And then I think there's also an equal danger in anybody that thinks it is only about the principle because if you are a radical in either direction and if you can't split the difference, you're not living within the liberal democracy because the liberal democracy is a compromise between two ideas that together on the surface don't exactly fit. XS: So I think what ties it all together for me is the idea that ideology does not really by itself drive major world events. It certainly, as an idea, spurs men and women to action, but the idea that there are power imbalances and circumstances, political realities that shape those ideologies. At the same time that there's an interplay between them both, I think is fundamental to how we look at the world. We try to understand the reality of the situation in addition to what people are saying. JLS: Yeah I think that's exactly right and I hope that as we get into the second round of French elections – it's sort of the year of elections, right? We're going to have British elections this year, we're going to have German elections this year, who knows what other stuff is going to pop up. I hope that – and I am sure we will be talking about these in some depth as we go both in terms of our writing and also on the podcast, but I think one thing as people think about these elections, if you want to think about things through the way we're thinking about them, just listen to what Xander just said. I mean it's not really about the election. The election tells you that something important is happening, and it gives you some data points to explore for what's important that's happening, but it's not the election and the selection of the person itself. It's not about Merkel, it's not about Le Pen, it's not about Theresa May any more than it was really about Hitler or Stalin or Roosevelt. Those were all people who met the challenges of their time and were defined by the challenges that they faced not by their personal opinions on what they needed to happen. The same will happen in the 21st century, so the only way I think it's fair to make a comparison between those two time periods right now at least as I see it is to talk about how the leaders then and the leaders now are not free actors. They are constrained and defined by the things that exist around them, and they are expressions of things underneath them. They're not shaping history themselves, they are as much a part of being shaped by it as all of us have been shaped by it. So I think we'll wrap up there. So Xander this was fun. We should do this again. This was a long one and I hope people enjoy it, but if people think it's too long or if you have questions that we didn't answer, if you have suggestions for any other topics, you can just write in to us at comments@geopoliticalfutures.com. You can also just visit us at geopoliticalfutures.com to read our stuff, and we'll see you out there next week.
The Simple Sophisticate - Intelligent Living Paired with Signature Style
~The Simple Sophisticate, episode #151 ~Subscribe to The Simple Sophisticate: iTunes | Stitcher | iHeartRadio "There is something about the French woman, a sense of freedom that must read and show in the way we dress." —Marion Cotillard No one has yet pinpointed when the allure of French style came to epitomize the pinnacle of effortless, chic style, but nonetheless, the flattering stereotype continues to be perpetuated and this post will do the same. Why? In all honesty, if you have been to France, you have seen it. You have crossed paths with the style seen in Paris that embodies classic staples worn with such ease and confidence that the woman appears to be on her own catwalk wherever she goes. Now not every French woman embodies the qualities oft associated with simple, chic, effortlessness just as not every American woman is intrigued by fast fashion and putting more in her closet (if you are a reader of TSLL, I am pretty confident you do not fall into that traditional American stereotype). But since the French woman has lessons to share when it comes to the style of quality over quantity, and demonstrates how magnificent it can look, people from around the globe have taken note, which may be why so many non-French women have impeccable, signature style as well. "What defines French Style? An effortless chic attitude - the Parisienne always wears great basics. It's about clever mix and match." -Evelyne Chétrite Wherever we find the inspiration that moves us to shift and change our wardrobe, it is worth investigating exactly what the fundamentals are of that particular approach to style. To begin, I must make a confession, I am not someone who enjoys shopping for clothes, but I do thoroughly appreciate and feel most confident when I know the clothes I am wearing work well on my body for whatever occasion I may be involved in. Thus, I have always wanted to drill down to how to cultivate a dependable, chic wardrobe that is versatile and lasts. So it was not a surprise when the French woman's approach to style caught my attention. Let's take a look at how to incorporate the 10 fundamentals of French style into our lives so that we too can look our best, spend our money wisely and limit the time we spend in shops and online boutiques so that we can go about enjoying the simply luxurious lives we have created. 1. Staples over trends "In an era of excess, Frenchness speaks to a certain kind of abstinence - but also of a noble refusal to compromise on quality, as well as the confidence to resist tacky gimmicks." —Lisa Armstrong, The Daily Telegraph Watching the seasonal runway shows are great fun and full of inspiration and ideas what new way to wear a button up blouse or what to pair with a knee-length skirts, but don't hop on the bandwagon if it's a one-season phenomenon. How do you know if it's a one season phenomenon? Ask yourself, would you wear it if you hadn't seen it on the runway or if wasn't cheered by Vogue and the fashion elites? If the answer is no, then just appreciate it and move on. Staples may seem safe or boring, but as we will discuss in #2, when you purchase well, know your body and tailor to your needs, you will shine. And the key word is you. You, rather than your clothes will be what everyone will notice and that is the intent to dressing well each time we step into our closets. Instead of considering what will draw attention, what will shock, what will woo onlookers, ask yourself "what will look best on me and help me elevate to feel and do my best?" Return to those clothes again and again and again, and you will never be disappointed. 2. Invest, don't skimp A French woman will have Chanel ballet flats and maybe even a Mulberry tote, but she won't have oodles of ballet flats in her closet or more than a few handbags unlike an average American's closet that is overflowing with bargain finds that may have looked wonderful on the rack at Ross but no longer shine two or even five years later. Hone in on what you need, save up and purchase what you love and will continue to use for years to come. My Lanvin ballet flats were an investment (always order one to a half-size larger than your regular size), but they were exactly what I had always wanted for years. When I finally purchased my first (I have two now - beige and black) pair, the price was expected, and I continue wear them at least 2-4 times a week (they continue to look wonderful and work with a long list of outfits). 3. Subtle over shocking Choose neutral hues that work with your skin tone in order to infuse a multitude of options. The white jersey tee works beautifully under your blazer, but it can also be tucked into a pencil skirt worn with heels to offer a high/low look to the office. Don't forget to wear it under your leather jacket as well paired with your favorite jeans. Shocking, while fun, has a shelf-life. Subtle again allows the woman to shine rather than the clothing. 4. Fewer but better You will have fewer items in your closet and what a beautiful sight that will be when you walk in. Clutter is stressful, too many choices can numb us and make it difficult to choose. Fewer, but better options simplifies the process but amplifies the outcome. 5. A skill rather than a sport As I mentioned at the top of the post, I honestly do not like to shop for clothing. Beginning when I was a young girl, I became quickly frustrated looking for clothing that fit my tall frame and thus began to see wardrobe building as the goal, not a sport that would waste hours of my day. A significant part of why I share what I learn and discover about style on TSLL is because I want to alleviate the frustration that I had so that you too, whether you love shopping or not, will be able to shop well each and every time, utilizing your time wisely so that you can enjoy the life you have built. Do I love beautiful attire and the craftsmanship, absolutely. If I could snap my fingers and have the wardrobe of 10-15 staple items for each season hanging in my closet that look brilliant on my body, I would snap away and spend the time I would have been shopping walking my dogs, working on a creative project, traveling or any one of the hobbies I enjoy. And so TSLL exists to reveal the tools we all can possess so that we each can build our signature wardrobe without feeling we have to do so each season, because we truly do not if we shop well. 6. Keep it simple A beautiful silk blouse paired with designer jeans that fall just to the ankle worn with a stunning pair of Roger Vivier flats. Nothing else. Classic pieces, quality pieces. Trust your purchases so that when you do pull them on and pair with them with the other items, you will know they work. Another reason to have fewer, but better items in your closet is that you become more familiar with them as you will have had them in your closet for many seasons. You will begin then to trust what you have, what looks flattering on your body and what other items might pair well with it. The simplifying of the process is a significant factor to loving and trusting your style. 7. Subtle, but sincere statement pieces Begin to let go of the costume jewelry. I used to regularly have my large tear-drop earrings that were not that expensive but fun conversational pieces, and then I began to realize I didn't want my clothing to be the conversational piece, I wanted to be talking about topics of more substance. So I purchased these earrings and wear them with nearly every outfit. They are simple, basic, but just the right femininity for work and play. A simple pair of diamond studs would also work beautifully. The key is to not be afraid to invest in a few investment statement pieces, but make sure they are subtle so that you can wear them for years and perhaps a lifetime. 8. Find what works and wear it regularly If blazers are your flattering cut similar to Emmanuel Alt, then include a couple of quality blazers in a variety of hues in your closet. If you know crew necks are better than v-necks, stay loyal and do not deviate. Such a discovery of our style takes time, but so long as we pay attention, are willing to explore and try something new if other approaches aren't working, we will eventually find what works for our bodies, lives and comfort. Over the past few years, one of the trends that has become my signature is the jumpsuit. Not everyone loves the jumpsuit, but it has been a staple in my wardrobe - layering with blazers, wearing long-sleeve monochromatic versions in the winter and splurging on a versatile silk jumper by Vanessa Seward when it went on sale that takes me to work and is ideal of cool summer afternoons with sandals. 9. Mix the high and low As much as your investment items are the foundation of the French woman's wardrobe, not every item you wear has to be über sophisticated. Wear a pair of boyfriend jeans with heels (low/casual - boyfriend jeans; high/dressed-up - heels) or a bomber jacket over a camisole worn with an over-the-knee pencil skirt and sandals. The balance of seriousness with playful displays prowess of how to build and wear a wardrobe exuding confidence and personality. 10. Elevate yourself, don't hide The clothing you wear is meant to spotlight the talented, intelligent, fun and curious woman who you are. While clothing can offer some armor in a world that can be difficult at times, don't hide completely behind your sartorial choices. Let your signature shine. Choose clothing that regardless of the designer label is made well and elevates your confidence. Stick to what works, let go of what doesn't and dress for you, not to mimic what you should do. Part of embracing the French woman's approach to style is reconciling with the clothes you must get rid of, but on the flip side when you don't have to go shopping as often to fill the gaps or find that one item that you just don't seem to have, you will discover an ease with knowing what to wear when that will be priceless. As much as I love the power of the sartorial choices we make, I have always wanted the clothing to be the background (an impressive background, but still in the background). While being known for what one wears is initially flattering and a temporary confidence boost, it is knowing that the woman each one of us offers to the world is more than what she wears is valued far more than the clothing and image she projects that motivates me to fine tune and all but perfect my approach to style. And each time I gain more clarity, I look forward to sharing what I learn with you. May we all fine-tune our wardrobe so that we may make a worthwhile first-impression but follow through with a breath-taking performance offered by our intelligence, charm and wit. ~SIMILAR POSTS FROM THE ARCHIVES YOU MIGHT ENJOY: ~The Francophile's Style Guide: The 14 Essentials (podcast episode) ~Why Not . . . Master the Art of Dressing? ~Why Not . . . Organize Your Closet? ~20 Ways to Live Like a Parisienne (podcast episode ~How to Cultivate Your True Style All Year Long - inspired by Ines de la Fressange's new Parisian Lookbook (podcast episode) ~Shop TSLL Capsule Wardrobe boutique here ~As my way of saying thank you to listeners of the podcast, I have produced two new episodes for this week due to my loss of voice last week and inability to have a new episode as each Monday for over two years (except in one other instance) there has always been one. I appreciate your understanding, your well wishes and your interest in living simply luxuriously. Here is the link to episode #150. Have a lovely week. ~21 Life Lessons Learned in South Korea Petit Plaisir: ~The Curse of La Fontaine: A Verlaque and Bonnet mystery by M.L. Longworth ~begin with the first novel in the cozy, set in Aix-en-Provence mystery series, Death at the Chateau Bremont ~Image: French model Ophelie Guillermand captured by Tatel Velasquez Download the Episode
Happy Valentines day to all. The motivation of this song was from my beautiful girlfriend Megan Genereaux. Lyrics: Happy Valentines Day to the one I love. Her hair shines so red and vibrant all day. I remember the day I first met her. She pulled up to the packing lot at Oakland University. I can't help but think about you always all day and night. It gets so strong sometimes that I fall to the ground and I collapse, like I'm having a heart attack. I won't know what hit me, its so powerful. Time! Time doesn't mean a thing to me when I'm with you by your side. It's always like we're at the beach in Muskegon. We float on the waves. Holding each other like it's the last day on this earth. I keep you close in my heart. Always and forever through my life. My love for you is so unconditional. I'll do anything for you always anytime whenever you want me to. I can't help but think about you always all day and night. It get so strong sometimes that I fall to the ground and I collapse, like I'm having a heart attack. I won't know what hit me, it's so powerful. I promise you I'll always be truthful and honest to you. I will always be there. I'll be your best friend forever. Until the end of the world. When it comes, all fall down. I will be the one that picks you up at night. I'll always be there for you. I will always be there for you. For you. I will always be there for you Megan Genereaux. Oh Megan Genereaux your Frenchness drives me crazy! Peace & Love
Cosmopolis and Beyond: Literary Cosmopolitanism after the Republic of Letters
Sarah Parker focuses on the love affair between the Decadent poets Olive Custance and Renée Vivien and the American writer Natalie Barney, arguing that affecting ‘Frenchness’ and writing in French allowed them to articulate their desire for one another. This paper focuses on the literary productions inspired by the love affair between the Decadent poets Olive Custance, Renée Vivien (née Pauline Tarn), and the American writer Natalie Barney. It draws primarily on Vivien’s roman à clef 'Une Femme m’apparut' (A Woman Appeared to Me, 1904) along with Custance and Barney’s poetry. In analysing these texts, it is concerned primarily with the question: how does Vivien, Barney and Custance’s literary cosmopolitanism (in this case, their writing in – or affection of – ‘Frenchness’) reflect and interact with their expressions of lesbian desire? It also considers to what extent adopting a different language and national identity enabled these women to express a lesbian desire and to envision the possibility of a homoerotic cosmopolitan female community.
The Tour de France is happening right now! The 2015 edition started on July 4th and will continue until July 26th. I’m excited to be able to share this interview with Eric Reed about his new book, Selling the Yellow Jersey: The Tour de France in the Global Era (University of Chicago Press, 2015) as riders make their way through the various stages of this, the most famous bike race in the world. A compelling historical narrative of the Tour, including some of its most significant moments and stars, Selling the Yellow Jersey explores the Tour as a global phenomenon. Reed argues that, over the course of the twentieth century, France was a full participant in a globalization that the Tour exemplified as a business and media enterprise, and a spectacle consumed by millions of fans around the world. Considering the roles of organizers, riders, and spectators within and outside of France, the book examines the meanings of “Frenchness” in contexts regional, national, and global. From the Tour’s emergence in 1903 during a “cycling craze” that had a particular vitality in France, to the doping scandals of more recent years, Selling the Yellow Jersey traces the Tour’s triumphs and scandals over more than a hundred years. It is a history of culture and commerce, from an organizational home base in Paris, to smaller French host cities such as Pau and Brest, to an international scene of participants both on, and beyond, the saddle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Tour de France is happening right now! The 2015 edition started on July 4th and will continue until July 26th. I’m excited to be able to share this interview with Eric Reed about his new book, Selling the Yellow Jersey: The Tour de France in the Global Era (University of Chicago Press, 2015) as riders make their way through the various stages of this, the most famous bike race in the world. A compelling historical narrative of the Tour, including some of its most significant moments and stars, Selling the Yellow Jersey explores the Tour as a global phenomenon. Reed argues that, over the course of the twentieth century, France was a full participant in a globalization that the Tour exemplified as a business and media enterprise, and a spectacle consumed by millions of fans around the world. Considering the roles of organizers, riders, and spectators within and outside of France, the book examines the meanings of “Frenchness” in contexts regional, national, and global. From the Tour’s emergence in 1903 during a “cycling craze” that had a particular vitality in France, to the doping scandals of more recent years, Selling the Yellow Jersey traces the Tour’s triumphs and scandals over more than a hundred years. It is a history of culture and commerce, from an organizational home base in Paris, to smaller French host cities such as Pau and Brest, to an international scene of participants both on, and beyond, the saddle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Tour de France is happening right now! The 2015 edition started on July 4th and will continue until July 26th. I’m excited to be able to share this interview with Eric Reed about his new book, Selling the Yellow Jersey: The Tour de France in the Global Era (University of Chicago Press, 2015) as riders make their way through the various stages of this, the most famous bike race in the world. A compelling historical narrative of the Tour, including some of its most significant moments and stars, Selling the Yellow Jersey explores the Tour as a global phenomenon. Reed argues that, over the course of the twentieth century, France was a full participant in a globalization that the Tour exemplified as a business and media enterprise, and a spectacle consumed by millions of fans around the world. Considering the roles of organizers, riders, and spectators within and outside of France, the book examines the meanings of “Frenchness” in contexts regional, national, and global. From the Tour’s emergence in 1903 during a “cycling craze” that had a particular vitality in France, to the doping scandals of more recent years, Selling the Yellow Jersey traces the Tour’s triumphs and scandals over more than a hundred years. It is a history of culture and commerce, from an organizational home base in Paris, to smaller French host cities such as Pau and Brest, to an international scene of participants both on, and beyond, the saddle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Tour de France is happening right now! The 2015 edition started on July 4th and will continue until July 26th. I’m excited to be able to share this interview with Eric Reed about his new book, Selling the Yellow Jersey: The Tour de France in the Global Era (University of Chicago Press, 2015) as riders make their way through the various stages of this, the most famous bike race in the world. A compelling historical narrative of the Tour, including some of its most significant moments and stars, Selling the Yellow Jersey explores the Tour as a global phenomenon. Reed argues that, over the course of the twentieth century, France was a full participant in a globalization that the Tour exemplified as a business and media enterprise, and a spectacle consumed by millions of fans around the world. Considering the roles of organizers, riders, and spectators within and outside of France, the book examines the meanings of “Frenchness” in contexts regional, national, and global. From the Tour’s emergence in 1903 during a “cycling craze” that had a particular vitality in France, to the doping scandals of more recent years, Selling the Yellow Jersey traces the Tour’s triumphs and scandals over more than a hundred years. It is a history of culture and commerce, from an organizational home base in Paris, to smaller French host cities such as Pau and Brest, to an international scene of participants both on, and beyond, the saddle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Tour de France is happening right now! The 2015 edition started on July 4th and will continue until July 26th. I’m excited to be able to share this interview with Eric Reed about his new book, Selling the Yellow Jersey: The Tour de France in the Global Era (University of Chicago Press, 2015) as riders make their way through the various stages of this, the most famous bike race in the world. A compelling historical narrative of the Tour, including some of its most significant moments and stars, Selling the Yellow Jersey explores the Tour as a global phenomenon. Reed argues that, over the course of the twentieth century, France was a full participant in a globalization that the Tour exemplified as a business and media enterprise, and a spectacle consumed by millions of fans around the world. Considering the roles of organizers, riders, and spectators within and outside of France, the book examines the meanings of “Frenchness” in contexts regional, national, and global. From the Tour’s emergence in 1903 during a “cycling craze” that had a particular vitality in France, to the doping scandals of more recent years, Selling the Yellow Jersey traces the Tour’s triumphs and scandals over more than a hundred years. It is a history of culture and commerce, from an organizational home base in Paris, to smaller French host cities such as Pau and Brest, to an international scene of participants both on, and beyond, the saddle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
“France” does not appear in the title of Ellen Amster‘s new book, Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877-1956 (University of Texas Press, 2013). But in its pursuit of a set of medical encounters in colonial Morocco, this is a book that is all about the meeting of France and Frenchness with “Other” ideas about the body and its various states of being, living, and suffering. Approaching the history of French colonialism in Morocco as a series of deep connections between bodies and the body politic, Medicine and the Saints offers readers tremendous insight on the ways that Moroccans and their French colonizers borrowed from and clashed with one another when it came to their understandings of science, physical and spiritual health, and the complexities of interactions between patients, healers, families, and citizens. Treating the body as an archive, the book draws on an impressive range of documents and perspectives, in both Arabic and French. It also makes use of an extremely rich set of interviews that the author conducted with contemporary Moroccans between 1995 and 2000. The book reminds us that the French “civilizing mission” was often framed in scientific and medical terms and that the nationalisms and modernities that have emerged in Morocco (and indeed throughout the Islamic world) have been forged in complex relationship with a specifically French positivism that understands bodies and politics in particular ways. Medicine and the Saints is a fascinating, visceral history with profound implications for present day medical beliefs, practices, systems, and experiences within and beyond Morocco’s borders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Did you catch the French national team’s triumph in its first match against Honduras at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil? Well I did and it was fantastic. I was particularly excited knowing that the next morning, I was scheduled to interview Lindsay Krasnoff about her new book, The Making of Les Bleus: Sport in France, 1958-2010 (Lexington Books, 2012). An illuminating account of French sport since 1958, the book links the histories of football (soccer) and basketball to some of the major issues of the postwar period: the baby boom, the development of a consumer culture and new media, the Cold War, and decolonization. Moving from the “sports crisis” that preoccupied French policy makers in the wake of France’s poor showing at the 1960 Rome Olympics through the decades that led to the 1998 World Cup and subsequent victories, The Making of Les Bleus is a history of sport and politics that examines the interplay of the two on the national and international stages. Covering a period of over fifty years, the book considers sports as a primary means by which the French state sought to obtain and expand its own “soft power” in the world arena through the encouragement of national sports programs and culture. Krasnoff has drawn on an impressive range of archival material, as well as numerous interviews that provide readers with a unique perspective on recent years for which much of the written record remains off-limits to researchers. Concluding with a discussion of the most recent “sports crisis” in France (the national football team has suffered some serious losses in the last several years), Krasnoff’s study places more recent events in French sports culture in the context of a nation struggling with competing definitions of Frenchness. And I didn’t miss the chance to ask this expert for her thoughts on France’s odds this World Cup round. We are both optimistic… *Note: The views that Lindsay expresses in the interview are hers alone and do not represent those of her employer, the U.S. Department of State, or the U.S. Government. Information presented here is based on publicly available, declassified sources and oral history interviews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
There is a city in the Southern hills of Vietnam where honeymooners travel each year to affirm their love at high altitude, breathing in the alpine air and soaking in the legacies of French colonialism. Developed by the French in the nineteenth century, Dalat remains a contemporary tourist destination fully equipped with a “Valley of Love”, an artificial lake with paddleboats, and cowboys. It is also the subject of Eric Jennings‘ Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina (University of California Press, 2011). In his impressive study, Jennings explores more than one hundred years in the history of this colonial and now postcolonial city. Over the course of fourteen chapters, the book examines issues of space and place; disease and health; colonial violence and injustice; culture and leisure; the impacts of war, race and ethnicity, class, gender, memory, and nostalgia. Using Dalat’s past and present as a way into some of the deep contradictions and anxieties of French colonialism, the book is a stunning examination of a unique local context with broader implications for how we think empire and “Frenchness” together. Along the way, Jennings tells a series of fascinating stories, narratives of scientific debate and discovery; of murder and exploitation; of physical illness and recovery; and the attempt to create a French “home away from home” in the colonial mountains. Grounded in hitherto unexplored archival material, Imperial Heights opens up critical questions regarding the tensions and legacies of a French Indochina that was first made and then undone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
There is a city in the Southern hills of Vietnam where honeymooners travel each year to affirm their love at high altitude, breathing in the alpine air and soaking in the legacies of French colonialism. Developed by the French in the nineteenth century, Dalat remains a contemporary tourist destination fully equipped with a “Valley of Love”, an artificial lake with paddleboats, and cowboys. It is also the subject of Eric Jennings‘ Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina (University of California Press, 2011). In his impressive study, Jennings explores more than one hundred years in the history of this colonial and now postcolonial city. Over the course of fourteen chapters, the book examines issues of space and place; disease and health; colonial violence and injustice; culture and leisure; the impacts of war, race and ethnicity, class, gender, memory, and nostalgia. Using Dalat’s past and present as a way into some of the deep contradictions and anxieties of French colonialism, the book is a stunning examination of a unique local context with broader implications for how we think empire and “Frenchness” together. Along the way, Jennings tells a series of fascinating stories, narratives of scientific debate and discovery; of murder and exploitation; of physical illness and recovery; and the attempt to create a French “home away from home” in the colonial mountains. Grounded in hitherto unexplored archival material, Imperial Heights opens up critical questions regarding the tensions and legacies of a French Indochina that was first made and then undone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
There is a city in the Southern hills of Vietnam where honeymooners travel each year to affirm their love at high altitude, breathing in the alpine air and soaking in the legacies of French colonialism. Developed by the French in the nineteenth century, Dalat remains a contemporary tourist destination fully equipped with a “Valley of Love”, an artificial lake with paddleboats, and cowboys. It is also the subject of Eric Jennings‘ Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina (University of California Press, 2011). In his impressive study, Jennings explores more than one hundred years in the history of this colonial and now postcolonial city. Over the course of fourteen chapters, the book examines issues of space and place; disease and health; colonial violence and injustice; culture and leisure; the impacts of war, race and ethnicity, class, gender, memory, and nostalgia. Using Dalat’s past and present as a way into some of the deep contradictions and anxieties of French colonialism, the book is a stunning examination of a unique local context with broader implications for how we think empire and “Frenchness” together. Along the way, Jennings tells a series of fascinating stories, narratives of scientific debate and discovery; of murder and exploitation; of physical illness and recovery; and the attempt to create a French “home away from home” in the colonial mountains. Grounded in hitherto unexplored archival material, Imperial Heights opens up critical questions regarding the tensions and legacies of a French Indochina that was first made and then undone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
There is a city in the Southern hills of Vietnam where honeymooners travel each year to affirm their love at high altitude, breathing in the alpine air and soaking in the legacies of French colonialism. Developed by the French in the nineteenth century, Dalat remains a contemporary tourist destination fully equipped with a “Valley of Love”, an artificial lake with paddleboats, and cowboys. It is also the subject of Eric Jennings‘ Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina (University of California Press, 2011). In his impressive study, Jennings explores more than one hundred years in the history of this colonial and now postcolonial city. Over the course of fourteen chapters, the book examines issues of space and place; disease and health; colonial violence and injustice; culture and leisure; the impacts of war, race and ethnicity, class, gender, memory, and nostalgia. Using Dalat’s past and present as a way into some of the deep contradictions and anxieties of French colonialism, the book is a stunning examination of a unique local context with broader implications for how we think empire and “Frenchness” together. Along the way, Jennings tells a series of fascinating stories, narratives of scientific debate and discovery; of murder and exploitation; of physical illness and recovery; and the attempt to create a French “home away from home” in the colonial mountains. Grounded in hitherto unexplored archival material, Imperial Heights opens up critical questions regarding the tensions and legacies of a French Indochina that was first made and then undone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
There is a city in the Southern hills of Vietnam where honeymooners travel each year to affirm their love at high altitude, breathing in the alpine air and soaking in the legacies of French colonialism. Developed by the French in the nineteenth century, Dalat remains a contemporary tourist destination fully equipped with a “Valley of Love”, an artificial lake with paddleboats, and cowboys. It is also the subject of Eric Jennings‘ Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina (University of California Press, 2011). In his impressive study, Jennings explores more than one hundred years in the history of this colonial and now postcolonial city. Over the course of fourteen chapters, the book examines issues of space and place; disease and health; colonial violence and injustice; culture and leisure; the impacts of war, race and ethnicity, class, gender, memory, and nostalgia. Using Dalat’s past and present as a way into some of the deep contradictions and anxieties of French colonialism, the book is a stunning examination of a unique local context with broader implications for how we think empire and “Frenchness” together. Along the way, Jennings tells a series of fascinating stories, narratives of scientific debate and discovery; of murder and exploitation; of physical illness and recovery; and the attempt to create a French “home away from home” in the colonial mountains. Grounded in hitherto unexplored archival material, Imperial Heights opens up critical questions regarding the tensions and legacies of a French Indochina that was first made and then undone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
There is a city in the Southern hills of Vietnam where honeymooners travel each year to affirm their love at high altitude, breathing in the alpine air and soaking in the legacies of French colonialism. Developed by the French in the nineteenth century, Dalat remains a contemporary tourist destination fully equipped with a “Valley of Love”, an artificial lake with paddleboats, and cowboys. It is also the subject of Eric Jennings‘ Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina (University of California Press, 2011). In his impressive study, Jennings explores more than one hundred years in the history of this colonial and now postcolonial city. Over the course of fourteen chapters, the book examines issues of space and place; disease and health; colonial violence and injustice; culture and leisure; the impacts of war, race and ethnicity, class, gender, memory, and nostalgia. Using Dalat’s past and present as a way into some of the deep contradictions and anxieties of French colonialism, the book is a stunning examination of a unique local context with broader implications for how we think empire and “Frenchness” together. Along the way, Jennings tells a series of fascinating stories, narratives of scientific debate and discovery; of murder and exploitation; of physical illness and recovery; and the attempt to create a French “home away from home” in the colonial mountains. Grounded in hitherto unexplored archival material, Imperial Heights opens up critical questions regarding the tensions and legacies of a French Indochina that was first made and then undone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nacira Guénif-Souilamas is Associate Professor at the University of Paris. Her Phd dissertation was awarded « Le prix le Monde de la recherche universitaire » published as Des beurettes aux descendantes d’immigrants nord-africains, Grasset (2000), and in a paperback edition under the title Des beurettes, Hachette-Pluriel (2003), translated in arabic in 2004. She has co-authored with Éric Macé Les féministes et le garçon arabe, L’Aube (2004, paperback edition in 2006). She has edited La république mise à nu par son immigration, La Fabrique (2006). A number of her contributions appeared in edited volumes : La fracture coloniale, Qui a peur de la télévision en couleurs ?, La situation postcoloniale, La reconnaissance dans les société contemporaines, Repenser l’éducation préscolaire, Histoire politique des luttes de l’immigration (post)coloniale), Migration und Menschenrechte in Europa, Frenchness and the African Diaspora ; and articles in reviews and journals such as La Revue Européenne des Migration Internationales ; French Politics, Culture and Society ; Contemporary French Civilization (invited ed) ; Cosmopolitiques (invited ed) ; Mouvements ; VEI Diversité ; European Early Childhood Education Research Journal. She is currently completing a serie of chapters for forthcoming edited volumes : La fracture postcoloniale, Israeli-Paslestinian Conflict in the Francophone World, Europe: Europeanizing Queer, and articles in Yale French Studies, The Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. She contributes to public debates on migrations and discriminations issues, ethnic and racial research, gender and sexism. She is a board member of the TERRA network. .
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