THE MORNING LIST
On the occasion of the 27es A meeting on the history of Blois, which will bring together hundreds of historians from October 9 to 13 around the theme “The city”, “Le Monde des livres” today offers a selection of guest publications from the festival, such as Saidiya Hartman and Peter Frankopan, whose, respectively, Rebel lives – on the lives of black women in the United States after the end of slavery – and The Metamorphoses of the Earth – where the relationships between humanity and the climate are rethought in depth – are announced as two events. The historian Pauline Valade devotes a novel, Bruno and Johnto the last two condemned to death for homosexuality in France, executed in 1750. Two books, finally, explore the theme of the festival: History of the suburbsby Thibault Tellier, and the interdisciplinary collective (Re)thinking citiescoordinated by Loïc Vadelorge.
HISTORY OF WOMEN. “Rebellious Lives”, by Saidiya Hartman
It is a work of art that Saidiya Hartman carries out. Carving out destinies from what is missing in the archives. In Rebel livesan inspired essay that combines scientific rigor with the power of literature, the American researcher sheds light on the lives of African-American women who fled the segregationist South at the end of the 19th century.e century and early 20th centurye hoping to find freedom and dignity in the North.
To do this, she examines thousands of pages of investigation reports “who all present these black women as a problem”. Because they defied authority, of course. But above all, simply, because they are black. Beyond these individual cases, it is a “serial biography of an entire generation” that she composed: the second or third born after the official end of slavery in 1865. In the background, we can see the functioning of a young society where “freedom was still in an experimental stage”.
Saidiya Hartman thus offers these women what had been confiscated from them: full intimacy and humanity, avoiding any Manichaeism and angelism. A “personal wayshe said, to repair the violence of history, to write a love letter to all those who had suffered”by making these women actors of their destiny – and not simple victims. S. K.-G.
CLIMATE HISTORY. “The Metamorphoses of the Earth”, by Peter Frankopan
The Metamorphoses of the Earthby Peter Frankopan, is a book of wild ambition. Peter Frankopan intends nothing less than to retrace the way in which the environment has shaped human societies since their appearance and how the latter have transformed it until reaching, today, a point of no return.
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