Season 2 Ep. 4 - Race, Empire, and Policing in Paris

Charlotte Tate:From the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs at Middlebury College, this is New Frontiers. I’m Charlotte Tate, the associate director of the Rohatyn Center. In this episode, host Mark Williams sits down with historian Amit Prakash to discuss how French colonial history is influencing today’s law enforcement practices in France. 

Mark Williams: In June 2023, French police killed 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk during a traffic stop outside of Paris. That killing led to days of street protests, strong denunciations of brutal racialized police practices, and over 1,300 arrests. And all this in a country where officialdom and much of civil society typically avoids or even rejects the category of race in describing social identity.

To get a better grasp of French police practices and how they developed, I turned to Amit Prakash. Amit teaches courses on policing, borders, and anti-colonialism at Middlebury College. He directs the Rohatyn Global Fellows Program at the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs, and his new book, called Empire on the Seine, examines how French colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries conditioned the ways French law enforcement policed North Africans living in Paris from 1925 to 1975. 

The book opens with this bold assertion.

Amit Prakash: The specter of colonial racism haunts France. Although empire is one of the oldest modes of government, what was new and different about modern French imperialism was its ideological justification in racism.

Mark Williams: Given the way his book frames its analysis, that race came to influence all matters in France, including policing, I asked Amit if he’d been surprised, either by the claims French protesters had made about racist policing, or by the sheer size of the protests.

Amit Prakash: Not particularly. One of the interesting things about race in France is that it’s a very complicated issue in France. It does not operate in the same way as it does in America. There has been, since the advent of French colonialism, at least its modern phase, let’s call it from the 18th century onwards, a racialized form of colonial domination across first the Caribbean and then later North Africa.

What came with that was a series of legal precepts-produced social categories that had a lot of sort of political significance and also economic significance because we’re talking about racialized slavery. From the advent of modern French imperialism, there has been a constant refrain from people on the margin who have inveighed against French racism, but their voices have been muted. And so as a result, there is a sort of, willful blindness to the salience of race as a concept that really insidiously shapes many aspects of life in France.

Mark Williams: So, what you’re describing is a situation in which perhaps those who experience the impact of racism the most clearly see it, point to it, and yet those who are in power have arranged ways to discuss politics, to discuss society, to discuss policies that minimize or make racism disappear, at least in official discourse. 

Amit Prakash: Yeah, I think the view is generally that this is an Anglo-American conceptual import being forced in by a newer generation who happen to be academics of color. Who are coming from formerly colonized countries. Who have been arguing that race is an important concept in France and has indeed played a great role in French life. But the official view is that because race has no sort of scientific facticity, to endow it with real meaning would be to create another sort of divisive category for identity. Which will then further polarize the French Republican Union and so on.

Mark Williams: One of the big takeaways from Amit’s book is the idea that France’s old imperial ventures abroad have had much to do with how aspects of its policing and law enforcement developed at home, including its racial undertone, such as which groups of people are more likely to receive police attention and the rationales for subjecting these specific groups to police scrutiny. I asked Amit to elaborate a bit on these themes.

Amit Prakash: Yeah, so I call my book “Empire on the Seine,” and the idea is to first of all note that Paris was a capital of empire. It was a place where ideologies of empire were crafted. The personnel of the empire were trained there and spread out across the world. And as a result, there was a sort of imperial circuit of peoples and ideas between the imperial reaches of France and the imperial capital. And some of those sort of transfers of knowledge and people came through ideas of security, policing, and it really came from the colonial expeditions, which were first and foremost military expeditions. One of the things that people talk about a lot is should there be a distinction between the military and the police? So the sort of traditional argument is yes, well of course the military is there to defend the country and deal with sort of foreign affairs and foreign enemies. While the police are a domestic force to ensure domestic order and enforce the law. With the colonial situation, what you get is effectively the military acting as a police force on the colonized, because, certainly in North Africa, it was the case that there was military rule until the 1870’s. So, the first four decades of the establishment of French control in Algeria, for instance, was military rule. And so all of the social services that Algerians accessed were through the military. And so what ended up happening is that those practices, they call them Arab bureaus and things like that sort of organized both security and social services. 

Mark Williams: This is the military you’re talking about? 

Amit Prakash: This is the military in Algeria. And once you started getting North African migration to Paris, to the imperial capital, one of the things that Parisian municipal counselors noticed is that there were no Arab bureaus in France. So what do you do? These people are far too free. They’re used to a certain type of colonial discipline, so it was imagined. And therefore, the Parisian police force had to be altered to tailor their policing to the requirements of the so-called natives.

Mark Williams: So there was a retraining that took place over time? 

Amit Prakash: There’s a retraining and also a literal recruitment of former colonial officers, right? 

Mark Williams: So that many former military officers who are being recruited into the police. 

Amit Prakash: Military officers, sometimes local police chiefs and things like that, and many colonial governors. They were brought in as consultants. By the time you get to the 1950s and 1960s, it’s troops, it’s paratroopers from the Algerian War in Indochina that are brought in as specialists on the natives to consult with and set up different police services in Paris.

Mark Williams: This is fascinating. I learned a lot about France from reading your book. I learned a lot about its colonial history, the development of the police as an institution. And I’m wondering, is your book part of some broader field of scholarship on police studies, for example? Is there such a thing? And if there is, where does your book fit in? And what’s its contribution to the broader body of literature? 

Amit Prakash: So what I hope and aim for with the book as a contribution to scholarship is critical scholarship on policing. And so there is a sort of field of police studies, but that is much more, let’s call it practical and vocational.

Mark Williams: Is this distinct from criminology or? 

Amit Prakash: There’s overlap for sure. But for the most part, they are about training people who will be professionals in law enforcement. So that you study to learn best practices. There’s also a much smaller field that I hope to contribute to, which is a sort of critical analysis of the institution of police and policing. And my sort of gripe with police studies is that one, it’s ahistorical. It takes as an assumption that but for the police, there would be chaos. Right? That without the police, society would fall apart. Which sort of forgets that the police are a fairly modern institution coming in the 18th and 19th century. And of course, there were all sorts of complex societies around the world that existed prior to this without the police. And you know, they had policing but not necessarily the police. So that ends up naturalizing the police rather than historicizing it. And so that’s what I found interesting about this study when I went to France, was that here is a sort of entire life, entire biography, of a police institution from its advent, this North African brigade, to its dissolution that was never sort of announced, but happened nonetheless. And why is it in historical terms and the particular circumstances that there was felt to be a societal need to have a specialized police brigade just for North Africans in Paris. 

Mark Williams: If I could, as an aside, ask, the policing you’re talking about that grew up to focus on North Africans—it’s standing astride the regular police?

Amit Prakash: Initially, there’s this idea that the North Africans are a people apart, and therefore they need a police apart. And there’s all sorts of stereotypes that were associated with North Africans in the 1920s and 1930s that weren’t that different from previous stereotypes of Italians and Poles in France. That they’re intrinsically criminal, that they’re more violent. There’s sort of layers of prejudice that are there. So when the North Africans come in significant numbers and become a sort of durable population in Paris, the idea was that we definitely need a separate police force. We need an Arab bureau in Paris and they will work with the prefecture of police. They’re integrated into its institutional framework. Their head reports directly to the prefect and skirts the regular chain of command, which gives them a little bit more operational flexibility and things like that. Eventually, that ends up morphing into what is required of the general policing of Paris. That you don’t even need to call it the North African brigade anymore by the 1970s and 1980s. Because that’s just part of what….

Mark Williams: It has been absorbed into the general operation. 

Amit Prakash: Right. It becomes this is the ethos of the policing of Paris. 

Mark Williams: Is your work on France typical of what one might find more broadly in police studies? 

Amit Prakash: There are probably a dozen or so people around the world who work directly on the French police. And I’m part of a scholarly consensus on this from the sort of critical perspective. People who are trying to really historicize state institutions, understand why state violence happens, understand how categories produce others that then are systematically marginalized and things like that. So, in that sense, yes, I think what’s distinct is that I make a much longer term argument. Other people have made arguments about the interwar period. 

Mark Williams: Yes. Yours is an entire arc. 

Amit Prakash: Yeah. My argument is that, yes, the Algerian war is important, but so is prior and so is post. 

Mark Williams: Yes. Okay. Amit, your book really aims to explain how France policed people of North African descent, as you’ve said. And these are people who’d found their way to Paris and were living and working, studying there. One of the big takeaways that I got from your book was its focus on a police conception of North Africans. What exactly do you mean by that? The police conception of North Africans? What is that? How did it develop? Why is it important for us to understand? 

Amit Prakash: Every question that I ask of history is always, how is this possible? Like when you come across something in the archives, oh, there’s this thing called the North African brigade. What ideas had to be there prior to having the sort of collective will to create something like this. And so what you have over time in the 19th century bleeding over into the 20th century is a scientific establishment that is creating what ends up being called anthropology. It’s first called ethnology in France. 

And race is a major part of that origin story, race and colonialism. And the first sort of ethnographers are actually colonial administrators who make these sort of broad pronouncements about what these natives are like and so on. And in North Africa, there’s a couple of things going on. One is the sort of intrinsic argument that people born in North Africa are preternaturally violent, criminally minded, and unpredictable. Second, all of those so-called natural tendencies are then nourished by this malicious form of religion, heavy square quotes, Islam. So what you have are North African Muslims who are effectively a threat to upstanding citizens in society. And that idea is already there. Of course, it justifies all forms of colonial domination in North Africa. And it’s a very sort of useful concept, a convenient idea in that sense, right? When it comes to Paris, is the advance of an idea and also fertile ground for the development of that idea in Paris in the 1920s after the colonial conscription of North Africans for the army and labor conscription during World War I. Terrible worries about quote unquote, North African crime. And then of course, miscegenation, North African men sleeping with French women. So these are things that had to be protected against. Now, these ideas are not unique to North Africans. I think there’s an element that’s unique, which is Islam. 

But if you go back in the late 19th century, one of the biggest sort of race riots and massacres in France was against Italians. And Poles also were met with a lot of disdain. And if you go back in the earlier 19th century, migrants from Brittany were met with similar disdain. And that would, you know, probably shock somebody like Jean-Marie Le Pen who’s from Britainny, but they were also seen as outside, other, kind of backwards, and so on. So these are sort of ideas that are sedimented over time. 

Mark Williams: And they are somewhat dressed in the garb of scientific discourse. 

Amit Prakash: Right. And I think that’s also what’s a little bit unique about the North African situation. 

Mark Williams: It’s interesting, what you’re saying reminds me of some of the discourse I’ve read from America’s past. When the United States took over the Philippines back in 1898, and there was a tremendous debate over what to do with these former Spanish colonies. And the debate took place in Congress. If you go to the congressional record, you read some of the things that were said by elected officials. Senators like Senator Belvedere, who clearly seem to fully embrace extremely racist, well intentioned, extremely racist ideas. Nothing can change the blood coursing through these yellow people. Taking over their territory and governing them is good for them. Just full throated, extremely racist justifications for banditry, to put it, in shortened more explicit terms. But a real imperialist mission, and that sense of mission. And well intentioned at the same time, somewhat deluded, but what you’re saying really reminded me a lot of that. 

Mark Williams: So this concept of the North African is developed in the colony. It is used to further the control, the security of the colony, the management of these people, and then this concept is transported back to Paris when policing of these immigrants is required. 

Amit Prakash: When you look at the actual records in the archives, the politicians in Paris are often talking about what’s going on in the colonies. And there’s a debate about it. It’s not as if there’s everybody in France is pro colonial and there’s certainly a debate about some of the practices. And if we think about Algeria, the conquest of Algeria, there was a lot of debates in Paris about the French army acting ruthlessly and unethically and morally and so on.

Mark Williams: And so eventually what happens over there, what happens in the colony begins to affect aspects of what’s taking place at home. 

Amit Prakash: Absolutely. And it shapes public discussions about right and wrong and how people should be governed. 

Mark Williams: This is something I actually wanted to ask you a bit more about. I was wondering whether or not the French developed any ideas during the colonial period. Ideas about security. Ideas that they might have put into practice to control and manage the populations that they were governing, that then came home to roost so to speak, in terms of how Paris was policed. And I’m really thinking about notions of security and pacification, security and control. Does any of that ring a bell? Is this something you could speak to? 

Amit Prakash: Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, information awareness. The idea that the state authorities need to know the population well in order to govern them properly. And this is something that I’ve found common to most forms of imperialism, whether the French ilk, British ilk, or what have you, is that knowledge comes first. The production of colonial knowledge in order to produce these supposed irrevocable differences between these people, which then justifies governing them differently than the sort of quote unquote normal French population. And pacification for the French has a sort of interesting history. It really, actually starts with, let’s call it French on French violence during the revolutionary period in the Vendée. When there’s a counter revolutionary movement against the French Revolution. And the newly minted revolutionary republic goes in there and wants to wipe out this population—men, women, and everyone included. And it’s a very brutal repression. Now that becomes an example of a sort of good pacification.

What’s different in Algeria is that there’s an idea that maybe this will become a settler colony.  At first it was a punitive expedition supposedly, and then it ends up becoming a colonial conquest for land and things like that. And initially the pacification was an attempt to wipe out the Algerian population. And in between 1830 and 1871, one third of the Algerian population perished, so from eight million down to about five and a half million. So that’s a pretty massive reduction right there. The problem of course was that nobody wants to go to the colonies if you can’t lord it over a population that’s going to labor for you. So if there’s nobody there to work, nobody’s going to go. So they pulled back on that form of Vendée-like pacification, and created networks of surveillance and social control in order to have a well-disciplined and subdued laboring force for the colonials who would hopefully eventually come over and buy land and create these massive properties and so on. 

Mark Williams: How did those ideas then migrate to Paris?

Amit Prakash: Yeah, so, what had to happen then was that you had to create, as I mentioned before, these Arab bureaus that were staffed by military officials. And the knowledge from, and personnel, interestingly enough, from those Arab bureaus end up in Paris.  And they end up crafting the North African brigade so one of the architects of the sort of godfather of the brigade if you like is this guy Pierre Godin and he spent 15 years in Algeria as a colonial administrator. And then he became a Parisian municipal counselor. And then in the 1920s, he said we need a North African brigade in Paris. And you go through the decades through the period that I studied, 25 to 75. And every 10 to 15 years, you have yet another person, a colonial hand in some form or another saying that we need to beef this up. We need to create another service or something like that to at first pacify and surveil this population, and then it becomes to keep them French.

Mark Williams:  And to underscore a point, you’re saying that these tactics that were employed towards the North Africans who are living in Paris are distinct from tactics that are being used to police other parts of the city.

Amit Prakash: Absolutely. Rough treatment. A lot of corruption in the brigade initially. 

Mark Williams: Corruption in the terms of what?

Amit Prakash: People going to North African neighborhoods, the brigade, and shaking down store owners. That sort of thing. Sexual violence against the prostitution in some of those neighborhoods, things like that.

Mark Williams: Okay. Okay. Other concepts that you write about quite a bit in your book deal with issues of space and place. Actual locations in Paris that factored into how law enforcement went about the various tasks of policing. And can you explain a little bit of that, elaborate a bit on that? 

Amit Prakash: I think one of the reasons I was drawn to that is my conception of nationalism. If you look at 19th century nationalism and the post World War I settlement, it’s really ethnonationalism that produced the world as we know it in the ways that it’s been set up. And my argument is that there’s an attempt in that form of nationalism to make race and space coincide. That racialization implies spatialization. There’s a certain sort of bordering and so on, and certain people are supposed to be in this place and other people are supposed to be in that place. And so what happens with North African migration, with respect to the police conception of Paris and how it needs to be policed, there are certain places that are North African. And in the police records themselves, interestingly enough, they say are now being colonized by North Africans, right? There’s a sort of this idea of reverse colonization happening. And therefore, there’s this idea that places like Nanterre, places like Saint Denis….

Mark Williams: Nanterre is where the killing. 

Amit Prakash: Exactly. Where Nahel Merzouk was recently killed, tragically. So these become coded, right? There’s a sort of racial coding of the city done by police demographers. And there’s a lot of records in the police archives of this, of that. What does North African Paris look like? They live here, they live there, there’s so many thousands. And which kind of belies the avoidance of the use of race as a category in the census. Because they’re doing it internally, it’s maybe not on the national census, but in the policing of Paris, it’s very prominent. 

Mark Williams: You talked before about the Algerian War and I wanted to go into that a bit more deeply. I’ll ask the obvious question, did the war have an effect on the development of policing in Paris? And if so, how did it impact policing? 

Amit Prakash: With respect to policing in France, the Algerian war was very transformative. You have the coming of a man named Maurice Papon, who was the prefect of police, who had done, effectively, counterinsurgency repression in Morocco and Algeria before. During the Algerian War, he was the prefect of police during the most bloody era in Paris, where there were street fights between the Parisian police and the National Liberation Front members in France. And he created these units with the help of paratroopers from Algeria that were called technical assistance units for French Muslims of Algeria, where it was the full name of these institutions. But effectively what they were surveillance and repression units that were modeled on similar things that were done during the Battle of Algiers. One of the arguments is that, look, we know the population as a whole is not our enemy, but we don’t know who in the population is our enemy. Therefore, we have to do effectively a drag net throughout the entire population and just hope we haven’t alienated them by the end of it. 

Mark Williams: So this begs the obvious question, what were the results of some of these tactics? Effective control and subjugation of the population? Did tranquility ensue, or what was the result?

Amit Prakash: In the end, there was a series of violent escalations that both sides are at fault for this. And it doesn’t help that the French police, who are basically policing Paris increasingly brutally in order to keep Algeria French, they commit all sorts of heinous crimes against this population and end up alienating that population and it doesn’t work. 

Mark Williams: I wanted to ask you about crime rates and I don’t know if you could actually answer this question or not. By special tactics, special steps being applied to the North Africans, did your research reveal any crime statistics that could compare that population with the more general population? What do those statistics and that comparison look like? 

Amit Prakash: There might be slight bumps in certain types of crime, but not violent crime. Petty thefts and things like that. 

Mark Williams: Higher in the North African population? 

Amit Prakash: Higher in the North African population, but which also tracks with class. Petty theft and things like that is often a crime poor people commit, right? So poor marginalized people, they might commit such crimes. My view is that crime statistics are an interesting thing because if you create a brigade that is targeted towards a certain population, you are going to produce the statistics you want that will then justify that brigade. And I think you can tell that story if you went around the world. That there’s certain communities that are policed more for violations that most communities commit all the time, but they don’t happen to be policed for it. 

Mark Williams: You can see that if you look at, in the United States, if you look at statistics on arrests for, say, marijuana possession prior to the advent of legalization and other types of drugs as well. So a high frequency of arrests within minority populations, those who actually study the drug trade understand and government statistics point out that most users are white users of these drugs, but the arrests and the stats don’t compare with where the focus of the police have been directed to, which is urban settings, minority communities.

Amit Prakash: Yeah, I mean something like an ID check for Nahel Merzouk, right? There’s a reason he was stopped where, as opposed to say a fairly affluent white driver in central Paris, they wouldn’t have randomly stopped for an ID check. 

Mark Williams: Let’s circle back to this recent killing of Nahel Merzouk. In your book you say in here I’m quoting one major argument of this book is that there were continuities in the policing of North Africans in Paris that persist in various ways to the present. Can you draw some linkages for us between what you say in your book about policing North Africans in Paris and the killing of this 17-year-old boy?

Amit Prakash: Yeah, so the first thing is that the police had a racial cartography of Paris that was produced through police demographers that coded the city in certain ways that require different types of policing, more policing in different neighborhoods, and that tracked with immigrant status, formerly colonial status. And for the sake of ease, let’s just call it where racialized minorities lived. And one of the major places was Nanterre. This is exactly where Nahel Merzouk grew up and died. And so in one sense, it’s not surprising, but yet is shocking for a boy to be shot for the act of driving away. But in a twisted way, it makes sense that it happened in Nanterre and it would happen to a kid like that, because there are these sort of inherited prejudices. Institutional cultures are very sticky. You can try for all sorts of forms of transformation, but many people within them have vested interests in the status quo, and you’re met with recalcitrants, and all sorts of stuff happens. And security institutions are very much like that. There’s this sort of understanding that we’re doing the right work. We are the good guys, right? This has been the case with the police unions in France, they are up in arms that this police officer has been arrested. And which is also, yeah, it sounds familiar also, not surprising, but these are ideological continuities that become habits of mind, become habits, right? They become practices. 

Mark Williams: This raises a question that’s been percolating in my mind. I’m wondering if you see any parallels between France and the United States, particularly concerning issues of race, racism, policing. Does one case inform the other? Do you see parallels? Do you see any differences that are remarkable? 

Amit Prakash: There are a lot of connections, but I do think, race has a very different history in America than it does in France. One thing that I think we need to establish right away is that the history of policing in America is a bit different than that of France, precisely because America had racial slavery inside its domestic, continental United States.

Mark Williams: Which helps stimulate the development of the police….

Amit Prakash: Right? You’ve got these sort of different streams. The slave patrol in Virginia and South Carolina that emerges in the 17th century. So that’s one origin story. You’ve got the Night’s Watch, which develops in Boston, and it is informed by English practices. And then you’ve got the sort of frontiersmen and Indian killers in the West, right? That become like the Texas Rangers and things like that. And those are the sort of three different models, and they eventually blend together in different ways. But those are very sort of particular histories that are I think unique to the American experience. And also, of course the fact that race laws were de rigueur in America for a long time. It was normal to have completely racist laws and actually the period we’re living in now is a small window when we haven’t had them. So, I think that’s a big difference.

Mark Williams: What about parallels in terms of policing? And I’m thinking of sort of common critiques that you hear increasingly in the United States against police practices in urban settings, racialized policing against Black Americans, against Hispanic Americans. Basically against poor Americans, but they seem to be concentrated, these critiques, in urban areas where you do find a lot of people from those groups. And I’m wondering if you see parallels between those types of critiques and what you observed in the policing of North Africans.

Amit Prakash: Yeah, absolutely. And also there’s a history behind this, going back, decades, if not a century almost now. These complaints about over policing, police harassment, police brutality, etc. And one way I think about it in terms of the parallels, there’s the famous essay by James Baldwin that he published in The Nation called “Report from an Occupied Territory,” which was set in Harlem and was about the police occupation of Harlem, effectively. And a similar complaint has been registered over the decades from various different quarters, poorer neighborhoods, minority neighborhoods in France.

Mark Williams: Yeah. Amazing. What’s been the most surprising things that you’ve learned from your research, do you think?

Amit Prakash: I guess I was surprised at how obsessed they were, that this continuous drag net on the city, a census on every single cafe, every single bookstore, every single restaurant that Algerians either operated or went to. I think the most surprising thing for me was that there was a whole list of French academics that the police were watching because they worked on colonial affairs in North Africa and there was a worry that these people might become too sympathetic to the anti-colonial nationalist cause. So they also were being watched. By dint of being interested in this region, you were automatically suspect and under the police radar. 

Mark Williams: It’s amazing what you’re conveying to me is the intense insecurity that was felt by the mere presence of having these people in Paris.

Amit Prakash: Yeah. Their presence was a provocation. Their very presence. 

Mark Williams: It’s always interesting to observe this kind of mentality among predatory powers, imperialist powers. Powers who have gone to other people’s territory, taken over, ruled, but become so insecure when some of those people come home to visit. It’s fascinating. It’s not just France. It’s other imperialists.

Amit Prakash: Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is, the story of imperialism is like the moment you have imperialism, there’s always this anxiety about, if they come home.

Mark Williams: The whole anti-immigration sentiment, at least a good portion of it, I find really fascinating. Because some of the same people would feel quite good about expats going abroad and living well, prospering. They would think nothing of it. They even use these words to distinguish. When we do it, we’re expats. When you come to our country, you’re immigrants. 

Amit Prakash: Yeah. Or invaders.

Mark Williams: Invaders.

Do you have any thoughts on police reform? What steps do you think that France needs to take, or the United States for that matter, to make policing more effective and less problematic and less beholden to some of the biases and problems that have come from the past?

Amit Prakash: My view is that one should reallocate resources. How many of your resources are being allocated to policing and what are the police supposed to do with it? Are they supposed to deal with mental health crises? Multi-generational endemic poverty? Are they supposed to deal with the fact that certain regions don’t have jobs and therefore you’ve got populations that turn to crime because they have no other options? Are these all police issues is my question, and my view is that they’re not. That these are questions that can be addressed by other institutions, state institutions. I do think that the police should not be in the business of managing poverty, lack of housing, and mental health care.

Mark Williams: Okay, great. This has been a fascinating discussion. I really appreciate you taking time to come in and talk with us about these issues. And I want to thank you very much, Amit Prakash. 

Amit Prakash: Thank you very much for having me.

Chris Martucci ’25: Originally from India, Professor Amit Prakash moved to the US when he was six. A lover of music, his not-so-secret passion—one he started in college and now shares with his son—is being a radio DJ who specializes in techno and house music. When he’s not teaching or researching French history, he frequents such local Middlebury haunts as the Vermont Book Store and Marquis movie theater.  And along with his brother-in-law, he also co-hosts his own podcast called No Politics at the Dinner Table. Be sure to check it out.

Mark Williams: This episode of New Frontiers was produced by Margaret DeFoor and me, Mark Williams. Our theme music is by Ketsa. If you like the show, leave us a rating, a review on Spotify, Amazon, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. This can help others to find us too. We’ll be back with another episode of New Frontiers. Thanks a lot.