Thanks to Antrobiótica we have learned of a marvelous book: The Zombie of Greater Peru, or, The Countess of Cockaigne, by Pierre-Corneille Blessebois (1646-~1700). It has 145 pages, and was published in Rouen in 1697; its existence indicates that zombies were already being discussed in Europe then. The book is catalogued in the French National … More Des livres
According to Stephen Gregory in The Devil Behind the Mirror: Globalization and Politics in the Dominican Republic (U of California P, 2006), citizenship is a “technology of power” that enables the tourism police to enforce a kind of social hygiene on the behalf of tourists, who do not want to be irritated by vendors or … More Illegal at Home
1. The French Revolution did not give rise to the contemporary human rights movement, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man was as puny as Oswald de Andrade said it was. Hunt pays homage to the soft power of humanity. Toussaint, for his part, found it necessary to resort to weapons. 2. Newly discovered … More Des livres pour les vacances
I thought encyclopedias were a comparatively modern invention, but there is the Suda: (Σοῦδα or alternatively Suidas Σουΐδας) is a massive 10th century Byzantine Greek historical encyclopædia of the ancient Mediterranean world. It is an encyclopædic lexicon with 30,000 entries, many drawing from ancient sources that have since been lost. The derivation is from the … More Esoterica
A new, and I project very interesting book is Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minnesota, 2007). From the publisher (emphasis added): [W]hy, after more than five hundred years of violence perpetrated by Europeans against people of color, is there no ethical outrage? Rejecting the prevailing view that social categories of … More Toward a Global Idea of Race
There is a book by Daniel Hurewitz called Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics, and Martin Duberman has reviewed it. The review starts like this: What is the self? Do we all have one? Is it best treated with Botox or with books? Is it grounded in genetic concrete or manufactured by … More Bohemian Los Angeles
Here are some marvelous paragraphs from David A. Bell’s review essay, introduced in the last post. In the twenty-first century the Enlightenment appears anything but the triumphant imperial “project” denounced by vulgar postmodernists. Its heritage is fragile and endangered. Admittedly, its works remain in the “canon”–but perhaps only because they go largely unread in certain … More Profane Illuminations
Now I am supposed to be at a festival but it is raining I am still cleaning out my bookcases and files. I would like to be reading: 1. Richard Serrano, Against the Postcolonial: “Francophone” Writers at the Ends of the French Empire (Lexington Books, 2005). The publisher’s blurb says: Richard Serrano begins his provocative … More La Libre Pensée
If the globalized labor market is as good for people as its advocates claim, then why must films about globalized workers be shot on the sly? Films I would like to see include H-2 Worker, on the Florida cane fields, Mardi Gras: Made in China, on the conditions in which Mardi Gras beads are fabricated, … More Films
Once upon a time there was public ecstasy; then capitalism and Calvinism conspired to rout it out. […] Ecstasy and Enlightenment failed to hit it off. In the eyes of an emergent middle-class order, popular festivity was that most scandalous and opaque of all activities, that which is done purely for its own sake. All … More On Festivity and Enlightenment
coldhearted scientist وداد 