All posts by Laurent Dubois

I am Marcello Lotti Professor of Romance Studies and History at Duke University. A specialist on the history and culture of France and the Caribbean, notably Haiti, I am the author of Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France. I founded the Soccer Politics blog in the Fall of 2009 as part of a Duke University course called "World Cup and World Politics," whose students helped me develop the site.
Orientalism

Scheherazade

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Next Tuesday, we will have the visit of two members of the artistic team involved with the Duke Performances presentation of Alonso King LINES Ballet. I urge you to get tickets to the show, which promises to be remarkable. (Student tickets are $5).

Please Note: Contrary to what is listed on the syllabus, the visit will actually take place in our regular classroom, 326 Allen Building.

Our class visitors will be Robert Rosenwasser, LINES Ballet’s Associate Artistic Director and Selby Schwartz, LINES Ballet’s Artistic Project Manager. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in Comparative Literature (Italian/French), and a Joint Ph.D. in Medieval Studies. She has been a Lecturer at UC Berkeley, a LEAP Mentor at St. Mary’s College of California, and the Artistic Manager of LINES Ballet; of late she has been in Rome, writing about drag & dance.

Selby Schwartz has recommended, along with the reading, a brief French video on the Alonso King version of the ballet available here.

In our class, we will hear about the way in which they have studied and adapted the famous Ballet Russe version of Scheherazade, considered perhaps the greatest Orientalist spectacle of its day in France, in this 21st century version.

You can read background about Schererezade as a character in the 1001 Nights and in various other works of art and literature here.

Additional readings are on Blackboard.

Please post a comment or question you would like to pose to our visitors here by 8 p.m. next Monday.

Haiti, Senegal, Slave Trade

President of Senegal Offers Haitians a Return to their “Homeland”

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Among the many reactions to the earthquake in Haiti has been the fascinating offer on the part of the President of Senegal to welcome any Haitians who wished to return to Africa, which he referred to as their “terre natale,” or homeland. He said that if a few came, he would offer them land and a house. If many were to come, he would offer them an entire region of the country. Click here to read more about this.

Colonial Legacies, Haiti

Aftershocks of History in Haiti

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Several days after the earthquake in Haiti, our understanding of the losses are steadily mounting. Among the tens of thousands dead are the writer George Anglade, and Mamadou Bah, a member of the U.N. team who had been doing work to improve libraries in Haiti, and the city of Port-au-Prince has been irreparably transformed. The aftershocks of this event will certainly be multiple and ongoing.

For insightful updates on what is going on the ground in Haiti, I highly recommend the Twitter feed of Richard Morse from Haiti, which gives a sense of how people have been coping with the events.

I did a short segment on the political history of Haiti on “All Things Considered,” which is available here.

Here, courtesy of Haitian historian Gusti Pourchet-Gaillard, are some photos of the earthquake hitting the downtown area of Port-au-Prince, the Champs de Mars, where the National Palace, Ministries, and many schools and cultural institutions are located. Other colleagues in Haiti share the horrifying news that the Ecole Normale Superieure, one of Haiti’s universities, collapsed with perhaps 1,000 students within it taking examinations.

I recommend this interview with Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat on Cnn.com, in which she recalls the way in which Haiti was born out of slave revolution. You can also see a remarkable interview of a now homeless President Preval, and images of the destroyed National Palace, at cnn.com.

For those of you who read French, the newspaper Liberation has an excellent report and chronology of the events here.

It’s also worth being aware, though, of some of the very curious ways in which Haitian history is narrated, as this now famous clip of Pat Robertson speaking about the earthquake yesterday shows.

Here is a nice response to Robertson’s statement from a specialist on Haitian music and culture, Elizabeth McAlister.

She also has published a good essay on responses to the earthquake among Vodou practitioners.

A Ph.D. candidate in History at Duke has also published this opinion piece about disaster aid to Haiti.

And here is a critical piece about the I.M.F. approach to the crisis, which argues that much of the world actually owes Haiti.

If you read interesting pieces about the events, or find photographs of videos you would like to share, you can do so in the comment section below this post.


French Revolution, Human Rights

Inventing Human Rights

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Lynn Hunt will be visiting Duke as part of the Provost’s lecture series on January 19th, and will be visiting our class that day in 326 Allen Building on Duke’s West Campus from 10:05-11:20 to talk about her book Inventing Human Rights (which is our first reading assignment for the semester). It a great deal of attention when it was published in 2007. The eminent U.S. historian Gordon Wood reviewed it in the New York Times, it rated a brief mention in the New Yorker,  and received a range of responses within academic publications. The questions she posed were, as is so often the case in the writing of history, driven at least in part by contemporary events, most particularly the debates about the use of torture that took place in the U.S. in the years after 9/11.  But it also represents the culmination of decades of thinking about the history of rights and revolution. Since the publication of her ground-breaking 1994 book The Family Romance of the French Revolution, she has been one of the leading scholars in the field of European history, and shaped approaches to history by helping to pioneer and showcase the now widespread approaches of cultural history. (You can see a selection of her publications here).

You can watch Lynn Hunt lecture on the book at University of California Santa Barbara below, and see her give a lecture on “Revolutionary Movements” in her class at UCLA in the video below that.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/YZVD1G4q0bA" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/5_bTJnAH3Cw" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Share your comments about these lectures and her book here.

Colonial Legacies, MC Solaar, Slave Trade

MC Solaar, “Les Colonies”

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On the first day of class, we’ll be discussing the song “Les Colonies” by MC Solaar. You download the song on i-tunes, and can also hear it in the video below, accompanied by images of the slave trading fort in Gorée island, near Dakar, Senegal. The song early on evokes the “paysage de Gorée,” and evokes its history: the island was a major departure point for French slavers departing for the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the fort is famous for a doorway leading out to the water, known as the “door of no retun.” Click here for a virtual visit of the island prepared by UNESCO, which has declared it a World Heritage Site.

MC Solaar makes a connection in the song between the past of slavery and contemporary forms of exploitation and migration linking Europe and Africa.

You can get the full lyrics of the song in French here. And here are the lyrics of the first verse, with my translation of it into English below:

MC Solaar, “Les Colonies” (2002)

Lyrics to First Verse

On a connu les colonies, l’anthropophage économie

La félonie la traite d’esclaves, la dette, le F.M.I.

Bruno, Jean-Marie, si j’cours j’ai mes raisons

Les mêmes que les deux nègres maigres sous un avion

Avant c’était déjà grave de voir des fers qui entravent

Paysage de Gorée, Maisons des esclaves

Cave sans amour, sans retour ni recours

Sans cours de cassation, sans oreille pour entendre “au secours”

Où sont passés les baobabs et les hordes de gosses

Dans cette ère de négoce où ne vivent que le big boss

Rentablité – instabilité – imbécilité

N’ont fait qu’augmenter les taux de mortalité

Ce sont des larmes qui coulent dans nos artères

Psychose séculaire j’ai peur quand j’entends charter

Parfois je rêve de mettre un gun dans un paquet d’chips

De braquer la Banque Mondiale. Pour tout donner au townships.

C’est trop complexe. Où sont les droits de l’Homme?

Translation:

We’ve known colonies, cannibal economies

Felony, the slave trade, debt, the I.M.F.

Bruno, Jean-Marie, if I run I’ve got my reasons

The same as those two skinny kids under the airplane

Before it was already sad to see the chains that locked up

The landscape of Gorée, the Maison des Esclaves

Caves without love, without return or recourse

Without a court of justice, with no ears to hear “help”

Where have the baobabs and crowds of kids gone

In this era of business only the big boss lives

Profit – instability – stupidity

Have only increased mortality

There are tears running through our arteries

A secular psychosis, I’m scared when I hear “charter”

Sometimes I dream of putting a gun in a bag of chips

Holding up the World Bank to give everything to the townships

It’s too complex, where are the Rights of Man?