If you want an idea of how invisible non-white perspectives are in French cultural debate, they are (in 2020) about to take the n-word out of the title of that Agatha Christie novel and a media philosopher is calling it ‘cancel culture’ and quoting Rousseau
Interview here (in French) - also he splutters (hilariously) that if this kind of terrible censorship is allowed to stand, then next they’ll be CHANGING THE LYRICS OF DIRE STRAITS SONGS. lecho.be/culture/genera…
The cultural context in which people like Enthoven clutch their pearls about censorship is also one where a magazine can run an illustration of a black deputée in a slave collar and chains (h/t @julienkirch) theguardian.com/world/2020/aug…
Spent a happy day being called a cultural imperialist by white French men. I’ll just leave this here on the history of the word ‘nègre’ and find somewhere fresh to coca-colonize google.com/amp/s/la1ere.f…
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
This company Prosecraft appears to have stolen a lot of books, trained an AI, and are now offering a service based on that data blog.shaxpir.com/prosecraft-lin…
I've been traveling for a while, and some good book and music mail was waiting for me when I got back. I also bought some things in Paris. So, a thread of the TBR / TBListened pile
Gallimard are doing a series of political tracts. Badiou, political crime writer Didier Daeninckx and a collective of historians taking down Zemmour's distortions of French history
Two translations from @archipelagobks that I can't wait to read: @a_nathanwest's version of Hermann Burger's last novel Brenner and Maureen Freely's version of Sevgi Soysal's autobiographical prison novel Dawn.
Carlson has same pseudo-decent talking point. But this is what mourning looks like - people angry and sad enough to want to do something, rather than pretending it’s like the damn weather.
There is a posture of learned helplessness adopted by US politicians in the face of this and many other problems. Words like ‘tragedy’ drain away agency.
These deaths are the result of policy. In other countries policy was changed and these events became vanishingly rare. See UK after Dunblane, Australia after Port Arthur