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A comparison of French and American approaches to freedom of expression, with reference to the historical, social and philosophical contexts.
How Iranians forged a vibrant, informal video distribution infrastructure when their government banned all home video technology in 1983. In 1983, the Iranian government banned the personal use of home video technology. In Underground, Blake Atwood recounts how in response to the ban, technology enthusiasts, cinephiles, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens forged an illegal but complex underground system for video distribution. Atwood draws on archival sources including trade publications, newspapers, memoirs, films, and laws, but at the heart of the book lies a corpus of oral history interviews conducted with participants in the underground. He argues that videocassettes helped to instituti...
The Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack of January 7, 2015 shook French journalism to the core and reverberated around the world, triggering a cascade of responses from journalists, media outlets, cartoonists and caricaturists from diverse geographies of freedom of expression and journalistic cultures. This book is a multifaceted case study that describes and explains sameness and difference in diverse journalistic conceptualizations of the Charlie Hebdo affair from a comparative, international perspective. It explores how different journalistic traditions, cultures, worldviews and styles conceptualized and reacted to the clash between freedom of expression and respect for religious sentiments in...
Money is an evil that does good, and a good that does evil. It is wise to have money, says Pascal Bruckner, and wise to think and talk about it critically. One of the world’s great essayists guides us through the commentary that money has generated since ancient times, as he builds an unfashionable defense of the worldly wisdom of the bourgeoisie.
Since 1997 John Lichfield, The Independent's correspondent in France, has been sending dispatches back to the newspaper in London. More than transient news stories, the popular ‘Our Man in Paris' series consists of essays on all things French. Sometimes serious, at other times light-hearted, they offer varied vignettes of life in the hexagone and trace the author’s evolving relationship with his adopted country. Many of Lichfield’s themes concern the mysteries of Paris and its people. Who is responsible for the city’s extraordinary plumbing? How can you drive around the Arc de Triomphe and survive? He also ponders the phenomena that intrigue many foreigners, such as the eloquence of the capital’s beggars and the identity of the intimidating but fast disappearing concierge. Visiting places as different as the Musée d’Orsay and Disneyland, he explores culture high and low as well as the everyday pleasures and problems of living in Paris.
This comparative, transatlantic two-volume work covers nearly 120 years of the history of the rights, integration, and security of the Jewish people in both the United States and France, the countries with the largest and third-largest Jewish populations. Religious freedom and secularism have evolved differently in France and the United States, reinforcing their separate national identities. Yet there are parallels to their Jewish history, and in how the security of Jews has repeatedly defined and tested the national interests of France and the United States in world affairs. Drawing on the author’s personal experience as an international civil servant, these volumes explore topics such as...
The Routledge Companion to Freedom of Expression and Censorship offers a thorough exploration of the debates surrounding this contentious topic, considering the importance placed upon it in democratic societies and the reasons frequently proposed for limiting and constraining it. This volume addresses the various historical, philosophical, political and cultural parameters of censorship and freedom of expression as well as current debates involving technology, journalism and media regulation. Geographically, temporally and culturally diverse accounts of censorship and freedom of expression are discussed through a broad range of perspectives and case studies. This Companion covers core princi...
Whereas in English-speaking countries comics are for children or adults ‘who should know better’, in France and Belgium the form is recognized as the ‘Ninth Art’ and follows in the path of poetry, architecture, painting and cinema. The bande dessinée [comic strip] has its own national institutions, regularly obtains front-page coverage and has received the accolades of statesmen from De Gaulle onwards. On the way to providing a comprehensive introduction to the most francophone of cultural phenomena, this book considers national specificity as relevant to an anglophone reader, whilst exploring related issues such as text/image expression, historical precedents and sociological implication. To do so it presents and analyses priceless manuscripts, a Franco- American rodent, Nazi propaganda, a museum-piece urinal, intellectual gay porn and a prehistoric warrior who's really Zinedine Zidane.