Simona Cerutti. Etrangers

In Étrangers, Simona Cerutti challenges common assumptions about “the Other” and “Othering” that she sees as overly influencing European historiography during the last several decades. She begins with a sharp critique of their conceptual foundations and suggests thoughtful and persuasive nuances. To ground such analysis, Cerutti turns to eighteenth-century Savoy, a thoroughfare between northern and southern Europe. The result is a book that should be required reading for anyone studying the concepts of frontiers, borderlands, and outsiders in both early modern and modern Europe. The heart of Cerutti's argument is a critique of excessively binary approaches to the study of outsiders and the uncertainty that presumably comes with that status. To correct this flaw, she proposes an assessment of the condition of exteriority or being an outsider (la condition d'extranéité) rather than a description of the identity of the outsider or foreigner (étranger). That shift can be difficult to follow but is key to her argument. She emphasizes repeatedly that the individuals she studies are not socially marginal or tangential, but they all share characteristics of exteriority that she finds central to Old Regime law and social structures. She accepts that some of the analytical paths she traces will not be as clear as historians prefer, but by focusing on “exteriority rather than alterity,” she hopes to transform historians' understanding of eighteenth-century society (p. 12). Her argument is passionate and persuasive.

Aesthetics · Alterity · Ancien regime · Argument (complex analysis) · Common ground · Epistemology · Historiography · Humanities · Identity (music) · Political science · Politics · Sociology · European Political History Analysis · Historical Influence and Diplomacy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy