Photo by notfrancois. Found on Flickr. French is now spoken mostly by people who aren’t French. More than 50 percent of them are African. French speakers are more likely to be Haitians and Canadians, Algerians and Senegalese, immigrants from Africa and Southeast Asia and the Caribbean who have settled in France, bringing their native cultures [...]
[25 Apr 2010]
The myth of an avant-garde serves the same market forces avant-gardism pretends to overthrow. Art may challenge authority … But art doesn’t actually overthrow anything except itself, and never has, not in 19th-century France or 20th-century Russia or 21st-century China or Iran. Even when it manages to tilt popular thinking, it still ends up within [...]
[18 Apr 2010]
In their rush to portray liberal internationalism as the height of human achievement, too many historians have forgotten what Mazower regards as the real ideological impulse behind the U.N.’s creation: preservation of the British Empire and white rule over Europe’s colonial possessions. From Hope Against History, a review of two books about the founding of [...]
[17 Dec 2009]