Keith Reader Reading
This collection pays tribute to the late Professor Keith Reader (1949-2022). He gave our journal’s readers the gift of his sharp and generous critical judgment as a reviewer, in some 40 book reviews, as well as serving on our International Advisory Board and publishing his own articles. Keith’s range of expertise was vast, spanning French cinema, gender and queer studies, left-wing political culture and philosophy, the history of Paris and Jewish-Muslim relations in France. Keith often expressed support for the work of younger researchers by suggesting that we review their work.
This selection of 10 pieces opens with a review from 1993 on the memoir by Louis Althusser, L’Avenir dure longtemps (1992). The second review reprised here, of work by Baudrillard, Bourdieu and Debray published in the early 1990s, opens by observing that ‘The cumulative effect of reading these texts […] was so depressing as to require confrontation and exorcism in print.’ Reviewing as purging. There follow 3 reviews of publications on the Israel-Palestine conflict and its substantial repercussions in France. We find Keith in splenetic mode in the seventh review, of a book on Truffaut and Godard. The eighth, of Eric Marty’s Radical Thought and the Return of the Jewish Question, offers its own perceptive analysis of Marty’s unusual type of Zionism. In a review of Casey Harison, Paris in Modern Times (2019), Keith yearns for a Paris out of reach during the Covid lockdown. In his last review, of Debra Kelly’s Fishes With Funny French Names: the French Restaurant in London from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-first Century (2021), he praises the book’s achievement and commends it to ‘cultural historians and educated gluttons alike’.
The photo of Keith (courtesy of Victoria Reid and Eleonore Kofman) was taken in 2011 at the Glasgow Film Theatre after a screening of Jean Eustache’s Maman et la Putain (1973), one of his favourite films.