Last articles

• Whose history?: Conversation about heritage, the abolition of slavery and national sentiment

  23 January 2008, by Melanine Choir

  Remembrance, history, heritage: this is first part of a conversation around the research interests of these two British sociologists whose works explore the relations between notions of race, culture and nationalism. If their studies tend to focus on Great Britain and the USA, their methods offer a model that begs to be adapted to French circumstances and specificities, in order to start to think an alternative to Sarkozy and his ghost writer Guaino’s vision of “civilization.”

• Thugs, Punks, or Wise?

  3 January 2008, by @Alfred, Nico Melanine

  The recent crisis in the French projects of Villiers-le-Bel revealed once more how mainstream groupthink never learns. It recycles its own mediocrity in order to spread the same old class scorn: an ideology we should reject and fight.

• Nicolas Sarkozy: his nation in danger

  18 May 2007, by @Alfred

  Oh, the sweet irony of the May 10th photo-op in the Luxembourg gardens in Paris... It was the second national day of commemoration of the abolition of slavery in France. This nice pretext was all but erased by the occasion, a historical occasion, we learned on conservative French channel TF1: Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy were there, together, one on the outs, one coming in! History in the making! And for Sarkozy, this was about presenting a certain idea of the nation. His nation. Not ours.

• Maroon Slaves and Black Flags

  13 January 2007, by @Alfred, Soopa Seb

  During slavery’s reign of horror, solidarities were struck between human groups everything should have kept apart: white sailors, maroon slaves, black freedmen, white indentured servants joined in common, pre-revolutionary struggles. A thing to ponder in times of communautarist discourse, when some of our politicians fuel with xenophobic discourse the skewed debate over the “cultural” and “ethnic” divisions that allegedly characterize the populace.

• Fight alongside your defenders

  8 September 2006, by Alfred

  Lilian Thuram has done it again, this time with fellow French soccer star Patrick Vieira, much to the dismay of the French right wing parties. The French international cap record holder and the team captain think they have a right to use their brains as well as they use their feet. Left-wing softies get all woozy for them: it is so good to have niggers do your job. Thuram and Vieira don’t care. They’re used to it.