What We're Reading This Week

Zaib un Nisa Aziz, Yale University

Grégory Pierrot, “Facing France’s ghosts: A conversation with Mame-Fatou Niang,” LA Review of Books

Pierrot and Niang, professors of English and French respectively, sit down to have a conversation about thinking about identity in modern France and why the question of race remains so vexed in French intellectual circles.

Perry Link, “The CCP’s culture of fear,” The New York Review of Books

At the one-hundred-year anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, President Xi Jinping celebrates the glory and promise of “new” China but the celebration is unable to hide a darker story of hierarchy and violence.

Daniel Baker, “Britain’s imperial heyday is nothing to be nostalgic for,” Jacobin Magazine

Daniel Baker reviews Imperial nostalgia: How the British conquered themselves a new book by Peter Mitchell and discusses the relationship between imperial memory, public nostalgia, and the making of Britain’s current culture wars.

Joseph Satish, University of Hyderabad

Rudrangshu Mukherjee, “Redeeming the Rani,” Open Magazine

An edited excerpt from A Begum and a Rani: Hazrat Mahal and Lakshmibai in 1857 by Rudrangshu Mukherjee.

Sonali Sathaye, “What does history make happen?: Teaching the Partition in 2021,” Caravan

A reflection on teaching the history of the 1947 India-Pakistan partition to high school students in south India.

Mridula Mukherjee, Aditya Mukherjee, and Sucheta Mahajan, “The strange irony of roping in Mahatma Gandhi to establish Savarkar’s nationalist credentials,” The Wire

Reviews the historical record to verify a recent claim that VD Savarkar filed mercy petitions at the behest of Mahatma Gandhi.