Virtual Poaching and Altered Space: Reading Parkour in French Visual Culture

Parkour has emerged in the last decade as a significant cultural practice, both in France, where it originated, and internationally. The cultural resonance of parkour—a form of street gymnastics combining acrobatic agility with a creative approach to urban space—is emphasised through its presence on numerous internet sites, as well as representations in advertising media, the bande dessinée, and films. While the prevalence of parkour as a practice is widely known, these numerous manifestations within culture have not been widely theorised. This article focuses primarily on parkour's representations in visual culture, especially in cinema, and considers the associations made in two films between parkour and the banlieue. Analysing both the legitimacy and potential problems in making the banlieue a stage for parkour performance and big-screen entertainment enables us to reconsider the notion of the film banlieue, as well as the political possibilities of a ‘parkour film’. Lastly, reflecting on the circumstances of contemporary cinema and the role of the internet, the article considers philosophical aspects of the ‘parkour film’, as well as seeking parallels between parkour's spatial practices and the practices of cinematic and online production and distribution.

La dernière décennie a vu apparaître le parkour en tant que pratique culturelle significative, en France, où il a son origine, mais aussi au niveau international. L'impact culturel du parkour – une gymnastique de rue qui unit l'agilité acrobatique à une attitude créative envers l'espace urbain – est souligné par sa présence sur nombre de sites Web, dans la publicité, la bande dessinée, et dans certains films. Alors que la popularité du parkour comme pratique est reconnue, ces représentations culturelles ont suscité moins d'intérêt théorique. Cet article porte sur les représentations du parkour dans la culture visuelle – principalement dans le cinéma – et examine les rapports établis dans deux films entre le parkour et la banlieue. En se demandant s'il est ou légitime ou problématique de se servir de la banlieue comme scène pour la célébration du parkour ou pour les super-productions cinématiques, on peut réexaminer le concept du ‘film banlieue’, et considérer les possibilités politiques d'un ‘film parkour’. Finalement, en réfléchissant sur la situation contemporaine du cinéma et le rôle de l'Internet, l'article considère les aspects philosophiques du film parkour; en même temps, il cherche à établir des correspondances entre les pratiques spatiales du parkour et les pratiques de production et dissémination cinématiques et numériques.     

L’Amour est dans le pré: cultural representations and social hierarchisation of farmers

In this article, the authors analyse socio-cultural representations of farmers conveyed by a popular French reality TV programme called L’Amour est dans le pré, which features ‘real’ farmers and is filmed in the countryside. Their objective is to determine the place and role assigned to farmers within contemporary French society. To study L’Amour est dans le pré’s televisual representation of farmers, they use Blanchard and Bancel’s articulation of the concept of ‘human zoos’ and, more specifically, its implications regarding reality TV. Based on content and discourse analyses of the Portraits episodes of season 7, the authors intend to engage competing representations and ideological appropriation of farmers in a French context, and, more broadly, to identify how this reality television programme illuminates tensions in reconfigurations of nationhood in contemporary France. They show that on the one hand, the programme challenges generic, geographical and social conventions with its carefully choreographed on-site interview, strategic post-production editing and, finally, its interactive weaving of subjectivity and objectivity, representation and observation that generates a sense of proximity and immediacy between farmers and viewers. On the other hand, they demonstrate that the programme reinforces and perpetuates a dichotomised national identity with its visual and discursive idealisation and marginalisation of farmers.     

The Problem that Had a Name: French High‐Rise Developments and the Fantasy of a Suburban Homemaker Pathology, 1954–73

Within Western Europe, France had the largest and longest postwar commitment to private social‐market housing inside dense residential suburbs called grands ensembles d'habitation (GEs). Social‐Catholic activists and planners viewed the GEs as facilitating women's maternal mission within egalitarian communities, but others across the political spectrum saw them as pathological spaces, especially for women who supposedly contracted a psychological disease dubbed ‘sarcellite’, after France's flagship GE of Sarcelles. This article analyses how a phantasmatic gendered discourse of housing disaster, first circulated by the media, strategically influenced gendered actors’ residential desires and legitimised policy shifts toward single‐family housing. The discourse of sarcellite reveals how housing realities and imaginaries shaped gendered claims to housing as an evolving aspect of social citizenship. The article considers both suburban women's demands for subsidised childcare and other services and the nuances and contradictions of the evolving discourse of sarcellite.     

Anti-racist activism and the memory of colonialism: race as Republican critique after 2005

In 2005, French public debates increasingly focused on coming to terms with the memory of colonialism. This new interest in the country’s colonial history owed a great deal to the activity of a new kind of anti-racist organisation that prioritised the need to trigger a broad public debate about issues of race and memory. This article will examine the emergence of two of these organisations: Les Indigènes de la République and the Conseil Représentatif des Associations Noires. Both organisations were founded in 2005 and established themselves as well-known actors in France’s anti-racist scene through the appropriation of different aspects of France’s memory of colonialism. Indeed, their interventions concentrated on the way colonial legacies influenced contemporary Republican discourse and especially on the role of ‘race’ in contemporary France. Simultaneously, however, these organisations differed in their goals and understandings of activism. Through their cases, this piece will argue that anti-racist activists initiated a public debate on the memory of colonialism in order to find new ways to combat contemporary discrimination in France rather than thematising memory for the sake of remembrance.     

National Identity and Everyday Cultures in Contemporary France: Re-Constructing Frenchness through ‘Third Kind’ Representations of the Cités (1960–2000)*

This article examines the role played in France by the culture du quotidien (everyday culture) in establishing a more integrated image of the nation and identity. It suggests that since the 1960s, dominant media discourse in France, and artistic representations of the urban periphery, have often perpetuated an image of the cités as menacing spaces detached from the national community and emblematic of France's postmodern crisis. Focusing on everyday cultural creations about the Grand Ensemble in La Courneuve, it argues that the ‘ordinariness’ of the lives these creations convey, along with the residents’ cultural practices and their continuing sense of belonging, effectively treats geography, culture and history in a way that questions the standard externalising discourse about the cités. Despite their limits in terms of circulation, these cultural artefacts of a ‘third kind’ offer images that contribute to challenging the ‘banlieues myth’ and help re-construct a French identity perceived under threat. 1 ?[1] I express my gratitude to Dr Karima Laachir, Professor Kate Ince and Dr Jackie Clarke for their support, comments and advice, while preparing this article. I am also indebted to the challenging and inspiring contributions made by the participants of the ASMCF conference held in Manchester in September 2008. Finally, my thanks go to the inhabitants of La Courneuve who, like Dr Roger Amar, kindly accepted to discuss their views on French contemporary society.      

The Poison and the Spider's Web: Diderot and Eighteenth-Century French Epicureanism

This article argues that the term ‘Epicurean’ had multiple meanings in the moral and political thought of the eighteenth century. Concentrating on the reception of Epicureanism in France, it shows that some critics focused on Epicurus’ hedonistic moral psychology and labelled Epicurean those thinkers who denied natural sociability; for others, who instead focused on Epicurus’ materialist natural philosophy, to label a thinker an Epicurean was to label them an atheist. This polyvalence is presented as a salutary caution against essentialising claims about the content of eighteenth-century Epicureanism per se. Despite this sceptical stance, however, the article goes on to argue that it is nevertheless fruitful to investigate the engagement with Epicureanism by particular thinkers or in particular texts. Indeed, a comparative reading of Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie entry on ‘Epicuréisme’ and his source material in Johan Jakob Bruker and Pierre Bayle demonstrates that Diderot used his discussion of Epicureanism to intervene directly in contemporary theological controversies over the immortal soul and a providential god.     

The idea of German cultural regions in the Third Reich: the work of Franz Petri

This article considers the German idea of the cultural region between the wars, with particular reference to the work of Franz Petri. Drawing on a self-consciously ‘modern’ integration of archaeological, historical and geographical research, Petri was a pioneering figure in the so-called Kulturraumforschung school. Petri's method involved an attempt to reconstruct Germanic cultural traditions and legacies in Belgium and northern France through a detailed investigation of Medieval field and place names, burial sites and skeletons. Although Petri's research had initially no explicit ideological or geopolitical objectives, his research into Germanic settlement and ‘soil’ beyond the nation's contemporary political and linguistic borders was used by those German political activists who rejected the Treaty of Versailles and who sought to re-establish a greater German Reich, including some leading National Socialists.     

From nation to population: the racialisation of ‘Métis’ in the Canadian census†

ABSTRACT. Between 1996 and 2001 the ‘Métis population’ of Canada skyrocketed from 204,000 to 292,000, an astonishing and demographically improbable increase of 43 per cent. Most puzzling about this ‘increase’ is not so much the unpersuasive explanations offered by statisticians and others but, more fundamentally, the underlying assumption that such a thing as a ‘Métis population’ exists at all. In contrast, I argue that such an idea constitutes an artifact of Canada's racial/colonial episteme in which ‘the Métis’– formerly an indigenous nation invaded and displaced in the Canadian nation‐state's westward expansion – have been reduced in public and administrative discourse to include any indigenous individual who identifies as Métis: reduced, in other words, to (part of) a race. The paper argues further that the authority of the Canadian census as a privileged forum of contemporary meaning‐making in Canadian society is such that the lack of explicit Census categories to distinguish Métis Nation allegiance further naturalises a racialised construction of Métis at the expense of an indigenously national one.     

War and peace in the contemporary French film ecosystem: Valérie Donzelli’s La Guerre est déclarée

This article analyses Valérie Donzelli’s film Declaration of War (La Guerre est déclarée, 2011), in the context of the contemporary French film ecosystem. The article argues that Donzelli’s film exemplifies the French miniaturist mode of production; demonstrates the modern conceptual notion of applied cinephilia; highlights the idiosyncratic uses possible for French popular genres, particularly the comedy and the musical; and embodies the French film industry’s export mission by representing on-screen the French national healthcare system.     

Charity and Political Protest in French Popular Music

This article explores the cultural assumptions expressed in the self-proclaimed ‘alternative’ and ‘protest’ sector of French popular music, and how these become problematic when leading a charity concert. Liberté de circulation (1999) is a small-scale concert set up for the benefit of the Groupe d'Information et de Soutien des Travailleurs Immigrés (GISTI) in support of illegal immigrants, and its participants (artists and organisers) have a confused relationship with contestation and media exposure. While they convincingly wrap their pro-migration discourse in notions of solidarity and universality, they often confine themselves in artistic and production terms to a certain marginality, which fails the objective of raising funds and public awareness for the charity targeted. Drawing on a comparison between Liberté de Circulation and Les Enfoirés, a high-profile, televised charity show supporting the destitute, the article observes the problematic articulation of charity to political commitment and, in so doing, contributes to debate about the formation of cultural identities around the concept of ‘resistance’ in contemporary France. This discussion follows the pluridisciplinary method of popular music studies and includes an analysis of song lyrics, orchestration, artists' declarations in interviews and the media reception of charity concerts.     

The Linguistic and Rhetorical Legacy of the Prague Spring: Reading the Czechoslovak Communist Party Daily,Rudé právo,from the Late 1980s

This study uses a corpus-informed lexicological approach to analyse texts published in the Czechoslovak Communist Party daily Rudé právo during the final years of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia. The analysis aims to uncover how far such texts represented a departure from or a reaffirmation of the norms of the pre-Gorbachev era and, in particular, the role that they played in the Party’s attempt to control interpretations of the 1968 Prague Spring. The investigation also considers ways in which the texts sought to construct a ‘new’ reality in the light of the changes in the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries. The article maintains that the ‘authoritative discourse’ model represents an especially useful analytical framework for evaluating the impact of ideological language in the context of the Communist system. The model both helps to explain the relative acquiescence of most of the population, and also to track the extent to which the ‘coded’ message of the approved discourse was successful in slowing the demise of the regime.     

Bringing Counterculture to France: Actuel Magazine and the Legacy of May '68

This article considers the nature and role of counterculture in France in the aftermath of 1968. It engages with recent work by Kristin Ross who has argued that demagogic characterisations of May '68 around notions of ‘youth’ and ‘generation’ serve to depoliticise the event. This emphasis on the ‘cultural effects’ of 1968 is linked in Ross's account with the idea of counterculture, but the link between depoliticisation and counterculture is made without a sustained examination of counterculture's actual instances. A reassessment of the nature of French counterculture is therefore made here via an examination of Actuel magazine (1971–1975), which constituted an important node of youth cultural practice in those years. This article charts the rise and fall of Actuel, analyses how it first created and then related to its constituency, and provides key insights into the development and (de)politicisation of youth cultures in France in the years after 1968.     

Muscles,Nerves, and Sex: The Contradictions of the Medical Approach to Female Bodies in Movement in France, 1847–1914

From the early nineteenth century in France, the treatment of hysteria was connected to both physical and moral development. As a result, therapeutic treatments envisaged by medical practitioners were influenced by and related to the formulation of precepts of medical gymnastics. This article considers how ‘physical education’ for women became part of medical discourse, specifically the elaboration of ‘body treatment’ as a remedy against nervous disorders including hysteria. From the Second Republic (1848) to the years of the belle epoque (1914), the discourse concerning the medical cause of ‘hysterical madness’ is marked by the progressive discrediting of reflections that located the causes of pathology in the genitals. However, the shaping of a neuro‐cerebral etiology did not fully replace discussions of the relationship between hysteria, female bodies and the uterus. While the current historiography emphasises the participation of doctors in the production and legitimation of physical exercises in the nineteenth century, some aspects of this process are not yet fully explored. We examine the ambivalences of medical discourse, between the rhetoric of the eternally wounded woman and the need to develop women's abilities (intellectual, moral, and physical) to ensure healthy children. And despite the shadows that still obscure the etiology of nervous disorders, there is, in our period, a genuine dynamic favouring experimental therapeutics. The ‘movement disorders’, such as chorea, hysteria or neurasthenia, were handled by increasingly well‐established regimes utilising physical exercise. The introduction of gymnastics in the hospital played a fundamental role in this process; it enabled experimentation and lent legitimacy to physical exercise as therapy.     

Love as difference: the politics of love in the thought of Malek Chebel

This article discusses the ongoing discourses on love that first developed in the 1980s in France as they are articulated through the work of Malek Chebel. It argues that for Chebel ‘love’ contributes to the ongoing negotiation between Islam and the West and of Islam in France/Europe. The article considers his discourse on love within the context of the current debates on French constructions of community and membership and examines how love engages with the question of difference and identity to decentre and de‐essentialise ‘Islam’. It concludes that the negotiation between Europe and Islam involves questioning the role of Maghrebi culture and tradition in defining ‘Islam’ in France.     

In the name of the Republic: Untimely meditations on the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attack (Respond to this article at https://www.therai.org.uk/publications/anthropology-today/debate)

In the wake of the killings at Charlie Hebdo offices and in a kosher supermarket in January 2015, an unprecedented national mobilization took place in France in defence of the endangered ‘values of the Republic’: liberty, equality, fraternity, to which had been added laïcité, the French version of secularism. However, the unanimity was soon disrupted as some did not join the ‘Je suis Charlie’ movement, questioning the double standard in the implementation of these principles. This essay analyzes the variations and flaws in the application of liberty, in particular free speech, and of laïcité, to the detriment of Islam, and discusses how equality and fraternity are currently undermined by social disparities and racial discriminations, which are in part inherited from the colonial past. Although they might seem untimely in such consensual moments, these meditations invite a critical reflection on the contradictions of contemporary democracies.     

The state of war

This article frames the discussion of the ‘state of war’ in this issue of International Affairs. Beginning by noting the continued recurrence of ‘traditional’ modes of war along side so‐called ‘new wars’ and calling to aid Rousseau's brutal satire of 1756, The state of war, the article offers a discussion of three ‘responses’ to the reality of war in international relations—the heroic response, the realpolitik response and the compassionate response—and argues that a synthesis between them characterizes the general approach to war in any historical period. It then considers how the contemporary synthesis might be viewed and offers thoughts on the articles in this issue in the light of this suggestion.     

Cultural insecurity and its discursive crystallisation in contemporary France

This article analyses the emergence in French public discourse since 2010 of the term ‘insécurité culturelle’ (‘cultural insecurity’). It traces firstly the take-up of the term outside France since the 1980s in anglophone written news media. It establishes four received meanings for the term: a ‘pure’ cultural insecurity expressing simply a relation to the arts world; a nationally refracted cultural insecurity that expresses that relation through the prism of relations between nations; an anthropologico-political conception; and a conception related to the human development paradigm. The take-up in France of the term has conformed to the anthropologico-political conception. Developments after 2002 in France created propitious conditions for coupling the semantic fields of ‘culture’ and ‘insecurity’. The term itself was launched from 2010 through the work of two quite different ‘discursive entrepreneurs’ associated with the erstwhile ‘popular left’ current close to the French Socialist Party (Christophe Guilluy and Laurent Bouvet). The article analyses in both linguistic and political perspectives how the expression has been taken up since 2012 in the national press in France. In particular, it explores the debate concerning the purchase of the term on reality, and its current discursive fit with the agendas of the mainstream and far right.     

SOS Racisme and the Legacies of Colonialism 2005–2009: An Ambivalent Relationship

The relationship of French anti-racist organisations with the country's colonial past forms a substantial division within the movement. Whilst some organisations—the Mouvement des Indigènes de la République, for example—place colonial commemoration at the heart of their ideology and draw parallels between the colonial past and post-colonial present, others are far more sceptical. One such group is SOS Racisme, which, despite the intense debate around the legacies of colonialism during the article's timeframe (typified by the law of 23 February 2005 on the ‘positive role’ of colonisation, and Nicolas Sarkozy's discourse on ‘repentance’), has been consistently reluctant to acknowledge the impact of such legacies on contemporary French society, to the extent of seeing too much emphasis on the colonial past as actively harmful to both the anti-racist movement and populations of immigrant origin. In this article, the author considers why this is, noting that although SOS sees France's colonial past as a legitimate area of historical study, it rejects the idea that it should affect the way in which post-colonial populations are seen and treated in contemporary France; the idea that it should form the backbone of these populations' identities; and the idea that immigrants and their descendants have the right to see themselves as victims solely because of their colonial heritage. This rejection, the author argues, can be linked with both SOS's emphasis on universalist republicanism and its prioritisation of practical action against racism over analysis of its causes.     

Comics and the Demystification of France's Immigration ‘Problem’: Reading Christophe Dabitch's Immigrants

While universalism constitutes the foundation of French republicanism, public discourse and changes in immigration law have revealed that racial and/or ethnic discrimination and exclusion are necessary for cultural assimilation and for the protection of France's ‘universalist’ model. Studies have also shown that at least 40% of the French population is of foreign origin. So how has France justified the reconciliation of universalism and particularism (now referred to as communitarianism) in certain instances but not others? Christophe Dabitch's collaborative comic-book project, Immigrants (2010), aims to deconstruct the French republican narrative of universalism by using a popular medium that is both transcultural and transnational. An effective collage of visual styles, reproduced testimony and scholarship on immigration in France, Dabitch's album proposes writing an alternative French history of immigration and invites readers to question founding mythologies which have erected France as the country of human rights. This article has three objectives: to present Immigrants as a serious historical and artistic project on immigration; to critically examine this publication's purpose (can comics effectively demonstrate that immigration is a common but significant aspect of nation building?); and to explore how comics can positively re-imagine France as a métropole cosmopolite, as an international point of convergence.     

Fiction ‘néo-réactionnaire’ avec Richard Millet

Omnipresent in the political and media landscapes, the neo-reactionary discourse has become a major discursive trend in contemporary France. Recent scholarship has started to theorise its mechanisms of production and circulation, with a particular focus on the visibility and posture of the celebrities who embody it. The importance of this discourse’s literary component has been pointed out, but also restricted to discussions pertaining to the role played by these public figures’ writings published for a mass audience such as essays and newspaper articles. The objective of this article is to highlight the need to take into consideration literary representations that echo but also complete the theoretical arguments developed in more popular outlets. Through the analysis of Richard Millet’s Province (2016), the potential of fiction, and more precisely the realist novel, will be explored in order to suggest that a thorough understanding of the neo-reactionarydiscourse can only be achieved through the study of the multiple platforms that disseminate and shape it.