{"title":"Behind the mask: An introduction to the fiction of Anne-Claire Decorvet","authors":"J. Flower","doi":"10.1177/09571558221150701","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558221150701","url":null,"abstract":"Recognized in Switzerland by numerous prizes, Anne-Claire Decorvet's fiction has yet to make its mark abroad. With the exception of her biographical novel, Un lieu sans raison, inspired by the life of Marguerite Sirvins, it is set predominantly in and around Geneva, explores family and social instability, insanity and psychiatric care in the twentieth century. This article explores some of the distinctive and characteristic features of her writing with a view towards introducing her work to new readers.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"83 - 91"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-01-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46819958","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The ‘Islamo-gauchiste threat’ as political nudge","authors":"P. Marlière","doi":"10.1177/09571558231152992","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558231152992","url":null,"abstract":"What is ‘islamo-gauchisme’? The word sparked heated debates in French academia and in public conversations in 2020–2021. This article endeavors to shed light on the origin of the notion, to look at its uses within and outside academia, and to reflect on the political ramifications of the controversy. Islamo-gauchisme is an unsubstantial notion which operates as political nudge in the public debate: it sounds sufficiently threatening and self-explanatory to be taken seriously. This study shows that the controversy on islamo-gauchisme has helped mainstream illiberal and right-wing policies, to make them plainly acceptable to the public.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"234 - 249"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-01-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42947160","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Breaking the Republican mold: French independent schools and agonistic pluralism amidst Franco-conformity*","authors":"Carol Ferrara","doi":"10.1177/09571558221151001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558221151001","url":null,"abstract":"The modern French school system was established in the late nineteenth century upon an acculturating, assimilationist, and secular ideology of making “French people French” and emphasizing unity over cultural diversity. Thus, most scholarship on the French education system aptly highlights the system's French Republican “mold” characteristics—hyper-centralization, Franco-conformity, and “Republican sanctuary”—even if adherence to the mold is not always achieved. However, French hors contrat or independent schools are afforded significant freedoms in terms of curriculum, pedagogy, admittance criteria, and the incorporation of religion. These independent schools represent a veritable rainbow of ethical and educational perspectives that break from the French Republican schooling mold. Drawing upon seven months of ethnographic research in a variety of French independent schools, I suggest that these schools’ existence illustrate flexibility and plasticity within the otherwise monolithic French education system, collectively pointing to a surprising form of agonistic pluralism on the margins of French Republicanism.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46919728","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Margins, flows and crossing points: France's liquid territory","authors":"E. Welch","doi":"10.1177/09571558221150699","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558221150699","url":null,"abstract":"In his accounts of Montmartre and Marseille, Nicholas Hewitt shows how places on margins and frontiers channel flows of different sorts running across city, nation and world. In doing so, they open up suggestive perspectives on the nature of French territory, how it is conceived, and how it can be imagined. In particular, they foreground the productive tension of the marginal place as edge and opening, and interrogate the bounded and regulated space implied by the geometrical trope of the French ‘hexagon’. What emerges instead is a curiously liquid sense of French space-in-time as shifting, shimmering and mercurial, caught up in and contributing to the ebb and flow of global circulation. This article explores how movement, flow and liquidity have featured in recent explorations of French territory and topography, drawing on work by Jean Rolin, Agnès Varda and the photography project France(s) territoire liquide, whose title spells out its assumption about the nature of contemporary French space. At the same time, the article situates those accounts in relation to conceptions of French territory which informed the work of post-war spatial planners, whose substantial material and infrastructural legacies reflected their own sense of territory as flux, flow and liquid force.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"21 - 33"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-01-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42309957","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reinventing democracy in Paris and Madrid: Sylvain George’s Benjaminian urban montage","authors":"M. O'shaughnessy","doi":"10.1177/09571558221144374","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558221144374","url":null,"abstract":"Sylvain George is one of the most interesting French filmmakers working today. He has made a series of poetic, experimental documentaries about migrants and refugees around Calais and has brought together migrant figures and Occupy movements in his two ‘city symphonies’, Vers Madrid (The Burning Bright) (2012) and Paris est une fête (2018). The principal theoretical influence on George's cinema is the work of Walter Benjamin. This article shows how certain essential Benjaminian concepts can help us understand George's films as they seek productive alignments and collisions between contemporary mobilisations and the history embedded in urban spaces. But it also argues that, even as they point towards a renewal of fundamental European political traditions, they show that a politics no longer limited by national belonging remains to be found.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"106 - 125"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47716355","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A sense of place: Special number in honour of Nicholas Hewitt","authors":"Michael Kelly","doi":"10.1177/09571558221144372","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558221144372","url":null,"abstract":"This is the introductory editorial to a special issue in honour of former editor of French Cultural Studies, Nicholas Hewitt (NH). It includes some reflections on the author's collaboration with NH and on the process of founding the journal in the late 1980s. It outlines the themes discussed in the nine substantive articles especially around the guiding theme of the sense of place, which NH did much to inspire.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"3 - 8"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46570412","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The anti-city: Representing La Défense in recent French fiction and film","authors":"J. Lane","doi":"10.1177/09571558221144369","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558221144369","url":null,"abstract":"This article begins with the 2009 documentary, La Dépossession, by filmmaker Jean-Robert Viallet, suggesting that La Défense is depicted as an anti-city. It seeks to anatomise this trope and chronotope, examining the manner in which a range of recent novels and feature films similarly lament the destructive effects of globalised finance on French society, polity and nation. They figure spatiotemporal relationships between France's present and its historical past, between the anonymity of La Défense and certain unmistakably French locations, between a supposedly ‘Anglo-Saxon’ mode of capital accumulation and the French nation this is held to threaten. Having identified the characteristic features of this trope and chronotope, the article then turns to consider some of their inherent paradoxes, ironies and contradictions. It points out that the historic centre of Haussmann's Paris is itself the product of an earlier process of violent restructuring and dispossession driven by powerful financial forces and undertaken at the behest of a highly conservative political regime. It is ironic that Haussmann's cityscape should now be presented as a symbol of stable, traditional, if now embattled, French national identity. Perhaps, La Défense should be imagined less as an anti-city than as a location deeply embedded in the complexities, contradictions and conflicts of French history.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"49 - 61"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45628692","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Colette and Saint-Tropez","authors":"E. Wilson","doi":"10.1177/09571558221144373","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558221144373","url":null,"abstract":"This article takes the novelist Colette, who bought a house outside Saint-Tropez in 1925, and examines moments and feelings from her time in that place. Inspired by Hewitt's approach, and by his example of ‘the unique hold exerted by Marseille on the nation's imagination’, it traces, through Colette, imaginative modes of inhabiting a space, seeing it as a psychic as much as material location, a repository of feelings. Colette's work invests a place with meaning through writing, so that it becomes an imaginary space, intimate, sensory, and consciously feminine. Since Colette's feminism resides most surely in her pursuit of pleasure, this place can be a house of feelings, about love, about present pleasures shaded by past experience, a space accessed through the senses. In this way, her house in Saint-Tropez appears as a space of speculation and exploratory relations, in which to think too about the lived and dreamed realities of other female lives.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"73 - 82"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44090495","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Love, grief and violence – A study of Camille Kouchner's La Familia grande (2021)","authors":"Orsolya Katalin Petocz","doi":"10.1177/09571558221143492","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558221143492","url":null,"abstract":"In her 2021 book La Familia grande, Camille Kouchner testifies to the event of sexual violence more precisely that of incestuous hebephiliac rape within her family. In extensive discussions that followed the publication of the book, the media has focused on the allegations of incestuous rape against Olivier Duhamel upon his stepson, twin-brother of Kouchner, nicknamed ‘Victor’ in La Familia grande. Kouchner's nuclear and extended family is part of a French politico-cultural elite that has been shaken by Kouchner's unveiling of violence. Acknowledging this context, this article looks closely at the text itself, and also situates it in relation to works by other woman members of Kouchner's family, with a sharp focus on the work of Évelyne Pisier, Kouchner's mother. This article teases out questions of love, grief and violence as related to Kouchner's testimony, presenting a case for close attention to the literary work alongside its paratexts. I argue that shifting away from the violence of Duhamel's acts, the book turns towards the ways in which the heteropatriarchal structures of the family allow for the perpetration of such an act and the perpetuation of its violence through silencing. This reading argues for the necessary unveiling of a filiation of women, to form a possible resistance to normative narratives of the family. This article further connects Judith Butler's thoughts about incest prohibition and Évelyne Pisier's queer-inclusive feminism.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"394 - 410"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49427858","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bringing French modernism to Singapore: Nanyang painter Georgette Chen","authors":"C. Neal","doi":"10.1177/09571558221109703","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558221109703","url":null,"abstract":"A veritable world citizen, Nanyang painter Georgette Chen (1906–1993) melded artistic influences from both the East and West, bringing French modernism to Singapore. Much has been written about her contribution to the art of Singapore, her role in the establishment of the Nanyang Style, the lasting influence that she exerted on younger artists, and her considerable artistic achievements. Never before examined is the development of her oeuvre that reflects this mixture. The works selected for this investigation reveal her artistic development from student to teacher, the range of her thematic interests, and the stimuli that she absorbed from a life ensconced in eastern and western cultures.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"191 - 210"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49167141","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}