You Can’t Always Get What You Want, or In Defense of False Choices
Žižek on Macron and LePen
White European Women’s Rights
France’s Paradoxical Women’s Liberation
A Burkini Removed and Secularism Exposed
The Two Faces of Post Modern Barbarism: A Response to the Massacre in Nice
Paris Spring? Social Media And The Spread Of European Solidarity Protests
June marks the fifth month of Nuit Debout (Standing Night) a movement that sprung from earlier protests by young people against the French government’s labor law reform. On March 31, 2016, an informal group of a dozen citizens from Fakir, a left-wing activist magazine, used the #mars40 Twitter hashtag to ...
Charlie Hebdo and the Appeal for French Context
White & Black Analytics
The attacks on the offices of the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in January 2015, during which fourteen people were killed, pose a specific problem for the white left. The call to contextualize Charlie Hebdo foregrounded a structurally white French context, in which people of colour ...
We Say No to the “Sacred Union”
In the aftermath of the killings at Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher, critical voices have largely been drowned in the general sea of undifferentiated outrage. But this statement by French colleagues, which recently appeared in Le Monde, is a major intervention and a welcome exception.
...A Tribute to Economist Bernard Maris (Sept. 23, 1946 – Jan. 7, 2015)
I was shocked to learn that Bernard Maris had been murdered at a meeting of the editors of Charlie Hebdo in Paris on January 7, 2015. He died at his desk, killed by the fanaticism that he regularly denounced.
Bernard Maris was an economist and a member of the governing board ...
A Postcard from France: A Canadian in Avignon
To provide some context for what follows: I live in France, in the small southern city of Avignon. My wife, Audrey, is French, but I’m not. I, like so many others here, am “an immigrant.” Recent events have made the last few days emotionally and intellectually complex. I’ve been, at ...
Seven Steps toward Enlightenment: The Case of the French Killings
When a crystal breaks, it breaks along lines of pre-existing weakness. Thus traumatic assaults, like the one in Paris, can serve as X-rays into the body politic that endures them. Certainly, the US invasion of Iraq, a response to 9/11, serves as a paradigm case of how a terroristic attack ...