French Scholars Research Articles

Az afrikai hősepika kutatása a francia nyelvűség területén

In the field of heroic epic research in Africa, the collections, transcripts, translations, and follow-up analyses accompanying the editions of the text were published for the most part in two languages, French and English. In this study, the author takes into account the outstanding achievements of French scholarship.

‘Nothing Is Less Universal than the Idea of Race’

In 1950, the cultural anthropologist Alfred Métraux, a student of Marcel Mauss, was appointed to head a new Race Bureau at UNESCO in Paris whose mission was to combat racism with the tools of social science. Métraux had worked in the Americas since the 1930s, and his appointment allowed French social scientists to join the global struggle to remove prejudice ‘from the minds of men’. To what extent did French scholars help shape Métraux’s efforts, given that at the time American sociologists and social psychologists dominated the study of race relations? Booklets commissioned by UNESCO and authored by French and American scientists in the early 1950s suggest that linguistic and conceptual barriers made cross-national discussions of race difficult, but not impossible. Thanks in part to Métraux’s campaign, the social scientific study of race relations in post-war France began earlier than is typically remembered.

Aphra Behn’s “Emperor of the Moon” and Its French Source “Arlequin, Empereur dans la lune.” Ed. and trans. Judy A. Hayden and Daniel J. Worden.

<i>Aphra Behn’s “Emperor of the Moon” and Its French Source “Arlequin, Empereur dans la lune.”</i> Ed. and trans. Judy A. Hayden and Daniel J. Worden.

A New Edition of the De cerimoniis: No Longer a ‘geteiltes Dossier’?

AbstractThis review article presents a brief survey of the new critical edition, translation and commentary of the important tenth-century Byzantine imperial treatise known as the De cerimoniis aulae byzantinae (on the ceremonial of the Byzantine court), a title ascribed to the text only in the 16th century. The edition offers an upto- date and highly accurate edition of the tenth century manuscripts through which the text has been transmitted and the detailed and rigorous commentary includes a complete historical and structural analysis of the two books into which the text is divided. In the course of their analysis, the editors arrive at a number of important new conclusions about the origins, intentions and structure of the text, the working methods of the emperor who commissioned it, and the aims and intentions of Basil the parakoimomenos, the person who commissioned the Leipzig manuscript, the chief surviving witness for the text. The 5 volumes of the publication represent a superb achievement by the team of French scholars under the original direction of Gilbert Dagron (†).

Anthologizing Poe: Editions, Translations, and (Trans)National Canons

Anthologizing Poe: Editions, Translations, and (Trans)National Canons

Review: Framing the Church: The Social and Artistic Power of Buttresses in French Gothic Architecture

Review: <i>Framing the Church: The Social and Artistic Power of Buttresses in French Gothic Architecture</i>

Building territorial value within local circular economy’s projects: lessons from French scholars’ studies

ABSTRACT This contribution proposes an introduction to the concept of territorial value used by French-speaking researchers to analyse the benefits of circular economy (CE)’s projects. For several years, French-speaking researchers have been highlighting the emergence of a new form of value in the CE’s implementation. This so-called territorial value is associated with the mobilisation of heterogeneous actors (industrial, institutional, associative, etc.) in the CE’s implementation in the territories. It is essentially based on the capture, realisation, and redistribution of positive social externalities. However, this concept of territorial value covers many issues. This contribution addresses the theoretical and empirical issues of territorial value. It discusses its relationship with other concepts and/or forms of value (extended customer value, partnership value, shared value, etc.) which nevertheless remain values oriented towards the company. Then, it shows a relationship between territorial value, the issue of territorial development and, more broadly the ecological transition. The critical analysis reveals that the territorial value is defined around an overcoming of the genealogical approach of the value centred on the company. It refers to the valorisation of territorial resources. Then, it supposes the existence of a collective process relying particularly on the relations of proximity between the territorial actors. Finally, this contribution explores the difficulties in measuring this territorial value, which constitute research opportunities for the international scientific community.

The now-times of (post) apartheid

This commentary explores the multi-temporalities of the pasts which relate to South African cities ‘now’. Inspired by Myriam Houssay-Holzchuch’s article in this volume, and the wider engagements of French scholars in the South African context, this commentary takes as a starting point Walter Benjamin’s idea of history as thought through ‘now-time’. In doing so, I assess the declining relevance of the ‘post’ in thinking the futures of South African cities.

God will reward you: Muslim practices of caring for precarious migrants in the context of secular suspicion

In recent years, Muslims have become more visibly invested in humanitarian work in France. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Marseille, this article examines local initiatives to care for precarious others whose lives are neither materially supported nor socially recognized within the current French political regime. Engaging with critical French scholarship on humanitarianism as care for others associated with emergency, suffering and the politics of compassion, I show how food-distribution (maraudes) by Muslim-run humanitarian associations also draw from Islamic ethics of care. While social dynamics related to gender, class, race and generation structure the maraudes, the foregrounding of shared precarity, and of religious duty and piety over pity, challenges the ‘hierarchies of deservingness’ established by humanitarian border regimes. In caring for precarious others, Muslims must navigate both the secular suspicion directed towards Islam and the securitization of migration. Carrying out the religious duty of helping those in need, they are ‘laying claim to public space’ for both Muslims and precarious migrants.

The Ship of Democracy

Abstract War, exile and democratic crisis organized the world-mind in the early 1940s around the transitive exigences of states. Political in origin, those trials also magnified the pressure points of international legal personality due to the disaggregation of territory, people and legitimate, being democratic, government. France presents the paradigm case worthy of attention for the unexpected recoding of the normative lines of state identity by the cultural internationalism of French scholars in exile. L’École Libre Hautes Etudes (l’ÉLHE) in New York stands out as the representative of a civic and cultural code of state identity framed by the cultural activism of esteemed intellectuals and contingent on ideas or rather, on the ideal of the free state. Their symbolic ship of democracy alerts internationalists to the aleatory meetings between different codes of statehood which disrupt, and might easily progress, the normative rules of state identity during crisis. Three such encounters matter now, anchoring this study about what happens to international law when democracy fails, for the recoding of legal standards by cultural agents of state: of rules of state recognition, of territorial sovereignty and of the meaning of legal internationalism after war.

Intellectual History as History of Engagement? The French Scholarship

Few intellectual histories of France by non-French authors in recent years have produced the bitter polemic that Tony Judt's Past Imperfect: French intellectuals (1944–1956) elicited. Published in French at the same time as the English edition in 1992, the book was held to account for its questionable historiographical legitimacy, alleged inaccuracy in the treatment of sources, and not-so-hidden partisanship, even if it also received some positive reviews from authoritative specialists in the field in important national newspapers. Nevertheless, the general tone and content of the French academic reviews were largely negative, and in many ways this response was unsurprising: how could a study arguing that a certain dominant (and still alive) Jacobin philosophical tradition was characterized by a “marked absence of a concern with public ethics or political morality” be read otherwise? Further, in an often caustic style, Judt accused the postwar French intellectuals of being seduced by totalitarian tendencies. Such charge, not surprisingly, provoked a pointed defence of the intellectual and historiographical national sensibility, which was not above resorting to Continental stereotypes against the “Anglo-Saxon” cultural model. Nor was the negative reception surprising to Judt, who positioned himself explicitly in the text as an outsider, belonging to a different intellectual tradition. It is useful to remember this uproar today as one considers new books by Gisèle Sapiro and François Dosse, as it illustrates three important issues in a lively academic register: the continuity of a French approach to intellectual history, its difference from Anglo-American traditions, and a possible—although mediated—angle for understanding the nature of this French particularism, through the discussion of the historiographic projection of the idea of intellectual status.

Queer and insufficiently Spanish: tensions of gender and national identity around the transnational stardom of Luis Mariano

ABSTRACT During the 1950s, Luis Mariano was the main star of French film musicals. Born in Spain, but exiled to France after the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, the artist starred in several successful French-Spanish co-productions such as Andalousie/El sueño de Andalucía (1951), Violettes impériales/Violetas imperiales (1952) or Le chanteur de Mexico/El cantor de México (1956). This article analyses Luis Mariano’s stardom from a transnational perspective. Although some French scholars have started to study it within the framework of French cinema, Luis Mariano’s stardom worked in very different ways in Spain, as it implied and generated multiple tensions related to gender, queerness and national identity. Moreover, these tensions caused the introduction of changes in the films to adapt them to the Spanish audiences. Through the analysis of films, reviews, press articles, censorship documents and biographies, among other media texts, this article compares the results of the research on Luis Mariano in France with the investigation of his stardom in Spain, in order to evidence different relationships of the audiences of each country with the star and how he was read and received in diverse ways in each national context.

Bước đầu nghiên cứu bộ sách An Nam sơ học sử lược安南初學史略

The history book “An Nam so hoc su luoc” was edited by French scholars in the period when the colonial government reformed the education system in Vietnam with the purpose to split Vietnam from Chinese influences, and for a long term to make Vietnam to become a dependent country of France. This was the first time, the history subject was introduced into curriculum of general education for Vietnamese learners, and this was totally different from traditional examination for thousand years ago. In addition, with the Western modern design and edition, Vietnamese historical books had significant changes in terms of contents that was foundation for later book design. Apart from negative contents which serve exploiting and dominating of colonial government, the book "An Nam so hoc su luoc" as well as other Vietnamese historical books at that time were valuable document for scientific research.

Stripped and Script: Loyalist Writers of the American Revolution

Stripped and Script: Loyalist Writers of the American Revolution

I. Kant's Copernican revolution in the context of the concept of subjectivation

This article is dedicated to correlation between the concept of subjectivation of M. Foucault and the concept of subject of I. Kant. Due to the fact that the project of studying the forms of subjectivity has not been accomplished, the artistic legacy of the French scholar has left numerous questions still to be answered. One of such questions is the transformation of the subject that took place in Modern Age, and the reasons for the elimination of spiritual practices of subjectivation. The work is of historical-philosophical nature, and employs analytical, critical and comparative methods of research applicable to the texts of Michel Foucault and Immanuel Kant, as well as to a number of foreign (G. Deleuze, A. Renaut, T. Adorno) and domestic (M. Mamardashvili, F. Girenok, S. Khoruzhiy) analytical works. The novelty of this research consists in the analysis of the philosophical concept of M. Foucault in the specific context of transcendental philosophy of I. Kant. The author distinguishes between what the French researcher called the metaphysical subject of Descartes and the transcendental subject of Kant. The following conclusions were formulated: the acknowledgement of irrevocable loss of the elements of subjectivation in the Kantian concept of subject, which were reflected in the doctrine of Cartesius; claim of the autonomy of the Kantian subject, founded on the rejection of metaphysics and exclusion of heteronomy as a characteristic of subjectivity; confirmation of the key role of practical reason as the factor of further development of the concept of subject towards enhancing the autonomy and gnoseocentrism.

Book review: Jyoti Mohan, Claiming India: French Scholars and the Preoccupation with India in the Nineteenth Century

Jyoti Mohan, Claiming India: French Scholars and the Preoccupation with India in the Nineteenth Century, SAGE Publications, New Delhi, 2017, 432 pp., $59.99. ISBN: 9789352804658.

Constructing Vietnam, Constructing China

Vietnamese studies in China is a contentious field that is dominated by three frameworks: the central-regional relationship, the tributary relationship, and the diffusion thesis. It emerged in the late nineteenth century in response to French scholars’ questioning of the extent and duration of Chinese influence on Vietnam. It then became highly politicized between the 1970s and 1980s due to the issues of both the ethnic origins of the bronze drum and the nature of Sino-Vietnamese relations. In the twenty-first century, even though China began to address the issue of Sinocentrism, its claim to the South China Sea has been a source of great tension among the scholars in the two communist countries.

Ibadi Manuscripts in a European Collection

Abstract Within the framework of studies concerning the importance of European manuscript collections for Ibadi history, this article aims at retracing the history of an archive put together by the French scholar Auguste Bossoutrot (1856–1937). This archive gathered a quantity of materials on the Arabic and Berber languages collected during his life. In particular, some of the manuscripts contain parts of a long religious work in Berber (Kitāb al-Barbariyya), discovered in the island of Djerba (Tunisia) among the Ibadi community of the island towards the end of the nineteenth century. This text was firstly discovered and reported to the scientific community by another French scholar, A. De Calassanti-Motylinski (1854–1907), but his untimely death prevented him from publishing it and the whereabouts of the manuscripts that contained it remained unknown until the discovery of Bossoutrot’s papers, which contained the longest extant copy of the work (about 900 pages).

De druk van te hoge verwachtingen

Abstract The pleasant, quiet archaeological site of Olympia appears a far cry from the fame of the ancient Olympic Games, or from the spectacle of the modern variety. In this article, I discuss the end of ancient Olympia and the gradual re-emergence of the archaeological site. After Olympia was abandoned in early Byzantine times, its location was no longer remembered. However, its fame remained, partly through translations of ancient texts, notably Pausanias, partly through the revival of the Olympic Games in the 19th century. Early modern travelers and the French scholars who worked at the site as part of the Expedition de la Morée hoped that the site could fulfill their high expectations, in particular with regards to ancient sculpture. As the excavations continued, since 1875 as part of the research program of the German Archaeological Institute, the buried remains have revealed a different material reality. As a result of the combination of continuous research and restoration up until the present day the site of Olympia now provides an independent view on the past.

НОВЫЕ КНИГИ ПО НАРРАТОЛОГИИ. ЧАСТЬ 1. ОБЩЕЕ ПРОСТРАНСТВО ТЕОРИИ

This review is the first one in a series of reviews and articles on the most noteworthy books on theoretical narratology published in the last five years and aims to outline the common space of narrative theory. The focus is on contemporary narratological theories as they relate to classical ones. Particular attention is paid to the collection of articles by French scholars, given that in France narratology has developed since the decline of structuralism differently than in the English-speaking countries, Germany, and Scandinavia. The review also concerns two books on postcolonial narratology and econarratology, less known branches of postclassical narrative theory.