‘My Body was Aflame with His Memory’: War,Gender and Colonial Ghosts in Hiroshima mon amour (1959)

This article argues that historicising the iconic 1959 French film Hiroshima mon amour reveals a different set of meanings that most scholars have overlooked. As France found itself embroiled in the brutal and bloody Algerian War of Independence, many started reflecting on the meaning and aftereffects of the Second World War. Despite its anti‐colonial universalist humanism, Hiroshima remains haunted by colonial ghosts and fantasies of post‐war ‘Asia’ where Asian female bodies are passive and Asian male bodies only echo other European male bodies. Ultimately, sexual and racial differences organise the film's narrative of war and canonises a Eurocentric version of ‘history’. The film's melodramatic love story renders invisible the ways gender and sexuality shape understandings of violence, wars, and violated bodies. Against Marguerite Duras's and Alain Resnais's intentions, the love story allows the remembering and forgetting of a (French) national history that only the female character embodies. Only the French woman stands in for subjectivity, memory and trauma, rendering everything else secondary. Once read as a historical text, the film illustrates the limits and ambivalences of post‐war anti‐colonial humanist political imagination.     

Gabriel Germinet and the ' Livre d'or du théâtre radiophonique français ' (1923-1935)

The Ecole de Brive represents one of the most successful examples of marketing literary texts in recent years. The Ecole consists of eight authors all of whom publish with Editions Robert Laffont and write novels that deal with the rural France of bygone eras. Laffont has grouped these writers together, created a ‘school’ and then marketed their work as a healthy alternative to the overly introspective fiction produced by Parisian intellectuals. With the Ecole de Brive Laffont has cleverly exploited the traditional tensions between the city and the country, the widespread dissatisfaction with the political and cultural status of contemporary France, and the perceived inaccessibility of currently fashionable literature, in order to sell novels that claim to renew average French peoples’ contacts with their putative roots in the quasi‐mythic world of la France profonde.     

Writing,Immigration, and Sex in Dany Laferrière and Kim Thúy

ABSTRACT

Québécois immigrant writers Dany Laferrière’s and Kim Thúy’s first novels, Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer (1985) and Ru (2009), both thematize the process of coming-to-writing and autofiction in parallel with the tropes of the sexualization of the nonwhite “other” in a global (post)colonial context. This article examines Laferrière’s and Thúy’s starkly different novels to begin to account for the connection between the act of entering literature and the indictment of racial inequality and sexual exploitation.     

Beyond Orientalism: When Marceline Desbordes-Valmore carried Saʿdi’s Roses to France

This article follows a thread of translation and intertextual dialogue, taking us from the thirteenth-century Persian poet Sa?di to the nineteenth-century French poet Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. It reads Desbordes-Valmore’s poem ‘Les roses de Saadi’ (1860) with the two passages from Sa?di’s Golestān from which it was inspired, shedding new light on the poem’s metapoetic subtext. The original Persian text is compared to two French translations that were circulating at the time when Desbordes-Valmore was writing. This analysis of the Golestān’s reception forms the basis for the argument that Desbordes-Valmore recast in secular terms Sa?di’s discourse on poetic language, emphasizing the continuity, rather than difference, between her concerns and Sa?di’s. The case of Desbordes-Valmore thus reveals a forgotten facet of nineteenth-century French engagements with Middle Eastern culture: one of identification and literary influence, which existed alongside the processes of “othering” for which the period is better known.     

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 Greekness of Modern Greek Surrealism

Abstract

Surrealism as a full-blown artistic movement, or, as many of its exponents preferred to see it, a full-blown way of life, was very much a French product. The line of descent from larry's Ubu (1896), via the self-conscious modernism of Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars, to the Dadaist activities of 1916 represents the continuation of that semi-official anti-culture which had existed throughout nineteenth-century France. With the destruction of the officially sanctioned culture of Nationalism and Catholic conformism in the debacle of the First World War, there was a sudden vacuum in French intellectual circles which the anti-culture was quite ready to fill. In the words of an early member of she movement, Roger Vailland: ‘Surrealism was not a literary school. It was above all a common ground and meeting-place for young petit-bourgeois intellectuals particularly aware of the futility of every activity expected of them by their background and their era’.     

Singers without borders: a performer’s rotulus and the transmission of jeux partis

The jeu parti – a debate in song weighing questions of love, sex, wealth, ethical behaviour – enjoyed popular acclaim across social classes in thirteenth-century France. Despite the appeal of these texts as historical sources, suggestive of the mentalité of a medieval community through frank discussion of taboo subjects, jeux partis have received sporadic scholarly attention. A rare scroll, copied by an Anglo-Norman scribe (London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 1681) supplies new evidence of the genre’s transmission outside the pages of a codex and outside northern France. The only known document of its kind to contain jeux partis, it has been overlooked by scholars for a century, yet it suggests that the transmission of music and culture could be achieved textually, borne along the performance circuits of medieval Europe. This study investigates how jeux partis were composed, transmitted and refashioned for new audiences with the aid of text and improvisation.     

In Love with Garibaldi: Romancing the Italian Risorgimento

This article discusses the meaning of ‘love’ in the political transfer of the Italian Risorgimento. After a general introduction on the possible connections between love and nineteenth-century politics, the author focuses on Giuseppe Garibaldi, one of the most colourful Founding Fathers of modern Italy. While Garibaldi's overwhelming presence in Italian monuments suggests that his political role has been defined by the Italian nation, he started his career as an international fighter for freedom for whom national borders did not matter. In fact, the Garibaldi myth that made the Italian Risorgimento a popular cause in other countries might have been heavily shaped by ‘warm attachments’ between Garibaldi and women and men all over the world. By analysing how these ‘foreigners’ turned both themselves and Garibaldi into vehicles of revolutionary politics, this article shows that in the political transfer of Garibaldi it is not so clear who is the receiver and who the transmitter, what is the centre and what the periphery, male and female: as happens in romantic love as imagined by revolutionaries like Garibaldi, the active and passive subject alternate, giving shape to a political practice that is truly interactive and international.

Résumé: Cet article se penche sur la signification de ‘l'amour’ dans le transfert politique du Risorgimento. Après une brève discussion des connections entre amour et politique au dix-neuvième siècle, l'auteur discute plus en détail Giuseppe Garibaldi, le père fondateur le plus pittoresque de l'Italie moderne. Alors que les représentations monumentales de Garibaldi suggèrent un rôle politique purement national, il commença sa carrière comme un internationaliste combattant pour la liberté plutôt que pour des frontières. De fait le mythe Garibaldi qui fit du Risorgimento une cause populaire dans bien des pays aurait été produit par des attachements chaleureux entre Garibaldi et des hommes et femmes à travers le monde. En analysant comment ces étrangers se firent des agents de la politique révolutionnaire cet article montre que dans le transfert politique Garibaldien il n'est pas très aisé de distinguer qui donne et qui reçoit, qui est au centre et qui est périphérique. Tout comme dans l'amour romantique imaginé par des révolutionnaires comme Garibaldi, les sujets passifs et actifs alternent et donnent forme à une pratique politique véritablement interactive et internationale.     

‘Some Very Queer Couples’: Gender Migrants and Intimacy in Nineteenth-Century America

This article contends that the term gender migrant – which describes a person who changed gender on a long-term basis in their everyday life – offers a useful tool for grappling with the ambiguities of nineteenth-century transgender history. Examining four cases of gender change that circulated in the popular press between the antebellum era and the turn of the twentieth century, the article brings to light intimate relationships that do not fit within the categories of female husbands or sexual inverts that have become familiar to historians of sexuality. Some female-assigned gender migrants lived as men and sought same-gender intimacy in the company of other men. Reading ambiguous cases of love and marriage from multiple angles provides insight into the strategies that resourceful gender migrants used to legitimise their public gender identities.     

Was there a French Sonderweg?

The notion of a historical Sonderweg (special way) is applied to the case of France in this article. It takes the Revolution as the seminal event in modem French history, and examines rival interpretations of its legacy; after the demise of the Marxist interpretation, these can be characterised as Whig‐Republican and Tory‐Tocquevillian. It concludes by offering a third interpretation—that the Revolution's real bequest to France was Bonapartism.     

Xing: The Discourse of Sex and Human Nature in Modern China

In Modern Chinese, xing is the character most commonly used to denote sex, gender and sexuality. However, the character was a specialist Confucian term originally meaning ‘human nature’ in Classical Chinese, and only came to signify both sex and human nature in the early twentieth century. This usage was invented by Japanese intellectuals in the late nineteenth century for their translations of sexological texts from Europe, in which they encountered the concept of sex as a natural drive and the fundamental core of individuals. This article investigates the convoluted linguistic career of xing, and argues that in China in the 1920s, sex/xing became the point of anchorage for a new politics, which naturalised sex, legitimised talk about reproduction and desire, and made imperative the intensification of the production of scientific knowledge on sex (and by extension ‘human nature’). It is emphasised that the history of xing in China in the 1920s is not just a curiosity or appendage to more ‘mainstream’ history of sexuality; rather, it is impossible to appreciate the global nature of modernity without a thorough understanding of the circulation of sexual ideas.     

Jeremy Bentham,the French Revolution and political radicalism

An unresolved debate in Bentham scholarship concerns the question of the timing and circumstances which led to Bentham's ‘conversion’ to democracy, and thus to political radicalism. In the early stages of the French Revolution, Bentham composed material which appeared to justify equality of suffrage on utilitarian grounds, but there are differing interpretations concerning the extent and depth of Bentham's commitment to democracy at this time. The appearance of Rights, Representation, and Reform: Nonsense upon Stilts and other essays on the French Revolution, a new volume in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, containing definitive texts of Bentham's writings at this crucial period, offers an opportunity to reassess this debate. First, Bentham's most radical proposals for political reform came not in the so-called ‘Essay on Representation’ composed in late 1788 and early 1789, as has traditionally been assumed, but in his ‘Projet of a Constitutional Code for France’ composed in the autumn of 1789, where he advocated universal adult (male and female) suffrage, subject to a literacy test. Second, it may be doubted if the very question as to whether Bentham was or was not a sincere convert to democracy is particularly helpful. Rather, it may be better to see Bentham as a ‘projector’ during this period of his life. Third, the nature of Bentham's radicalism was very different at this period from what it would become in the 1810s and 1820s, for instance in relation to his commitment to the traditional structures of the British Constitution. Having said that, his attitude to the British Constitution remained complex and ambivalent. At his most radical phase, in the autumn of 1789, he advocated wide-ranging measures of electoral reform while at the same time harbouring aspirations to be returned to Parliament for one of the Marquis of Lansdowne's pocket boroughs. To conclude, it was, arguably, the internal dynamic of Bentham's critical utilitarianism, rather than the events of the French Revolution, which was ultimately responsible for pushing him into a novel form of radical politics.     

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.     

Terrorism and the banlieues: the Charlie Hebdo attacks in context

In January 2015, French society was shocked by a sequence of fatal attacks at the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in Paris. In the wake of these tragic events, many social and political commentators interpreted the killings as an assault on freedom of expression and core French values of liberty, equality and laïcité. Prime Minister Manuel Valls described the perpetrators as disciples of Islamofascism. More than this, the terrorists were represented as the extreme manifestation of a deviant and nihilistic ‘other’—largely concentrated in France’s infamous banlieues—that rejected the Republic and embraced a form of ideological extremism that originated beyond France’s borders. Yet this interpretation fails to adequately consider the complexity of the situation. Drawing on the work on radicalisation by Wiktorowicz, and illustrated with lessons learned from research into the causes of the 2005 French riots, this article has two objectives: to highlight the importance of everyday exclusion in the web of causal factors that frames the path to violent extremism in France; and to offer an alternative view of the role and influence of the banlieues in this context.     

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.     

Keeping Up Appearances: Dress, Architecture, Furniture, and Status at French Azilum

Situated in northern Pennsylvania, French Azilum was a late eighteenth-/early nineteenth-century community of elite French refugees escaping the French Revolution. Inhabitants of the isolated community expressed the need to reconstitute themselves as the privileged class of the ancien régime by attempting to dress, build their homes, and furnish them in a certain fashion to distinguish themselves as elites and to reestablish the social hierarchy of the ancien régime in a frontier outpost. In this paper, we explore how the settlers at French Azilum used architecture, furnishings, and dress in an attempt to keep up appearances.     

A Thematic Analysis of “Love” and “Truth” in Caritas in Veritate

Abstract

The encyclical Caritas in veritate uses love as its guiding theological theme, and this innovation exposes the encyclical to critical reflections from some of the greatest theological minds of the mid-twentieth century. This article attempts to revive these critiques in order to analyze Benedict XVI’s use of caritas. Does Benedict’s use of love differ from his predecessors, and is it in any way more adequate? Are the critiques leveled against a social ethic of love merely the product of a hopelessly cynical age, or is love merely a species of interpersonal amity-inapplicable to broader social contexts? Does the fusion of love with the fundamentally contested notion of truth clarify what the Pope means by caritas, or is this conceptual marriage fraught with imprecision and inconsistencies?     

Introduction

In November 2004, France carried out one of the biggest evacuation operations of its expatriates since the Algerian War of 1954–1962. Within a couple of days, more than 8000 French citizens were forced to leave Côte d'Ivoire because of violent anti-French protests by the supporters of the Ivorian regime. This article examines the dispute between French repatriates from Côte d'Ivoire and the French government by analysing the arguments put forward by both sides in legal texts and semi-structured interviews conducted in France and Côte d'Ivoire. It is argued that the dispute cannot be explained satisfactorily as a mere instrumentalisation of the current debates in France about Françafrique. On the contrary, the article shows that Françafrique should be understood primarily as an ideological discourse that organises Franco-African relations and makes them resilient to change.     

J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and intellectual history

ABSTRACT

Recent thinking about Intellectual History has moved beyond studying only verbal texts, to encompass other kinds of visual and aural texts that can be vehicles for generative thought. Where might music fit into this expanded conception? If ideas are defined purely as concepts that can be expressed in words, music can be no more than an “epiphenomenon”, a consequence or representation of ideas that lie behind it, but not capable of embodying those ideas in itself. Yet to many musicians, it seems obvious that music can function as a way in which ideas are developed and worked out. What kinds of knowledge might be embodied in music, then, and how do its meanings change over time? In this paper, I examine some of these issues through consideration of one of the key texts of Western art music, J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, exploring how it was conceived in a liturgical context in Bach’s time, how its meaning changed when transposed to the very different milieus of concert performance in nineteenth-century Berlin and colonial Sydney, and as it has been re-imagined in a variety of recent staged and recorded versions.