This article proposes an interrogation of the tropes of female narcissism with a material history of the mirror and women's accounts of looking at themselves in nineteenth-century France. Drawing from a range of sources in order to trace the introduction of the vanity into domestic spaces, I argue that the newfound availability of the looking glass, while encouraging a self-objectification in the eyes

This article argues that in Caché, politics, aesthetics and life collapse into one another by setting a dystopic simulacrum from which the spectator becomes emancipated. Caché critiques colonial-racist discourses within the France–Algeria context alongside the society of the spectacle, subverting binary categorisations such as form/content, ethics/aesthetics and diegetic/extradiegetic through staged

Frederick Charles Worth (1825–1895) is consensually regarded as a founder of haute couture. His business was accompanied by unprecedented marketing strategies. These strategies included also the person of dressmaker in order to change his social status. In accordance with this, dressmaking is no longer just a craft; it has begun to aspire to the position of art. This article wants to show that the

The following article offers a comparative, contextualized analysis of two versions of Cauchemar Blanc: its initial iteration as a bande dessinée published in 1974 by Moebius and its cinematic adaptation in 1991 by Mathieu Kassovitz. By analyzing the aesthetic and discursive strategies used, the study demonstrates how the authors use visual media to expose the pervasiveness of racism in France. Though

Mahi Binebine se veut un veilleur de mémoire qui consacre ses oeuvres aux laissés pour compte, aux victimes de l’innommable. Son roman Cannibales (1999) s’inscrit dans la mouvance d’une littérature qui interroge le drame de l’émigration clandestine et son cortège de cadavres et de rêves brisés. Attirés par le chant des sirènes de l’Eldorado européen, les candidats à l’émigration illégale, gavés d’illusions

This article unveils how the French political ideology of universalism benefits from the perpetual racialization of others. Drawing from various definitions and understandings of racial capitalism, I demonstrate how the success of universalism relies on the racialization of French society to strengthen its homogenizing cultural hegemony. Cedric Robinson notes that European civilization has historically

Revered as one of the principal figures of contemporary African literature and one of the greatest francophone writers, the celebrated Ivorian author; Ahmadou Kourouma, is renowned for his criticism of colonial machination, Africa's political and social structure, and satirical writings. In his selected works for this study—“Allah n’est pas obligé” and “Soleils des indépendances,” he profoundly explores

This article offers a critical analysis of “the Fabrègues Affair” (2022), a case of youth violence in which two twelve-year-old girls carried out a series of stabbings, resulting in the death of one of their fathers. What was initially viewed as a simple “family tragedy [ drame intrafamilial]” ballooned into a national conversation when the girls claimed, after their arrest, that their violent act

French electroacoustic music in the post-war decades has typically been associated with a high modernism that spurned popular or mass culture. This article situates electroacoustic music in the late 1960s and 1970s in relation to the transformation of the cultural field in this period, which unsettled clear divisions between high and low cultures. Attending in particular to the question of subjectivity

This article makes use of James Scott's theory of ‘hidden transcripts’ to study cultural works and relevant writings that document the history of the carceral in Tunisia. It contends that prisoners found in songs and writings hidden transcripts to resist authoritarianism, to denounce the miscarriage of justice and to communicate with the outside world. Prisoner cultural works and writings show that

How to speak of wounding, of survival? Regarding a new “recently adopted apocalyptic tone in philosophy” and the multiple crises of the twenty-first century this question, which has shaped Occidental philosophy after Auschwitz, seems to have gained increased urgency. In her book “The New Wounded” (orig. 2007) Malabou addresses this question of the (im)possibility of the symbolization of traumatic injuries

‘Annie Ernaux: Politics lived and written’ starts by outlining the aim and key terms of this special issue of French Cultural Studies dedicated to ‘Annie Ernaux: Writing, Politics’. It then provides an overview of her life, highlighting some of the ways in which the writer, who was born in 1940, experienced or witnessed first-hand the historical events, legal pressures, and socio-political realities

RésuméLauréate du Prix Nobel, Annie Ernaux est une écrivaine consacrée mais elle est en outre considérée comme une représentante des dominé.e.s, avec toutes les ambiguïtés que ce terme de « représentante » recouvre. Si la réception de l’œuvre demeure clivée en France, force est de constater que le programme qui a en partie guidé l’œuvre d’Ernaux – « venger ma race et venger mon sexe » – participe d’une

RésuméDepuis la deuxième décennie du XXIe siècle, les études littéraires françaises et québécoises ont identifié une « littérature (du) care », un ensemble d’œuvres dont certains traits rejoignent la perspective féministe du care. En partant d’une suggestion de Larroux (2020), cet article s’intéressera aux deux récits de filiation « laborieuse » d’Annie Ernaux, La Place (1983) et Une femme (1988),

RésuméChez Annie Ernaux, l’alliage « désirer désobéir » (que j’emprunte à Georges Didi-Huberman) cristallise un engagement motivé par l’indignation et porté par une révolte créatrice – contre les indignités, contre le « désengagement de l’État », contre un déclinisme mortifère. L’opposition d’Ernaux au pouvoir dépasse la simple protestation ; comme chez Camus, qui demeure une de ses inspirations, une

RésuméLa volonté de faire une littérature qui soit, en quelque manière, politique est constamment réaffirmée tout au long du parcours d’écrivaine d’Annie Ernaux. En puisant surtout dans ses écrits réflexifs et déclarations lors d’entretiens, on s’attache à proposer un essai de « situation théorique » des discours méta-poétiques de l’autrice touchant à cette question du politique, afin de voir quelles

This article considers the elaboration of time as part of the formal construction that relates writing and politics in Ernaux's work. Beginning with her claim that ‘Écrire, c’est créer du temps’, particular attention is paid to the role of the future in Ernaux's ‘lived time’, especially the future as anticipated in the past. Her accounts of the past, in both fiction and autobiographical writing, show

RésuméDans Une Femme (1987), Annie Ernaux affirmait se situer « au-dessous de la littérature » : dans quelle mesure ce positionnement, maintenu par l’autrice au fil des décennies, est-il compatible avec sa consécration ? Cet article envisage la publication des Années (2008) comme un tournant qui a été suivi de nombreux textes dialogiques et collaboratifs s’éloignant de formats littéraires consacrés

This article was written in response to the attacks on Annie Ernaux following the announcement by the Swedish Academy of its decision to award her the Nobel Prize in Literature on 6 October 2022. In particular, it discusses the accusation of anti-Zionism, more or less explicitly conflated with antisemitism. Through the analysis of texts signed by Ernaux, the article demonstrates that this accusation

The documents added to the new edition of Ernaux's Retour à Yvetot (2013, 2022), written during her student years, represent the process and affects of class transition, without the benefits of hindsight, experience, and the readings in sociology, particularly of Bourdieu, that inform her literary texts. I analyse them here both in relation to Ernaux's published works, particularly La Honte and Mémoire

Mariette Monpierre's and Michel Reinette’s 2022 documentary, Les Derniers Blancs Matignon de Guadeloupe, and Estelle-Sarah Bulle’s 2018 novel, Là, où les chiens aboient par la queue emblematize the complexities involved in reimagining postcolonial identities in Guadeloupe, especially that of the Blancs-Matignon. They are a mostly White, endogamous, and isolated group who have had a discreet existence

In 2014, philosopher Chantal Jaquet coined the term transclasse to describe a person who is in the process of changing their social class. In opposition to the perhaps more widely-known expression ‘transfuge de classe’ – popularised by writers such as Annie Ernaux and Édouard Louis – transclasse allows for a comprehension of the necessarily transient nature of social migration, encapsulating a vital

RésuméDéfinies comme une association individuelle et récurrente de l’image mentale d’une couleur à la perception d’un son, l’audition colorée, puis les perceptions sensorielles nommées synesthésies...

This article aims to examine the genealogy of the discourse of islamogauchisme (sometimes translated as ‘Islamo-leftism’), provide a socio-historical analysis of its political functions in the Fren...

There existed a fascinating means of collecting fairy tales in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that has hitherto remained unexplored: the collection of chromolithographs or “chromos,” ...

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