Maurizio Meloni, Coloniality and Structural Othering in European Thought A Racialized Canon, Routledge 2026

This book provides a historical and conceptual analysis of patterns of racialized otherness in European thought, traversing primary sources, historical periods, and national archives, to show that the longue durée of structural othering beyond individual disciplinary canons is essential to making sense of epistemic violence and structural coloniality in the European canon.

Through the analysis of published texts and personal letters, the book brings to light racializing tropes and patterns of othering in four canonical authors each representing a different Western European country: Italian father of humanism Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), Charles Darwin, Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault. The chapters on Italian humanism begin by highlighting how one of the founding myths of European modernity was shaped by a protocolonial mentality and the violent excision of Arabic sources, whilst the chapter on Darwin analyses the importance of shooting and frontier wars in the Beagle voyage and the vicissitudes of the term ‘extermination’ in Darwin’s thought. Elias’s civilizing narrative is unpacked to highlight his omission of colonial violence in parallel to the development of court etiquette in the metropoles. Finally, Foucault’s belief in the uniqueness of the Greek experience goes in parallel with his deletion of Islamic presence in the genealogy of modern governmentality. The initial and final chapters offer an ethnography of forgotten ethnic violence and racialized monuments in Italy linked with the distinctive history of Italian colonialism and ‘eternal fascism’.

It will appeal to scholars, researchers and students with interests in social theory, sociology, political theory, cultural studies, history, history of science, and postcolonial and ethnic studies.

Maurizio Meloni is Associate Professor of Sociology at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University, Australia. He works at the interface of social theory and the history of biology, racism, and the body. His authored books include: Political Biology (2016), and Impressionable Biologies (Routledge, 2019).

Michael C. Behrent, Becoming Foucault. The Poitiers Years, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023

Though Michel Foucault is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, little is known about his early life. Even Foucault’s biographers have neglected this period, preferring instead to start the story when the future philosopher arrives in Paris.

Becoming Foucault is a historical reconstruction of the world in which Foucault grew up: the small city of Poitiers, France, from the 1920s until the end of the Second World War. Beyond exploring previously unexamined aspects of Foucault’s childhood, including his wartime ordeals, it proposes an original interpretation of Foucault’s oeuvre. Michael Behrent argues that Foucault, in addition to being a theorist of power, knowledge, and selfhood, was also a philosopher of experience. He was a thinker intent on making sense of the events that he lived through. Behrent identifies four specific experiences in Foucault’s childhood that exercised a decisive influence on him and that, in various ways, he later made the subject of his philosophy: his family’s deep connections to the medical profession; his upbringing in a bourgeois household; the German Occupation during World War II; and his Catholic education.

Behrent not only reconstructs the specific nature of these experiences but also shows how reference to them surfaces in Foucault’s later work. In this way, the book both sheds light on a formative period in the philosopher’s life and offers a unique interpretation of key aspects of his thought.

Michael C. Behrent is Professor of History at Appalachian State University.