Virtual Library

In La Disparition, the l’OuLiPo author, Georges Perec writes an entire novel without using the letter “e.” The constraint Perec sets himself is built off the equation whereby the disappearance of the letter “e” equals the disappearance of “eux [them],” referring to his parents who disappeared in Auschwitz. The novel in turn is dedicated to “eux.” La Disparition itself tells the story of Anton Voyl, a man who himself has disappeared and left behind him a trail of mysterious notes. 

«Cette femme aux pieds nus qui donne le titre à mon livre, c'est ma mère, Stefania. Lorsque nous étions enfants, au Rwanda, mes sœurs et moi, maman nous répétait souvent : "Quand je mourrai, surtout recouvrez mon corps avec mon pagne, personne ne doit voir le corps d'une mère." Ma mère a été assassinée, comme tous les Tutsi de Nyamata, en avril 1994 ; je n'ai pu recouvrir son corps, ses restes ont disparu. Ce livre est le linceul dont je n'ai pu parer ma mère. C'est aussi le bonheur déchirant de la faire revivre, elle qui, jusqu'au bout traquée, voulut nous sauver en déjouant pour nous la sanglante terreur du quotidien. C'est, au seuil de l'horrible génocide, son histoire, c'est notre histoire.»

Kéba-Dabo avait pour tâche, en son ministère, de " procéder aux désencombrements humains ", soit : éloigner les mendiants de la Ville en ces temps où le tourisme, qui prenait son essor, aurait pu s'en trouver dérangé. Et son chef, MourNdiaye, a encore insisté : cette fois, il n'en veut plus un seul dans les rues ; et ainsi fut fait. Mais les mendiants sont humains, et le jour où, écrasés par les humiliations, ils décident de se mettre en grève, de ne plus mendier, c'est toute la vie sociale du pays qui s'en trouve bouleversée. A qui adresser ses prières ? À qui faire ces dons qui doivent amener la réussite ? Avec humour, avec gravité aussi, Aminata Sow Fall dénonce dans ce roman les travers des puissants et donne un visage aux éternels humbles, du Sénégal ou d'ailleurs.

On July 16, 1942, little Annette Muller was nine years old. After having survived the hell that was the Velodrome d’Hiver, she was interned with her mother and younger brother, Michel at Beaune-la-Rolande. She witnessed the terrible fate of the thousands of young Jewish children interned in the Loiret camps who were cruelly separated from their mothers, then sent to Auschwitz -- from which none of them would return.

Annette escaped deportations thanks to her father who succeeded in securing her and her brother’s release from Drancy. She was one of the rare few children to have survived the Velodrome d’Hiver. 

From the Vel d’Hiv to the camps of  Beaune-la-Rolande camp and Drancy to the Lamarck refuge to the Catholic orphanage where she was hidden to the children’s home in Mans, she has never been able to forget. She finally decided to tell her story; she returns the perspective of the child that she was, as if those moments never settled in the past.

Modiano's debut novel is a sardonic, often grotesque satire of France during the Nazi occupation. We are immediately plunged into the hallucinatory imagination of Raphael Schlemilovitch, a young Jewish man, torn between self-aggrandisement and self-loathing, who may be the heir to a Venezuelan fortune, may have lived during the Nazi Occupation, may have rubbed shoulders with the most notorious collaborators and anti-Semites of the time, may even have been the lover of Eva Braun...or he may have been none of these things. But at the centre of this vortex is 'La Place de l'Etoile' - the Place of the Star - which is both the geographical and moral centre of Paris, and that place next to the heart where French Jews were compelled to wear the yellow star, the symbol of their persecution.

Paris, 17 octobre 1961. La fin de la guerre d'Algérie est proche. En réponse au couvre-feu imposé aux Algériens par Maurice Papon, alors préfet de police, le FLN organise à Paris une manifestation pacifi que. La police charge : violences, arrestations massives, matraquages, meurtres, Algériens jetés dans la Seine. Nanterre, 1996. Amel a seize ans. Elle entend parfois sa mère et sa grand-mère discuter de choses graves dans une langue, l'arabe, qu'elle comprend mal. Quand elle pose des questions, les femmes se dérobent. Avec Omer, journaliste algérien réfugié, et grâce au film documentaire de Louis, fils d'une Française ayant adopté la cause algérienne, elle cherche à comprendre. Roman polyphonique dense, essentiel, poignant, La Seine était rouge lève le voile de l'oubli sur l'une des pages les plus douloureuses de l'histoire de la France contemporaine. Née à Aflou, en Algérie, d'un père algérien et d'une mère française, Leïla Sebbar vit aujourd'hui à Paris. Romancière et nouvelliste, elle est l'auteur d'un grand nombre de livres parmi lesquels la trilogie de Shérazade (Stock), Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père (Julliard), Les Femmes au bain (Bleu autour), Le Peintre et son modèle (Al Manar-Alain Gorius), Le Ravin de la femme sauvage (Thierry Magnier), Mon cher fils (Elyzad).

Leïla Sebbar's novel recounts an event in French history that has been hidden for many years. Toward the end of the Algerian war, the FLN, an Algerian nationalist party, organized a demonstration in Paris to oppose a curfew imposed upon Algerians in France. About 30,000 Algerians gathered peacefully, but the protest was brutally suppressed by the Paris police. Between 50 and 200 Algerians were killed and their bodies were thrown into the Seine. This incident provides the background for a more intimate look into the history of violence between France and Algeria. Following three young protagonists--one French, one Algerian, and one French national of Algerian descent--Sebbar takes readers on a journey of discovery and comprehension. Mildred Mortimer's impressive translation conveys the power of Sebbar's words in English and allows English-speaking readers an opportunity to understand the complex relationship between past and present, metropole and colony, immigrant and citizen, that lies at the heart of this acclaimed novel.

In 1937, Mexican workers were among the strikers and supporters beaten, arrested, and murdered by Chicago policemen in the now infamous Republic Steel Mill Strike. Using this event as a springboard, Zaragosa Vargas embarks on the first full-scale history of the Mexican-American labor movement in twentieth-century America. Absorbing and meticulously researched, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights paints a multifaceted portrait of the complexities and contours of the Mexican American struggle for equality from the 1930s to the postwar era.

Drawing on extensive archival research, Vargas focuses on the large Mexican American communities in Texas, Colorado, and California. As he explains, the Great Depression heightened the struggles of Spanish speaking blue-collar workers, and employers began to define citizenship to exclude Mexicans from political rights and erect barriers to resistance. Mexican Americans faced hostility and repatriation.

The mounting strife resulted in strikes by Mexican fruit and vegetable farmers. This collective action, combined with involvement in the Communist party, led Mexican workers to unionize. Vargas carefully illustrates how union mobilization in agriculture, tobacco, garment, and other industries became an important vehicle for achieving Mexican American labor and civil rights.

He details how interracial unionism proved successful in cross-border alliances, in fighting discriminatory hiring practices, in building local unions, in mobilizing against fascism and in fighting brutal racism. No longer willing to accept their inferior status, a rising Mexican American grassroots movement would utilize direct action to achieve equality.

 In Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery, Jennifer L. Morgan examines for the first time how African women's labor in both senses became intertwined in the English colonies. Beginning with the ideological foundations of racial slavery in early modern Europe, Laboring Women traverses the Atlantic, exploring the social and cultural lives of women in West Africa, slaveowners' expectations for reproductive labor, and women's lives as workers and mothers under colonial slavery. Challenging conventional wisdom, Morgan reveals how expectations regarding gender and reproduction were central to racial ideologies, the organization of slave labor, and the nature of slave community and resistance. Taking into consideration the heritage of Africans prior to enslavement and the cultural logic of values and practices recreated under the duress of slavery, she examines how women's gender identity was defined by their shared experiences as agricultural laborers and mothers, and shows how, given these distinctions, their situation differed considerably from that of enslaved men. Telling her story through the arc of African women's actual lives--from West Africa, to the experience of the Middle Passage, to life on the plantations--she offers a thoughtful look at the ways women's reproductive experience shaped their roles in communities and helped them resist some of the more egregious effects of slave life. Presenting a highly original, theoretically grounded view of reproduction and labor as the twin pillars of female exploitation in slavery, Laboring Women is a distinctive contribution to the literature of slavery and the history of women.

Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But the effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites. Davis argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World were sown in this era of High Imperialism, as the price for capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of peasants' lives.

Dworkin begins with the question that is at the heart of the whole legal system: in difficult cases how do (and how should) judges decide what the law is? He shows that judges must decide hard cases by interpreting rather than simply applying past legal decisions, and he produces a general theory of what interpretation is—in literature as well as in law—and of when one interpretation is better than others. Every legal interpretation reflects an underlying theory about the general character of law: Dworkin assesses three such theories. One, which has been very influential, takes the law of a community to be only what the established conventions of that community say it is. Another, currently in vogue, assumes that legal practice is best understood as an instrument of society to achieve its goals. Dworkin argues forcefully and persuasively against both these views: he insists that the most fundamental point of law is not to report consensus or provide efficient means to social goals, but to answer the requirement that a political community act in a coherent and principled manner toward all its members. He discusses, in the light of that view, cases at common law, cases arising under statutes, and great constitutional cases in the Supreme Court, and he systematically demonstrates that his concept of political and legal integrity is the key to Anglo-American legal theory and practice.