The colonialists would artificially reduce the size of Africa, while we are faced with well-known map projection effects.
When activists highlight their ignorance of basic geographical concepts, Jacques Robert is there to push their arguments to the point of absurdity...
It will explore cyborg dogs becoming queer and canine intimacies at the heart of the anti-colonial struggle. Mikhail Kostylev analyzes a highly acclaimed American article in which ideology leads to the manipulation of language and the denial of reality.
The exhibition "Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art" at the Brooklyn Museum, curated by Stephanie Sparling Williams, offers a radical rereading of American art history by inverting power relations: works by non-white and women artists are foregrounded, while those by white artists are physically demeaned to force a reckoning with historical inequalities. This approach, hailed by some as a necessary deconstruction of the dominant narrative, is criticized by others as a form of radical activism that transforms the museum experience into an ideological display.
In "Insurrection of Particularities," Chantal Delsol analyzes the decline of the universal in favor of a wokeness marked by relativism, the dictatorship of identities, and the questioning of rationality, which substitutes emotion and ideology for debate and science. She shows how this evolution leads to a democracy dominated by minorities, an excessive egalitarianism deconstructing all hierarchy, and a performative thought where truth is replaced by militant narratives imposed through intimidation. A review by Emmanuelle Hénin.
Since 2020, calls have been growing in the West to erase or rename public symbols deemed to be linked to a colonial, racist and slave-owning past.
This movement, amplified by contemporary demands such as those of Black Lives Matter, seeks to purge the public space of any reference considered problematic.
Ivan Burel denounces the Manichean approach and the moral anachronism of this phenomenon, comparable to the Roman damnatio memoriae, which risks distorting collective memory and dividing society.
The wearing of Western clothing by world leaders, including those opposed to the West, illustrates a cultural and societal homogenization resulting from a process of imitation of dominant powers. This phenomenon, which also affects urban planning and political structures, has its origins in the colonial history and technological choices of the West. Even unconsciously, this mimicry recognizes the impact of the West on modernity.
“We are losing science,” warns Weiss, who sees this politicization as an existential threat. “When remains are buried or destroyed, when museums censor their exhibits, there is nothing left to study. Unlike other disciplines, once anthropological data is lost, it cannot be recreated.”
Elizabeth Weiss nevertheless remains attached to the idea of an anthropology anchored in science and the exploration of the past. But her testimony, opposing scientific rigor to identity pretensions, suggests an uncertain future for a discipline in search of meaning.
Thus sacrificing to the spirit of the times - or, according to some, to an ideology that has become dominant and to which it would be appropriate to conform - the Académie de France in Rome now seems to often give the advantage, in its selection process, to projects that authorize themselves by questioning gender norms (and in particular "hetero-patriarchy"), by criticizing racism (designated as "systemic" or inherent in all institutions of Western societies, while anti-Semitism remains, in these approaches, and unsurprisingly, as a blind spot) or even by criticizing, against the backdrop of a global ecological crisis invested with an apocalyptic dimension, "extractive" and "neo-liberal" capitalism.
The secular framework of the secularization of shared spaces is under threat. "Race" is promoted as a "grid for reading the world", in the very words of the President of the CNRS. In reality, the violence is indeed on the side of decolonial thought, which intends to impose silence on those who do not fit into the framework that they claim to impose in the name of an ideology that they struggle to name. The open society, presented as an improbable horizon, is only a pretext to legitimize in the eyes of its zealous promoters the exercise of force for the advent of an "open future".[1]Who does not see the seeds of tyranny in this masquerade?