In The Devil Finds Work (1976), James Baldwin presents a remarkably generous review of Boris Vian's controversial novel, J’irai cracher sur vos tombes (1946). Vian's book was exceptionally sensitiv...

In this interview, Aurelien Mondon and Simon Dawes analyse the mainstreaming of far-right politics. It aims to make sense of Marine Le Pen's rise by putting it in perspective and accounting for the...

RésuméEn 1989, l’affaire dite du « foulard » ou du « voile islamique » voit en France les passions se déchaîner à propos de la laïcité à l’école. L’épisode est vieux d’un tiers de siècle, et cet ar...

The satirical songs of Jean Yanne (1933–2003) are a little-studied aspect of the work of this French singer-songwriter, comedian, actor and film director. Composed and performed in the late-1950s a...

Dany Laferrière has demonstrated a continuous engagement with Japan, beginning with the novel Éroshima in 1987 and continuing to his most recent publication in 2021, Sur la route avec Bashō. The ai...

This article begins with the recommendations of the Leathes Report of 1916 in connection with the internationalisation of language study and the reasons why the ideal of transnational mobility was ...

Terroir is an untranslatable, unstable, and often undefinable French term frequently used in the global wine industry. This article focuses on the transnational potentialities and cultural transfer...

Placed in the context of scandals surrounding Houellebecq's earlier novels, Anéantir (2022) is described as strategically losing its political and other plots to focus on the death of its protagoni...

Nick Hewitt wrote wonderfully well about the significance of different places in French history and culture, and in our lives. Colette was a chronicler of places, from the famous childhood house an...

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...

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...

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 ov...

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...

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 t...

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...

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 chrono...

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 ex...

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 fo...

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...

This article discusses the emergence of a discourse on ‘political Islam’ in the policy circles of European elites. It interprets this discourse on one hand as a manifestation of the further crimina...

RésuméAu royaume des cieux (Julien Duvivier, 1949) et La Cage aux filles (Maurice Cloche, 1950), deux fictions situées dans des centres de rééducation pour jeunes femmes, ont une histoire liée. Fon...

On the basis of the problematization of the relationships between translatability and untranslatability, tradition and translation, we try to clear the impact of cultural context on the translator'...

The challenges of climate change and mass extinction have stressed the need to rethink our encounters with non-human others in the literary imagination. This article explores this question by readi...

Through concepts such as the act of transgression, the idea of the pursuit of luxury can be radically transformed by reconsidering the work of the French philosopher Georges Bataille on sovereignty...

Presumably guilty of an “ increasing visibility”, the ostentatious presence of Muslim women in the streets of France participates, in Michel Houellebecq's novel Soumission, in this fashionable jere...

This article deals with the concept and practice of haute couture, of the designing and making of high-quality fashion clothes, and haute couture's contemporary engagement with the virtual worlds o...

This paper argues that Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) goes beyond the lesbian or queer categorization that critics have often hastily reduced it to. Set in pre-revolutionary Fra...

Orthography and education of the citizens in texts for dictation by Gouzien. During the 19th century, dictation was probably the most current exercise in French schools and therefore the content of...

Cet article porte sur la représentation des personnages noirs dans la bande dessinée française Astérix. Écrite par René Goscinny et illustrée par Albert Uderzo, la série est parue pour la première ...

Leroyer’s documentary, #387 disparu en Méditerranée (2019), tracks the attempt to reconstruct the identity of migrants lost off the coast of Libya whereas Allouache’s metatextual Normal! (2011) cap...

This article takes as its starting point the use of fire as a political metaphor by Algerians who participated in the Screening Violence research project; it emerged in these discussions as a trope...

The French pavilion at the 2004 Venice Biennale of Architecture took up the theme of sustainable design through a “prospective game” that challenged participating architects to imagine an urban neighborhood's transformation in response to economic, social, and environmental constraints over the following 30 years. The exhibition paradoxically appeared to proclaim French sustainable know-how at a time

While France claims to be the nation of universal human rights, its historical intimacy with imperialism would suggest otherwise. The discourse of Republicanism is therefore what allows France to erase and smooth out rhetorical and material incongruities, allowing it to retain its national integrity. This article thus examines the discursive continuities between two constitutive realms of French power:

Relationships with others raise issues of identity and characterize individuals in their behavior with others. These identity issues, which are specific to each society, are sources of the discourse of otherness. In the French-speaking space which, by its essence and in the light of historical facts, reflects otherness, this discourse is reflected in the terms and lexies of topolectal varieties of

In recent years, French authors have called for the mobilization of literature in favor of migrants’ rights and recognition. Writers, publishers, and booksellers have donated all revenue to humanitarian agencies such as La Cimade, Amnesty International, and UNHCR. At the same time, humanitarian NGOs have mobilized literary works to rally audiences around migrant issues. This essay examines how contemporary

That childhood should be everywhere at home whatever the circumstances, has been implored by poets. Their powerful voices call on the international community to mobilize to protect the rights of the child. However, there are unfair practices; child domestic work is one of them. These children are called ‘domestic children’, ‘service children’ and les ‘restavèk’. Denounced by humanitarian institutions

Partant d’un concept qui a émergé dans le contexte latino-américain, l’esthétique décoloniale, cet article vise à étudier le terrain d’expression(s) du Québec, aussi révélateur sur le plan esthétique qu’urgent en termes sociaux: l’art dit autochtone et notamment la littérature des Premières Nations. Les œuvres les plus récentes produites au Québec dans ce domaine ont fait l’objet d’un nombre considérable

In spite of having an empire that was second only to Britain's by 1914, the French people remained mostly unconvinced by and mistrustful of the colonial idea. There is no better proof of this than the French colonial films between 1918 and 1945 which depicted the empire in a particularly unattractive way while seemingly advocating the colonial cause. The paradox is all the more surprising given that

The article examines the formal and thematic manifestations of seriality in the Netflix series La Révolution, which justifies the revolutionary outbreak in a counterfactual plot with a viral outbreak that turns the nobles into zombie-like monsters. While, on a macrostructural level, the generic frame of alternate history promotes the serial character through the varying repetition of the historical

The main objective of this article is to make the female voice heard in an area of the world where women are discriminated against and prejudiced, despite the progress made regarding their status in status in society. The aim is to demonstrate that the translation of the male discourse produced undergoes fundamental transformations that are the result of choices studied by the translator. She intervenes

This article is the result of research and reflection undertaken in the process of translating Vercoquin et le plancton. Focusing on music-related references in Boris Vian's first published novel, this article will discuss different layers of meaning and a variety of techniques that can be discerned in Vian's punning and wordplay. The complexity and compactness of his writing make for an exceptional

This article considers Alain Ehrenberg's extensive analysis of individualism in contemporary France. It shows how he has traced the emergence of autonomy as a key social value, and it goes on to analyse the distinctive features of Ehrenberg's sociological approach. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Ehrenberg does not regard the growth of individualism in France as a tragic process of anomie and isolation

This article focuses on the novel Les villes assassines ( 2011) by the Martinican writer Alfred Alexandre that shows his decolonial and critical vision of the politics indirectly established from France on overseas territories. The author paints a topography of misery where mafia, drugs and prostitution reign, showing the mechanisms of control and subjection of popular minorities, belonging to the

This paper aims at unpacking the cultural, historical and political significance behind the representations (including pictures, caricatures, journalistic articles, etc.) and self-representations of Rachel Félix (1821–1858), the first prominent Jewish performer on the French and British and American stage, as a prism which may afford a broader discussion about the literary formations of the figure

This article analyses how diverse communities are formed through storytelling and mythmaking in Wajdi Mouawad's theatrical tetralogy, Le Sang des promesses (1999–2009). Mythic origin stories, which Mouawad's migratory characters collect and share on their journeys from one community to the next, draw individuals from their pasts on stage to act out the events from each narrative. Mouawad thus reveals

This article draws on Michel de Certeau's notion of tactical resistance to examine the practices of reading and of using urban space in Raymond Queneau's Zazie dans le métro. Departing from formalist approaches that frame Queneau's Paris as a ‘construction verbale,’ I offer a historically situated analysis of the novel's representation of post-war Paris, demonstrating that the theme of semiotic instability

Whatever Happened to My Revolution offers a French feminist perspective on the impact today of the uprising by the left in Paris in May 1968. The continuing appeal of the events of ‘68 are considered to be in decline, yet the film suggests that the energy of 50 years ago continues to mobilize cultural politics through cinematic appeals that amount to the radical recuperation of some of the ambitions

The article retraces how the notion of cultural singularity in sexuality was constructed and weaponized in the most popular French illustrated periodical of the First World War. It argues that La Vie Parisienne’s sublimation of romantic love, sex, and Frenchness worked as a cultural tactic that, while helping the readership cope with a devastating historical disruption, undermined at the same time

In this article, I examine Charlie Hebdo, under the editorship of Philippe Val from 1994 to 2005, and how it reported on themes related to Islam and Muslims, both in France and abroad, particularly in relation to the satanic breasts controversy and the Hebron massacre in 1994, the Kosovo war, 9/11, and the 2005 banlieues riots in France. I argue that despite the plurality of voices within the magazine

This article introduces the special issue on ‘Islamophobia, Racialisation and the “Muslim Problem” in France’. Islamophobia is here understood as (anti-Muslim) racism, with structural and historical dimensions beyond those of individual acts of discrimination or prejudice, and whereby those perceived to be Muslim are systematically racialised as if they are ‘a race’ and as a ‘problem’ to be debated

By questioning the media coverage of the seven feminist movements that have received most publicity in the French mainstream media since the 2000s, this article shows that the media narrative regarding feminism perpetuates the national metanarrative produced in generalist newspapers. This metanarrative reinforces the power of majority groups by portraying them as inherently egalitarian, while those

This article traces the development over the last decades in France of anti-Muslim racism and discrimination within professional and organisational fields. It shows how, in the wake of 2004 law banning religious symbols in schools, new demands for religious neutrality have spread far beyond educational grounds, to permeate a variety of institutions, including those purportedly designed to fight against

In our work together, going back to the mid-2000s, we have always felt that it was impossible to engage fully with the ever circulating, scavenger nature of race and racism from the narrow Anglo-American vantage point that often predominates and orients public and scholarly discussions. Especially, when attempting to think with and against race in Europe and to excavate the attempts to ‘bury it alive’

In recent Franco-Vietnamese literature written by descendants of immigrants, the liminality of exile is portrayed in all its complexity through migrant bodies – that of parents’ bodies – and through political and social bodies – linked to History and the Việt Kiều’s positionality in French society. The experience of external movement becomes an internal one, creating porosity between the outside and

Cet article propose une réévaluation critique de la notion de corps sans organes dans l’oeuvre d’Antonin Artaud à la lumière des cahiers d’Ivry publiés fin 2011 et dans lesquels Artaud mentionne un nouveau « corps de gloire ». L’auteur commence par préciser la relation entre « le corps sans organes » et la tradition catholique de façon à montrer comment Artaud détourne cette dernière de façon hérétique

Le « professeur femme » est inventé en 1881 par la toute jeune IIIe République dans le cadre d’une entreprise de large envergure visant à la laïcisation du système scolaire français. Soucieux de ne point nuire au succès d’une oeuvre si importante pour la stabilité du régime même, les républicains s’emploient à faire intégrer cet être « hermaphrodite » tenant autant du masculin que du féminin à la norme

Résumé Des pièces comme Incendies permettent de libérer des voix silencieuses afin qu’elles puissent raconter des histoires de peine et de souffrance, et le théâtre donne un espace sûr pour présenter ces histoires. L’analyse suivante explore le comportement énigmatique de la protagoniste Nawal et cherche à expliquer pourquoi elle a choisi de s’éloigner de son monde et de vivre en silence. Il y a deux

Cet article entend se pencher, à partir du cas français, sur ce que signifie le concept même d’islamophobie. En évitant le débat autour du vocabulaire – qui tourne avant tout autour du fait de savoir si l’islamophobie est une « peur » ou non –, le présent article souhaite réinscrire l’islamophobie dans sa dynamique raciale. Pour reprendre l’expression de Sadri Khiari (2009), l’islamophobie apparaît

Although Jean Renoir’s oeuvre has been extensively debated since the emergence of the politique des auteurs in the pages of Cahiers du cinéma, his representation of gender relations has sustained less discussion than his signature formal style. This article posits that Renoir’s films provide a valuable means of identifying how gender, specifically female identity, affects temporal trajectories in cinema

James Baldwin’s concept of racial innocence is, at its core, a tool for examining the process whereby a dominant group subjugates another while prominently, proudly maintaining an egalitarian self-image. Rather than merely point to the existence of such a seemingly untenable paradox, Baldwin uses his concept of racial innocence to interrogate how that paradox persists; how it is consciously and unconsciously