Épisodes

  • Sally Frances Low, "Colonial Law Making: Cambodia Under the French" (NUS Press, 2023)

    Sally Frances Low, "Colonial Law Making: Cambodia Under the French" (NUS Press, 2023)
    Feb 22 2026
    In 1863 the French established a protectorate over the kingdom of Cambodia. The protectorate, along with Vietnam and Laos, later became part of the colonial state of French Indochina. Part of the French ‘civilizing mission’ in Cambodia involved reforming Cambodian law and legal processes. Sally Low’s pioneering study, Colonial Law Making: Cambodia under the French (NUS Press, 2023), tells the story of the encounter between what she calls two different legal and social ‘cosmologies’: Cambodia’s indigenous legal tradition and modern French legal thinking. While the French claimed they were modernizing Cambodian law, in fact they imposed many elements of French law. Initially, they dispossessed the king of much of his judicial authority. But ironically, the French reform of Cambodian law retained the monarchy as the semi-divine source of law, and royal power was subsequently legally embedded into new national institutions, the law, and the constitutions. At independence in 1953, 90 years after the French began their protectorate, Cambodia’s King Sihanouk inherited this legal apparatus which had done so much to enhance the power of the executive over the judiciary. Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies
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    46 min
  • Mélanie Lamotte, "By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire" (Harvard UP, 2026)

    Mélanie Lamotte, "By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire" (Harvard UP, 2026)
    Feb 18 2026
    From the beginning of the seventeenth century, French colonies and trading posts sprawled across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In the first pan-imperial history of the early French Empire in the English language, Mélanie Lamotte shows how an increasingly cohesive legal culture came to govern the lives of enslaved and free people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent. She also illuminates the important role played by these populations in the development of the empire, from Louisiana to Guadeloupe, Senegambia, Madagascar, Isle Bourbon, and India. The early French Empire has often been portrayed as a fragmented conglomerate of isolated colonies or regions. Yet Lamotte shows that racial policies issued by the metropole, as well as by officials in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, significantly influenced one another. Rather than focusing on the actions of administrators, however, Lamotte also reveals the extensive influence of people on the ground—especially those of non-European descent. Through their sexuality and their labor, along with their socio-economic and political endeavors, they played a critical role in building the empire and setting its limits. As they sought justice for themselves, strove to protect their kin, and aimed to improve their social conditions, these individuals also pushed against the advancement of white dominion in unexpected ways. Archivally rich and rigorously documented, By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire (Harvard UP, 2026) illuminates the transoceanic connections that united the French colonial world—and recasts people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent as key actors in the story of empire-building. This interview is conducted by Dr Lewis Wade, a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Bamberg. He is the author of the prize-winning Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France and can be found on Bluesky @wadehistory.bsky.social. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies
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    27 min
  • Claire Nicolas, "Une si longue course: Sport, genre, et citoyenneté au Ghana et en Côte d’Ivoire (années 1900-1970)" (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2024)

    Claire Nicolas, "Une si longue course: Sport, genre, et citoyenneté au Ghana et en Côte d’Ivoire (années 1900-1970)" (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2024)
    Feb 11 2026
    Today we are joined by Claire Nicolas, a chercheuse du Fonds National Suisse at Basel University, a holder of a prestigious Ambizione Research Grant, and the author of Une si longue course: Sport, genre, et citoyenneté au Ghana et en Côte d’Ivoire (années 1900-1970) (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2024). In our conversation, we discussed physical culture in colonial and post-colonial Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana, the differences and the similarities between the imperial and post-imperial biopolitical strategies in both places, and the way that sports histories benefit from sustained engagement with critical theory. In Une si longue course, Nicolas engages in a sustained comparison between the colonial and post-colonial physical cultural life of Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana. She organizes her work into two sections: one on colonial West Africa and another on post-colonial West Africa. Each section has three chapters covering physical education, scouting and sports. Her work addresses athletic life from the top down and the bottom up. In doing so, she shows that contrary to any simple history of teleological progress or sport as a crucible for nationalism, physical education, scouting and sport have been imperfect tools for imperial and post-imperial states. Athletes, scouts, and students found innovative ways to reshape the physical cultural priorities of the state to suit their own agendas. This deeply ambitious work significantly adds to our understanding of physical culture in colonial and post-colonial West Africa through a comparative approach. It draws upon extensive primary source research: Nicolas works in the archives of the British and French colonial states, the ministries of post-colonial Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana, and the repositories of international sporting organizations in Switzerland. She also relies upon oral histories conducted with Ghanaian and Ivoirian sportsmen and women. Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Great Britain, and France: their physical cultural programmes shared continuities and ruptures. Colonial empires concerned with the mise en valeur of their subjects sought biopolitical solutions to increase the birthrate, expand agricultural and industrial production, and prepare men for the defence of the empire. They worried that physical cultural programs – if poorly managed – would become sites for resistance, but Nicolas’ work shows that sporting clubs, scouting halls, and schools could confound any simple collaboration/resistance dichotomy. Nicolas’ work also demonstrates the deeply gendered nature of both colonial and post-colonial physical culture. Newly emergent post-colonial nations sought to produce new men (and women) in ways that replicated the essentialism of their imperial predecessors. Nicolas’ engaging work, thoroughly researched, and beautifully presented will be of broad interest to people invested in British, French, and West African history. It has broader conclusions for people interested in colonial and post-colonial theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies
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    58 min
  • Olivier Esteves et al., "France, You Love It but Leave It: The Silent Flight of French Muslims" (Polity, 2025)

    Olivier Esteves et al., "France, You Love It but Leave It: The Silent Flight of French Muslims" (Polity, 2025)
    Feb 6 2026
    Their names are Mohamed, Samira, sometimes Matthieu or Sophie. They were born and bred in France and are highly qualified, but they have decided to go and live in London or New York, Montreal or Brussels, Geneva or Dubai. Many were discriminated against on the French job market, or stigmatized simply because of their religion or the sound of their names. Whether devout or not, they felt unloved and unwanted in France, but abroad they have found a sense of peace and fulfilment that their native country failed to give them.Based on extensive original research, France, You Love It but Leave It: The Silent Flight of French Muslims (Polity, 2025) by Dr. Olivier Esteves, Dr. Alice Picard, and Dr. Julien Talpin sheds new light on the silent and largely unacknowledged flight abroad of French Muslims. It explores their motivations, their experiences in France and abroad, and their sense of Frenchness, torn between gratitude and bitterness. This book isn't just about an unreported brain-drain - it is also about the deleterious effects of Islamophobia in a country that balks at the very mention of the concept. And it highlights a pressing issue that many nations with Muslim minorities need to confront. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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 interviews 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
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    58 min
  • Cindy Anh Nguyen, "Bibliotactics: Libraries and the Colonial Public in Vietnam" (U California Press, 2026)

    Cindy Anh Nguyen, "Bibliotactics: Libraries and the Colonial Public in Vietnam" (U California Press, 2026)
    Feb 6 2026
    Libraries in French colonial Vietnam functioned as symbols of Western modernity and infrastructures of colonial knowledge. Yet Vietnamese readers pursued alternative uses of the library that exceeded imperial intentions. In Bibliotactics: Libraries and the Colonial Public in Vietnam (U California Press, 2026), Cindy Any Nguyen examines the Hanoi and Saigon state libraries in colonial and postcolonial Vietnam, uncovering the emergence of a colonial public who reimagined the political meaning and social space of the library through public critique and day-to-day practice. Comprising government bureaucrats, library personnel, journalists, and everyday library readers, this colonial public debated the role of libraries as educational resource, civilizing instrument, and literary heritage. Moving beyond procolonial or anticolonial nationalism framings, Bibliotactics advances a relational theory of power that centers public reading culture contextualized within the library infrastructure of the colonial information order. As the first comprehensive history of the colonial and national library in Asia, this book contributes new insights into publicity, colonial and postcolonial studies, and the histories of Vietnam, libraries, and information. Bibliotactics is available open access from Luminosa. Visit here to download a copy for free. Cindy Anh Nguyen is Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Studies and the Digital Humanities program at the University of California, Los Angeles. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom (2022) and The Social Movement Archive (2021), and co-editor of Armed By Design: Posters and Publications of Cuba’s Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (2025). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies
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    1 h et 1 min
  • 164 Maurice Samuels: Jewish Assimilation, Integration and the Dreyfus Affair (JP)

    164 Maurice Samuels: Jewish Assimilation, Integration and the Dreyfus Affair (JP)
    Feb 5 2026
    When it comes to the condition of Jews in Christian Europe, France was long known as the haven and heartland of integration and of toleration. And yet when things seemed to be going well for Jews in Western Europe and North America generally and France especially, the infamous fin de siècle Dreyfus affair brought to the surface some of the worst kinds of bigotry and animus--like contemporaneous Russian pogroms a premonition of the deadly looming revival of ethnic or religious divisions that had seemed a thing of the past. Our guest today, historian Maurice Samuels, author of many fine books on French history (Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France (2010), and The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews (2016))and director of the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism has written a crackerjack new book. Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair, (Yale 2024) has written a wonderful account of Dreyfus himself and how should we understand what that turmoil has ot tell us how Jews then (and perhaps today) coexisted with a mainstream secular Christian society either by way of assimilation or (not quite the same thing) by peaceful integration that preserved cultural distinctions. The discussion ranges widely, setting the scene in the prior centuries when Jews settled all over France, and then were accorded unusual rights by the universalist vision of the French Revolution. Maurie also explains why succeeding generations in France included the ascension not only of Leon Blum the Jewish socialist (and inventor of the weekend!) who improbably led anti-fascist France during in the 1930's--but also the other Jews who followed him as political leaders in France, right up to the present-day. From Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) forward, Maurie shows, intellectuals have missed the significance of the way Dreyfus and his family integrated without assimilating. The conversation culminating in Maurie introducing John to the fascinating "Franco-French War" about what that coexistence should look like: assimilation which presumes the disappearance of a distinctive Jewish cultural identity, or integration which posits the peaceful coexistence of French citizens of various religions and cultures. Mentioned in the episode Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question" (1844) George Eliot's (perhaps philosemitic) Daniel Deronda (1876) Why does Yale have a Hebrew motto, אורים ותומים (light and perfection)? The Haitian Revolution in its triumphs and tribulations is an analogy that helps explain jewish Emancipation--and also in some ways a tragic counterexample. The horrifying Great Replacement Theory we have heard so much about in America (eg in Charlottesville in 2017) began in France; Maurie has some thoughts about that. Michael Burns, Dreyfus: A Family Affair. America's racial "one drop" rule. Pierre Birnbaum, Leon Blum: Prime Minister, Socialist, Zionist (Yale, 2015) Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies
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    1 h
  • Andrew Billing, "Animal Rhetoric and Natural Science in Eighteenth-century Liberal Political Writing" (Routledge, 2023)

    Andrew Billing, "Animal Rhetoric and Natural Science in Eighteenth-century Liberal Political Writing" (Routledge, 2023)
    Feb 4 2026
    Animal Rhetoric and Natural Science in Eighteenth-century Liberal Political Writing: Political Zoologies of the French Enlightenment (Routledge, 2024) shows how our tendency to read French Enlightenment political writing from a narrow disciplinary perspective has obscured the hybrid character of political philosophy, rhetoric, and natural science in the period. As Michèle Duchet and others have shown, French Enlightenment thinkers developed a philosophical anthropology to support new political norms and models. This book explores how five important eighteenth-century French political authors—Rousseau, Diderot, La Mettrie, Quesnay, and Rétif de La Bretonne—also constructed a "political zoology" in their philosophical and literary writings informed by animal references drawn from Enlightenment natural history, science, and physiology. Drawing on theoretical work by Derrida, Latour, de Fontenay, and others, it shows how these five authors signed on to the old rhetorical tradition of animal comparisons in political philosophy, which they renewed via the findings and speculations of contemporary science. Engaging with recent scholarship on Enlightenment political thought, it also explores the links between their political zoologies and their family resemblance as "liberal" political thinkers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies
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    56 min
  • Jacqueline Couti and Anny Dominique Curtius, "Women, Theory, Praxis, and Performativities: Transoceanic Entanglements in Francophone Settings" (Liverpool UP, 2025)

    Jacqueline Couti and Anny Dominique Curtius, "Women, Theory, Praxis, and Performativities: Transoceanic Entanglements in Francophone Settings" (Liverpool UP, 2025)
    Feb 3 2026
    Women, Theory, Praxis, and Performativities: Transoceanic Entanglements in Francophone Settings (Liverpool UP, 2025) bridges the gap between the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. It collectively fosters new transoceanic modes of thinking to reframe postcolonial debates and reveal the interconnected dialogues led by women from former French colonies and post-contact island territories. Thus, the volume unsettles the male agenda (captains, missionaries, mariners, ethnographers), and pays attention to the ways in which artists, writers, and activists have theorized or poetized women and the seas, reclaimed agency and created transformative possibilities. To critically map out a gendered conversation with the ocean, the contributors explore activisms and feminisms, intersectional praxes of care, ecological and health impacts of nuclear radiation and chlordecone contamination, queerness, decolonizing dance, the unsettling of official archives and female tidalectical corporeality and embodiments, Mā'ohi epistemologies and ontologies, silence as empowerment against colonial violence, forced migration and vulnerability. The volume's overarching approach belongs to a "politics of refusal" which brings forth formerly discarded archives and discredited sites of knowledge to counter ideologies and doctrinal apparatus that promote forgetting or erasure among non-sovereign populations. In exploring transoceanic feminine spaces as vital sites of knowledge production, this interdisciplinary collaboration aims to ensure that readers actively engage with feminine praxes, understanding their significance not only as theoretical constructs but as lived experiences (re)occupying, (re)appropriating and transcending patriarchal and postcolonial spaces. Jacqueline Couti is the Laurence H. Favrot Professor of French in the Department of Modern & Classical Literatures & Cultures at Rice University and the author of 2016’s Dangerous Creole Liaisons: Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourses from 1806 to 1897 and 2021’s Sex, Sea, and Self: Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourses 1924–1948, as well as editing several critical editions and special journal issues, and authoring numerous articles and book chapters. Anny-Dominique Curtius is Professor of Francophone Studies in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Iowa, and has published two monographs : Symbioses d’une mémoire: Manifestations religieuses et littératures de la Caraibe in 2006 and Suzanne Césaire. Archéologie littéraire et artistique d’une mémoire empêchée in 2020. She has also co-edited a special issue of Esprit Créateur on “Francophonies of the Early Modern,” and published extensively in academic journals and edited volumes. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progress on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies
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    1 h et 18 min