Lexington Books
Pages: 288
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9¼
978-0-7391-0646-4 • Hardback • October 2003 • $130.00 • (£100.00)
978-0-7391-0647-1 • Paperback • October 2003 • $54.99 • (£42.00)
978-0-7391-5523-3 • eBook • October 2003 • $52.00 • (£40.00)
Tyler Stovall is the author of France Since the Second World War (2002), Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (1996), and The Rise of the Paris Red Belt (1990). He is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. Georges Van Den Abbeele, author ofTravel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau (1992) and translator of Jean-Fran_ois Lyotard's major works, is Director of the Davis Humanities Institute and Professor of French and Italian at the University of California, Davis.
Chapter 1 The Intelligentsia and New Conceptions of French Identity
Chapter 2 The Marginality of Michel de Certeau
Chapter 3 Disorienting Le Corbusier: Charles Edouard Jeanneret's 1911 Voyage d'Orient
Chapter 4 France in the Wilderness
Chapter 5 Opacity in the Films of Claire Denis
Chapter 6 Black Diaspora and Créolisation
Chapter 7 The French Language in the Face of Creolization
Chapter 8 Kojève and Fanon: the Desire for Recognition and the Fact of Blackness
Chapter 9 Historically Particular Uses of a Universal Subject
Chapter 10 For a Caribbean Intertext: On Some Readings of Maryse Condé's Crossing the Mangrove
Chapter 11 Hereditary Antagonism: Race and Nation in Maurice Casseus's Viejo
Chapter 12 Orientalism and the Maghrebian Presence in Post-Colonial France
Chapter 13 Nationalism, Colonialism, and Ethnic Discourse in the Construction of French Identity
Chapter 14 French Identity, Islam, and North Africans: Colonial Legacies, Post-Colonial Realities
Chapter 15 Social Dynamics in Colonial Algeria: The Question of Pieds-Noirs Identity
Chapter 16 Remembering the Jews of Algeria
Chapter 17 Miscegenation, Degeneration, and other Metropolitan Anxieties
Chapter 18 Love, Labor, and Race: Colonial Men and White Women in France during the Great War
Chapter 18 Decadence/Degeneration/Créolité:Rachilde's La Jongleuse
Chapter 20 The Children of Belgium
This is a superb collection. The elegant introduction presents the current situation of French and Francophone studies with icy clarity and should become required reading. The contributors add original interdisciplinary perspectives on intellectual and cultural history, race and gender, cinema and architecture, the Caribbean, the Maghreb, and Belgium. No one working in French studies can afford to ignore this book....
— Françoise Lionnet
French Civilization and Its Discontents is a rich mosaic of French and Francophone studies in the world at large. The editors take a strong critical view both of French universalism and of the civilizing mission that had marked its colonial ambitions. They show admirably how the nation is being renewed where it folds practices that had been outside of itself into the textures of contemporary life. The book is rich, variegated, and compelling. It will further galvanize our commitment to French and Francophone studies.
— Tom Conley
With great authority, French Civilization and Its Discontents shows why, at this moment, it is scholars outside France who are best situated to perceive the compelling political and cultural transversals that allow French history and that of the Francophone world to be thought together....
— Kristin Ross
This is simply the most comprehensive and compelling collection on these intersecting themes. It is bound to reconfigure French cultural studies and post/colonial histories.....
— David Theo Goldberg, Director, Humanities Research Institute, University of California
History doesn't stand still and French Civilization and Its Discontents provides a brilliant examination of how the state of France along with its culture, language, literature has exercised a powerful and complex influence both within and outside of its borders. This book challenges traditional notions about French history, its intellectual legacy, and its importance for a wide variety of subjects and disciplines. Stovall and Van Den Abbeele both deepen and expand the importance of interdisciplinary studies and in doing so open up new ground for understanding the landscape of global politics, and its intersection with the politics of difference and the legacy of the nation. This book should be read by both students of French civilization and everybody else interested in culture, identity, and global politics..
— Henry A. Giroux, McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest