Books & ideas

Zomia, Land Without State

2013-05-20T07:00:00Z

For two thousand years, according to James Scott, the mountains of Zomia were a place of refuge for the people of Southeast Asia. For the author, this region, as a centre of resistance to the state, holds up a mirror to our destructive and self-confident civilisation. A fascinating and intriguing anarchist history.

- Reviews / anarchisme, résistance, democracy, Asia, utopie

A World Out of Key

2013-05-16T07:30:00Z

Although today's world is more interdependent than ever, it is still a jigsaw puzzle of sovereign states. One consequence of globalization is that we have to update our own mental maps, and to understand other people's. In this interview, the diplomat and geographer Michel Foucher explains the world's new geography.

- Reviews / géographie, international relations, state, international comparisons

The Multiple Meanings of Revolution

2013-05-13T07:00:00Z

Though the age of historic upheavals and major political crises seemed to be over, the word “revolution” has made a recent comeback in Georgia, in the Ukraine and in the “Arab Springs” of 2011. Should we revise the concept of revolution? What, if anything, do these contemporary revolutions have in common? Can they be compared to the great revolutions of the past: namely the French and Soviet revolutions?

- Essays / revolution, democracy, crisis

From Bombay to Mumbai

2013-05-09T07:00:00Z

Gyan Prakash's most recent book takes us on a journey through Bombay's history, focusing on the myths and fables that have shaped how the city is represented. His ambitious project fails, however, to explain Bombay's transition from a cosmopolitan city to one torn apart by ethnic conflict.

- Reviews / city, urbanisme

Filming the End of the World

2013-05-06T07:30:00Z

2012, Terminator, Blade Runner, Melancholia. There is no shortage of films portraying the end of the world; in fact, they are becoming ever more successful. But what is their real meaning? Are they pure entertainment, allowing us to play with the idea that everything could stop from one day to the next? Peter Szendy believes that we should be taking them very seriously, because they express the fundamental nature of cinema itself – and because they tell us, in their own way, what a world is.

- Essays / cinema, picture

Interweaving Eastern and Western Perspectives

2013-05-02T08:44:48Z

In Florence and Baghdad, Hans Belting writes a new history of the human gaze based on its symbolic value in relation to the image. His starting point is the cultural transfer between the East and the West, leading to the invention of perspective in the 16^th century. The author examines two different forms of cultures of the gaze and lays the groundwork for a global art history.

- Reviews / culture, art history, global history, West, islam, Renaissance

Labour markets and the crisis of the European Monetary Union

2013-04-29T07:00:00Z

Most observers think of the crisis of the European monetary union primarily as a crisis of failed fiscal discipline in a monetary union. Bob Hancke proposes a very different way of looking at this. The crisis of EMU since 2009 has laid bare problematic aspects of the interaction between employment relations, and in particular wage bargaining systems, on the one hand, and central banks on the other.

- Essays / monnaie, European Union, salaries

Ghettos: Centers of Jewish Resistance?

2013-04-25T06:44:17Z

Running through this encyclopedic undertaking to map all the Jewish ghettos of World War II are Yad Vashem's contentions that the ghettos did not constitute a prerequisite for the Final Solution and that they were centers of Jewish resistance. What is innovative about this reference work is the huge amount of hitherto little-known documentation from the ex-USSR.

- Reviews / Shoah, antisemitism, judaism, ghetto

Revolution and Redistribution

2013-04-23T07:51:07Z

When we think about revolutions, don't economic interests tend to be left out of the equation? For the last two decades political and cultural questions have made social justice appear a secondary concern. According to historian Charles Walton, the problem of redistribution, already apparent in 18^th century revolutions, is also central to Egyptian revolutionaries.

- Essays / revolution, redistribution, French Revolution

The “Ambiguities” of Irène Némirovsky

2013-04-18T12:10:25Z

After being readmitted to French literary heritage following the international success of Suite française (2004), Irène Némirovsky's work provides a unique insight into the intellectual landscape of the inter-war period, particularly with regard to the crisis of the novel, the new mal du siècle and the Jewish literary renaissance. However, Angela Kershaw's recent book on the author shows the difficulties involved in reading and understanding a book once the Holocaust has changed our perception of it.

- Reviews / judaism, literature, entre-deux-guerres