Pub Date : 2026-02-28DOI: 10.1177/09571558261423871
Abubakar S Tajudeen
This study examines the music of Burkinabé artist Black So Man, bringing into focus how his songs articulate political critique and social commentary through what I term “human constellations”—metaphorical figures of lovers, youth, elders, parents, and workers. Focusing on four key songs—“Adji” (1998), “J’étais au Procès” (1997), “On S’en Fout” (1997), and “Le Système du Vampire” (1997)—the analysis demonstrates how Black So Man mobilizes affective registers of love, betrayal, pain, and resilience to render visible the failures of the postcolonial Burkinabé state. His lyrics expose the disillusionment that followed independence, the persistence of neocolonial exploitation, and the moral and social fractures that stem from corruption, privatization, and economic despair. By centering an understudied figure in Francophone West African music, this study fills a critical gap in African musical cultural scholarship and spotlights the significance of Burkinabé voices in theorizing political life.
本研究考察了布基纳法索艺术家Black So Man的音乐，重点关注他的歌曲是如何通过我所说的“人类星座”来表达政治批判和社会评论的——恋人、青年、老人、父母和工人的隐喻人物。以“Adji”（1998）、“J’”（1997）、“on S’en four”（1997）和“Le system du Vampire”（1997）这四首关键歌曲为重点，分析了黑人是如何调动爱情、背叛、痛苦和恢复力的情感记录，使后殖民时期布基纳法索国家的失败变得清晰。他的歌词揭露了独立后的幻灭，新殖民主义剥削的持续，以及腐败、私有化和经济绝望所导致的道德和社会破裂。通过以西非法语音乐中一个未被充分研究的人物为中心，本研究填补了非洲音乐文化学术的一个关键空白，并突出了布基纳法索人的声音在政治生活理论化中的重要性。
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Pub Date : 2026-02-26DOI: 10.1177/09571558261423868
Amanda Tavares
This article analyses Dreams Have No Titles (2022), a multidisciplinary and immersive installation by UK-based, French-Algerian artist Zineb Sedira. Commissioned for the French Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale, the project takes inspiration from the anticolonial and self-determining spirit of early post-independent Algeria, as well as activist films co-produced in the 1960s, 70s and 80s between Algeria, France and Italy. Following the multidirectional character of Sedira's work, this article first offers an overview of the installation and the many cultural references it contains. It then looks at the artist's mobilisation of personal narratives of migration and diaspora in relation to previous forms of cultural and political struggle, highlighting the cross-temporal and transnational effects of colonialism, but also many forms of resistance to it. It also explains how Dreams Have No Titles amplifies learnings from internationalist filmmaking in Algeria, especially through the prisms of relationality, solidarity and imagined possibility. Finally, the article discusses how Dreams Have No Titles reactivates utopias and political communities through strategies of mise en abyme, audience engagement, multi-platform referencing and do-it-yourself techniques, opening up paths for the production and transmission of transnational, cross-generational sociopolitical knowledge.
本文分析了来自英国的法裔阿尔及利亚艺术家Zineb Sedira的作品《Dreams Have No Titles》（2022），这是一件多学科的沉浸式装置作品。该项目受第59届威尼斯双年展法国馆委托，灵感来自阿尔及利亚独立后早期的反殖民和自决精神，以及阿尔及利亚、法国和意大利在20世纪60年代、70年代和80年代联合制作的激进主义电影。鉴于Sedira作品的多向性，本文首先概述了该装置及其包含的许多文化参考。然后，它着眼于艺术家对移民和散居的个人叙述的动员，与以前的文化和政治斗争形式有关，突出了殖民主义的跨时间和跨国影响，以及对它的多种形式的抵抗。影片还解释了《梦无标题》如何通过关系、团结和想象的可能性等角度，放大了阿尔及利亚国际主义电影制作的经验。最后，本文讨论了《梦无标题》如何通过“就地解决”、观众参与、多平台参考和自己动手技术等策略，重新激活乌托邦和政治社区，为跨国、跨代的社会政治知识的生产和传播开辟了道路。
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Pub Date : 2026-02-23DOI: 10.1177/09571558251406511
Karim Hammou
Résumé Cet article analyse les frontières raciales à l’œuvre dans l’industrie française du disque dans les années 1970, au moyen d’une analyse systématique du principal titre de presse professionnelle du secteur, Show Magazine , et d’une étude de cas portant sur le destin inattendu du morceau « Soul Makossa » de Manu Dibango publié 1973. Il propose de décrire cette industrie comme un agencement marchand racialisé, et démontre comment l’exploitation ségréguée des disques de musiciens africains en France est tributaire d’un dispositif économique asymétrique hérité de l’époque coloniale, la « Zone franc », mais aussi d’une culture de production marquée par la blanchité et reléguant l’Afrique dans un angle-mort de l’infrastructure informationnelle du secteur.
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Pub Date : 2026-02-16DOI: 10.1177/09571558261421396
Claire Gorrara
This article examines the wartime writing of French resister and historian Edith Thomas. It argues that Thomas's collection of fictional clandestine short stories, Contes d’Auxois (1943), provides an early social history of the French Resistance. It interprets such wartime writing as offering contemporary insights into women's contributions to the Resistance, key aspects of which would be taken up by later generations of historians. The article then examines how Thomas's personal experiences of the Resistance impacted her post-war work as a social and cultural historian. It reads her choice to write women back into history as one inflected by her resistance activism. The article ends by reading Thomas's Les Pétroleuses (1963) as a collective feminist biography that creates transhistorical connections between the ‘incendiary women’ of the Paris Commune and women's wartime resistance. In so doing, Thomas coopts the maligned women communards of 1870 to a Republican tradition of popular revolt in an act of feminist recuperation and celebration across centuries.
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Pub Date : 2026-02-09DOI: 10.1177/09571558261417900
John Armitage
The first section of this article offers a conceptual and historical narrative of luxury in eighteenth-century France, moving to an introduction to the main thrust of the eighteenth-century French philosophers of luxury Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jean-François de Saint-Lambert's endeavor to enhance the understanding of luxury. However, in the second section, attention is paid to the central theme of what I call “a moment of luxury” in eighteenth-century France, the import of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger's work on the concept of a “moment of vision,” and, in particular, my own original recasting of this experience of insight into people's situation as a “moment of luxurious vision.” In the third and final substantial section, as the article's title suggests, the concept of luxury is paramount in my specific contribution, which is less a historical than a philosophical interpretation of Jean-Honoré Fragonard's 1767–1768 famous painting, The Swing , with an emphasis on the artwork as a representation of a moment of luxurious vision. A conclusion is reserved for an evaluation of this philosophical work and my own assessment of its potential impact.
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Pub Date : 2026-02-09DOI: 10.1177/09571558261418002
Melissa Barchi Panek
This article examines how Julia Ducournau's Titane (2021) reconfigures the cultural coding of the automobile in French cinema by merging it with female corporeality to construct what I term automachinic femininity . Challenging the long-standing masculinized framing of both cars and women as objects of spectacle, the article argues that Titane fuses flesh and metal through a grotesque yet generative aesthetic. Through textual and semiotic analysis, the study situates the film within a lineage of French cinema while emphasizing its radical transgression. Central to this analysis is the figure of the Metallic Madonna, a mythic cyborg hybrid that reworks Marian iconography through machinic pregnancy and birth. By destabilizing binaries such as masculine/feminine and organic/mechanical, Titane positions the female body as a site of posthuman transformation rather than passive display. The article concludes that Ducournau's film offers a feminist posthuman framework for rethinking gender, technology, and embodiment in contemporary cinema today globally.
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Pub Date : 2025-12-30DOI: 10.1177/09571558251406518
Ruth Cruickshank
The intersection of food insecurity in occupied France with other risk factors and comorbidities thought to lead to eating disorders has been obscured. So have the profound emotional and functional impacts which occur right across the spectrum of these extremely serious psychiatric conditions, including the most prevalent, yet little-known diagnosis: other specific feeding or eating disorder (OSFED). This article challenges this nexus of neglect. It reveals how historians occlude key psychological impacts of semi-starvation in Vichy France and into the Trente Glorieuses . In the 1944–1945 ‘Minnesota Starvation Experiment’ and recent scientific research, it identifies epistemic injustice whereby testimony of lived experiences, the potential for making sense of them and access to knowledge are prejudicially undermined. Re-reading scientific literature fills some hermeneutic gaps, but Elsa Triolet's literary fiction provides a compelling representation of OSFED and powerfully communicates the impacts of the clinically significant distress or impairment experienced in all eating disorders. Entangling these critical re-readings demonstrates the Humanities’ potential for setting new agendas and for challenging narratives undermining understanding of all eating disorders.
{"title":"Challenging the enduring epistemic injustice of eating disorders: Critically re-reading Occupation food insecurity in the Trente Glorieuses with Elsa Triolet and the 1944–1945 ‘Minnesota Starvation Experiment’","authors":"Ruth Cruickshank","doi":"10.1177/09571558251406518","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558251406518","url":null,"abstract":"The intersection of food insecurity in occupied France with other risk factors and comorbidities thought to lead to eating disorders has been obscured. So have the profound emotional and functional impacts which occur right across the spectrum of these extremely serious psychiatric conditions, including the most prevalent, yet little-known diagnosis: other specific feeding or eating disorder (OSFED). This article challenges this nexus of neglect. It reveals how historians occlude key psychological impacts of semi-starvation in Vichy France and into the <jats:italic toggle=\"yes\">Trente Glorieuses</jats:italic> . In the 1944–1945 ‘Minnesota Starvation Experiment’ and recent scientific research, it identifies epistemic injustice whereby testimony of lived experiences, the potential for making sense of them and access to knowledge are prejudicially undermined. Re-reading scientific literature fills some hermeneutic gaps, but Elsa Triolet's literary fiction provides a compelling representation of OSFED and powerfully communicates the impacts of the clinically significant distress or impairment experienced in all eating disorders. Entangling these critical re-readings demonstrates the Humanities’ potential for setting new agendas and for challenging narratives undermining understanding of all eating disorders.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2025-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145893708","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-12-29DOI: 10.1177/09571558251406513
Bruno Galmar
This article explores how Iverson's APL (A Programming Language), a distinctive programming language, was integrated into Oulipo's Atlas de littérature potentielle by Paul Braffort (1923–2018), the group's AI and programming expert. For Braffort, APL was more than an efficient tool for algorithmic text processing and text generation; it served as a pedagogical “tool of thought” that enabled creative writers to abstract and formalize their ideas about constrained writing. We examine Braffort's technical and aesthetic rationale for adopting APL over more common programming languages. By uniting science (computer science in a broad sense) and humanities (literature) cultures, Braffort embodied a new figure in French experimental literature of the 1970s–1980s: the writer–mathematician–programmer, updating the previous figure in the Oulipo of the writer–mathematician epitomized by Queneau. In today's era of generative AI with natural-language interfaces, his forward-looking vision of modeling literary ideas in APL as a formal language remains both relevant and original. At present, with free access to modern APL tooling and abundant resources, creative writers can more readily than in 1981 experience APL as a powerful “intellectual tool”, a tool that has empowered creative artists beyond the field of literature. Braffort's work with APL in the Atlas stands as a milestone in French computational literature, characterized by the crossing of constrained writing, programming, and the formalizing spirit of early AI.
本文探讨了Iverson的APL（一种独特的编程语言）是如何被该组织的人工智能和编程专家Paul brford（1923-2018）整合到Oulipo的Atlas de litt自然潜能》中。对于brafford来说，APL不仅仅是算法文本处理和文本生成的有效工具；它作为一种教学“思想工具”，使有创造力的作家能够抽象和形式化他们关于约束写作的想法。我们将研究brafford在更常见的编程语言之上采用APL的技术和美学原理。通过将科学（广义上的计算机科学）和人文（文学）文化结合起来，布拉福特体现了20世纪70年代至80年代法国实验文学中的一个新形象：作家-数学家-程序员，更新了以格诺为代表的作家-数学家的奥利波形象。在当今以自然语言界面生成人工智能的时代，他将APL中的文学思想建模为形式语言的前瞻性愿景仍然具有相关性和原创性。目前，随着现代APL工具的免费使用和丰富的资源，有创造力的作家可以比1981年更容易地体验到APL作为一种强大的“智力工具”，一种使有创造力的艺术家超越文学领域的工具。brafford在Atlas中使用APL的工作是法国计算文学的一个里程碑，其特点是将约束写作、编程和早期人工智能的形式化精神结合在一起。
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Pub Date : 2025-12-22DOI: 10.1177/09571558251406520
Maxime Cervulle, Sarah Lécossais
This article examines how racial categories shape casting practices in the French film and television industry. Drawing on interviews with 24 casting directors and 51 actors and actresses perceived as non-white, it reveals a highly stratified employment landscape, where ethnoracial stereotypes severely restrict access to significant roles. Although explicit racial categorization is generally prohibited in France, the entertainment industry benefits from specific exemptions that allow casting professionals to openly rely on ethnoracial criteria. Non-white performers describe casting as a degrading, exclusionary process, as they are frequently compelled to embody caricatured roles, adopt fake accents or subjected to demeaning comments about their appearance. Despite formal training and proven talent, they are often confined to minor parts, due to a racialized structure of artistic labor.
{"title":"Casting out: The racial division of acting labor in French film and television","authors":"Maxime Cervulle, Sarah Lécossais","doi":"10.1177/09571558251406520","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558251406520","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines how racial categories shape casting practices in the French film and television industry. Drawing on interviews with 24 casting directors and 51 actors and actresses perceived as non-white, it reveals a highly stratified employment landscape, where ethnoracial stereotypes severely restrict access to significant roles. Although explicit racial categorization is generally prohibited in France, the entertainment industry benefits from specific exemptions that allow casting professionals to openly rely on ethnoracial criteria. Non-white performers describe casting as a degrading, exclusionary process, as they are frequently compelled to embody caricatured roles, adopt fake accents or subjected to demeaning comments about their appearance. Despite formal training and proven talent, they are often confined to minor parts, due to a racialized structure of artistic labor.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"29 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2025-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145808072","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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