Pleased to share that my latest article, "Fantasies of power: sex, humour and complicities in French rap" has been published with @francemodern.bsky.social ! Many thanks to the journal editors and anonymous peer reviewers for their constructive remarks and support.

Sur le Vélodrome d'IAM samedi dernier 🩵🤍
www.abcdrduson.com/articles/iam...

But wow, a disturbingly absurd reminder that, "The meaning of a cultural form and its place or position in the cultural field is not inscribed inside its form. Nor is its position fixed once and forever."

I spend a lot of time arguing that pop culture aesthetics matter (still very much believe that they do, including in the battle for strategic positions in the cultural field)...

"This year’s radical symbol or slogan will be neutralized into next year’s fashion; the year after, it will be the object of a profound cultural nostalgia." - Stuart Hall

Thinking about Hall's words + the alignment between decontextualizing meme/trolling logics and contemporary far-right aesthetics

I wrote for @ca.theconversation.com re: the 30th anniversary (this Fri) of President Jacques Chirac's June 13th, 1995 announcement that France would be resuming nuclear testing in the Pacific.

210 detonations in Algeria & Mā'ohi Nui (French Polynesia) from 1960-1996. Thousands of victims.

Nouvel article pour Musique journal à propos d'une artiste dont la musique me repousse autant qu'elle me fascine
musique-journal.fr/2025/06/13/p...

Historian here to nuance (ruin?) the joke: 1832 was a rather small uprising of 2-3000 members of a small secret society (Hugo’s ABC Society is based on the Society of Rights of Man) wagainst a not-so-tyrannical (yet) king, which was easily repressed by the army. 1/

"Celle qui dit écouter Mylène Farmer se dit choquée des tenues d’Aya Nakamura et du fait qu’elle serait « toujours à moitié nue ». Manifestement, la jeune femme ignore que Mylène Farmer a fait polémique pour s’être montrée dévêtue, voire entièrement nue dans ses clips."

You can preorder it here: www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501...

My dear friend Danielle Beaujon's brilliant book, Criminalizing the Casbahs, comes out June 15th! Mark your calendars, contact your libraries. I cannot recommend this rigorous, principled, well-written book enough to anyone interested in the histories of colonialism, race, and policing.

Canal+, Bolloré et le cinéma français : le grand embarras

Par Yunnes Abzouz et Ludovic Lamant

Glad to be back in my native Philadelphia area this week for NeMLA. I'll be participating in a roundtable *early* Sunday morning on queer resistance in the French & francophone world (I'd also like to resist early morning scheduling, but here we are.) Give a shout if you're attending as well!

And in the course "Culture and Power", students explored the neocolonial dynamics at play in France's restitution of looted artworks through Mati Diop's Dahomey

It's been a long week, but feeling lucky to have been able to teach two of my recent favorite films. In "Conspiracy Culture," we were thinking about gendered logics of believability, doubt, and victimhood in our "post-truth" moment through Justine Triet's Anatomie d'une chute

treading a fine line between exploring new research interests and driving myself mad(der) in the current political moment