The forthcoming history
How do museums narrate the story of the world ?
Meeting with Pierre Singaravélou, Natacha Laurent, and Guillaume Gaudin as part of the 7th edition of the festival The forthcoming history, In the Name of the Law!
In the Name of the Law!
Let us pause, for the duration of a festival, on these rules that structure societies, create commonality while also hierarchizing and individualizing, generate rights, constraints, and punishments as much as circumventions and transgressions.
From the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi to spoken promises, from the Abolition of slavery to exceptional laws, from divine laws to laws of physics, to all-too-human laws: why and how do we create laws—from the spirit to the letter? And for whom? Can society exist without laws? What social spaces, behaviors, and objects do laws delineate? Where do they derive their legitimacy, and what sparks resistance against their coercive power? From the law of series to that of the strongest, through the law of the market or that of nature: does the historian's gaze only reveal that 'necessity makes law'?
At a time when a worrying gap is widening in multiple domains between norms and usage, law and justice, legality and legitimacy, 'The forthcoming history' aims to open a dialogue with philosophy, economics, law, arts, and sciences, in order to understand what the law signifies.
From May 22nd to May 26th, 2024, in Toulouse and beyond, the 7th edition of 'The forthcoming history,' titled 'In the Name of the Law!' will bring together researchers, authors, artists, and journalists for meetings and workshops in original formats, open to all.
The history of art has long been written within a strictly national framework. Through recent collaborations with museums, Pierre Singaravélou has contributed to shifting our perspective by decentralizing it, as seen in projects such as "The World Seen from Asia" (Musée Guimet, 2018), which inverted the perspective, or in situating national collections within a global context (The Worlds of Orsay, Musée d'Orsay, 2021). He has also resurrected "The Lost Museums of the 19th Century" (Musée du Louvre, 2022) and narrated "Another History of the World" (Mucem, 2023-2024).
As a historian at the University Panthéon-Sorbonne, specializing in colonial worlds and counterfactual history, Pierre Singaravélou recently authored "Tianjin Cosmopolis: Another History of Globalization" (Seuil, 2017) and co-edited "A History of the World in the 19th Century" (Fayard, 2017).
Bibliography:
Fantômes du Louvre. Les musées disparus du XIXe siècle, éditions du Louvre/Hazan, 2023 (dir.)
Colonisations. Notre histoire, Le Seuil, 2023 (dir.)
L’Épicerie du monde. La mondialisation par les produits alimentaires du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours, Fayard, 2022
Natacha Laurent is a contemporary historian at the University of Toulouse Jean-Jaurès. Her work focuses on the history of Russia and the USSR, cinema and film heritage.
Bibliography :
with Christophe Gauthier, Raymond Borde, Une autre histoire du cinéma, Privat, 2023.
L’œil du Kremlin. Cinéma et censure sous Staline, 1928-1953, Privat, 2000.
Guillaume Gaudin is a modernist historian at the Université de Toulouse Jean-Jaurès. He specializes in the Hispanic worlds of the modern era.
Bibliography :
Penser et gouverner le Nouveau Monde au XVIIe siècle : l’empire de papier de Juan Díez de la Calle, commis du Conseil des Indes, L'Harmattan, 2013.
The forthcoming history festival is organized by the Théâtre Garonne, the Université de Toulouse Jean-Jaurès, Editions Anacharsis and the Ombres blanches bookshop.
Full program :