Melanine

• Strike in the French West Indies

  21 February 2009 par Alfred , translated by Alfred
  It happens so rarely that it might just be a dream: the West Indies are on the front pages of all major French newspapers, several days in a row? What the hell is happening? It is a revolt. No; a revolution. Looking beyond usual official bullshit about strikes and riots and the like, one can only notice that the Antillean movement is a bold gesture against the plague of the liberal capitalist economic system. You read that right. Read on for historical contextualization and internet (...)

• The British working class is no more racist than the talking suit on your television

  6 February 2009 par Nico Melanine
  A minimal investigation can establish that the wildcat strike begun at the Lindsey refinery in Great Britain is based on legitimate demands. Rather than tackling real problems, and out of class reflex, the media and politicians have chosen to systematically accuse the strikers of being racist. A minimal investigation can establish that the wildcat strike begun at the Lindsey refinery in Great Britain is based on legitimate demands. Rather than tackling real problems, and out of class (...)

• Transnationalism in translation: the engaged intellectual’s melancholia

  12 February 2008 par Melanine Choir

  Second part of our interview with Vron Ware and Paul Gilroy, in which we discuss cultural studies and the difficulty of exporting them, the role of engaged intellectuals in our world, and ways to reconcile feminism, antiracism and a critique of capitalism in the 21st century.

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

  23 January 2008 par 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 par Nico Melanine , translated by Alfred

  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 , translated 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 par Soopa Seb , translated by Alfred

  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 par 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.

• World Cup 2006: Issues of race and nationality in the French football team

  7 July 2006 par Alfred

  Though started in slow motion, this World Cup has shown much more than expected about France, culturally and athletically speaking. "We" have been very vocal in the stands ; "we"’ve been heard to say that this team was too black to proudly represent France. Now that the dark natives of football have offered France its second World Cup final in History, we can ask : what France are "we" talking about ?

• Eyes Wide Shut: of politics in French cinema, and more specifically in Michael Haneke’s Hidden

  22 February 2006 par Nico Melanine , translated by Alfred

  A few months after it came out in France, Michael Haneke’s Hidden is coming out in England. A good opportunity to watch it and possibly make up my own mind on Haneke’s cinema. A good opportunity to digress on the connections between art and politics and assert that no, what the anglo-saxon world calls “Postcolonial Studies” has no equivalent in France.

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