Dan Brewer takes time out of his sabbatical to write...
It's the season of dispatches back to the States getting published, so here's one from Paris. It's not in the grand style of Janet Flanner's or Adam Gopnick's gem-like letters in the New Yorker. Nor will Julian Assange be much interested in it. But it carries a sense of this dix-huitiémiste's pleasure, wonderment, and delight at having spent the fall in the City of Light while on sabbatical....
Of course, all has not been rosy in Paris of late.
Tectonic forces (left vs right, young vs. older, blue collar vs white
collar, men vs. women) collided over retirement reforms this fall, as
politicians and TV commentators debated (endlessly) what the appropriate
role of the state should be as France's population ages. Of course,
the bill for France's remarkable social programs is coming due, and the
question is how to pay for it. Similar questions to those in the US,
and very different answers. One popular response was to head for the
street and the political theatre of demonstrations. Mildly irritating
when the metro was more crowded than usual and the buses were late, but a
fascinating cultural encounter.A number of films out this fall
investigate other historical encounters with difference, which of course
is not a new topic for French writers and filmmakers. Xavier
Beauvois's poignant Des hommes et des dieux explores the tragic assassination of the monks of the Tibéhirine monastery in Algeria in 1996. In Hors-la-loi,
Rachid Bouchareb, who also directed Indigènes, follows the lives of
three brothers who leave Algeria for France after WWII, each via
different paths and each representing another strand in the complex
fabric that has linked these two countries for centuries. In his
troubling and provocative Vénus noire,
Abdellatif Kechiche recounts the story of Saartjie Baartman, the
so-called "Hottentot Venus," whom Georges Cuvier in 1817 viewed as the
proof of his theories of race and human development.Besides
spending time before the flickering screen (the big one, not that of my
laptop), I've recently become a denizen in what one colleague calls the
"steely bowels" of the BNF, the Bibliothèque nationale de France,
working on a book called Partial Recall. The goal is to tease out more
of the connections between the French eighteenth century and the
present (or the eighteenth century the present imagines). Last month I
gave a presentation at a CNRS (Centre national de la recherche
scientifique) seminar, entitled "(Mé)connaissance historique et savoir
historien au dix-huitième siècle." I'm working on a spring-time
lecture on "influence," too, trying to decide just how we text and image
folks think about that knotty topic. And a piece prompted by the
installation of an "eighteenth-century room" at the Minneapolis
Institute of Art just came out: "(Re)Constructing an Eighteenth-Century
Interior: The Value of Interiority on Display," in Architectural Space in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Constructing Identities and InteriorsIt's snowing outside today, as the weather prepares me for the impending return to the upper Midwest.
End of dépêche de Paris.
