Pub Date : 2023-07-10DOI: 10.1177/09571558231184165
P. Lyons
Robert Linhart's L’Établi recounts the author's experience of ‘établissement’ as a young Maoist militant in the months immediately following May ‘68. Ten years after leaving the École normale supérieure to work and politically organize at the Citroën automobile factory in Choisy, Linhart reflects on his experiences on the assembly line, and his attempts to organize an ultimately unsuccessful wildcat strike from within the factory. This article revisits L'Établi alongside Linhart's littlestudied critical writings on racism, imperialism, and capitalist production in order to foreground two interwoven, yet under-appreciated facets of the work, and Linhart's corpus more broadly: first, Linhart's critique of a dense racial and colonial logic which undergirded the division of labor and maintenance of orderly production in the factory despite the purported demise of the French Empire. And second, the his innovation as not just a political memoirist, but as an inventive literary strategist. To this end, this article focuses on the surprising movements of poetic effervescence which appear throughout L'Établi, which reveal themselves to be thoroughly interwoven with Linhart's anti-imperial, anti-capitalist project.
{"title":"'C’est comme ça qu’on fabrique des automobiles': Race, work, and colonial afterlives in Robert Linhart's L’Établi","authors":"P. Lyons","doi":"10.1177/09571558231184165","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558231184165","url":null,"abstract":"Robert Linhart's L’Établi recounts the author's experience of ‘établissement’ as a young Maoist militant in the months immediately following May ‘68. Ten years after leaving the École normale supérieure to work and politically organize at the Citroën automobile factory in Choisy, Linhart reflects on his experiences on the assembly line, and his attempts to organize an ultimately unsuccessful wildcat strike from within the factory. This article revisits L'Établi alongside Linhart's littlestudied critical writings on racism, imperialism, and capitalist production in order to foreground two interwoven, yet under-appreciated facets of the work, and Linhart's corpus more broadly: first, Linhart's critique of a dense racial and colonial logic which undergirded the division of labor and maintenance of orderly production in the factory despite the purported demise of the French Empire. And second, the his innovation as not just a political memoirist, but as an inventive literary strategist. To this end, this article focuses on the surprising movements of poetic effervescence which appear throughout L'Établi, which reveal themselves to be thoroughly interwoven with Linhart's anti-imperial, anti-capitalist project.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-07-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42701023","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 : 2023-07-06DOI: 10.1177/09571558221135023
Jing Chen, D. Ducard
Résumé Comment et pourquoi le philosophe Henri Maldiney a puisé dans les textes de la tradition esthétique chinoise issue de la philosophie du Daoïsme et du Chan dans son approche phénoménologique de l’art. En quoi les ouvrages de l’écrivain et essayiste François Cheng, traducteur et médiateur, de par sa double culture, ont constitué pour lui une ressource textuelle et une source de réflexion. Notre article place ainsi le premier dans les pas du second pour montrer d’une part la mise en œuvre, par des opérations de citation, paraphrase, reformulation et corrélation, d’une lecture active et interprétative, d’autre part pour mettre en évidence le rapprochement effectué entre les deux conceptions théoriques. Au final il en ressort un éclairage mutuel des catégories de la pensée chinoise et des concepts phénoménologiques, qui renouvelle la compréhension des unes comme des autres.
{"title":"Henri Maldiney dans les pas de François Cheng. La tradition de l’esthétique chinois et la phénoménologie de l’art","authors":"Jing Chen, D. Ducard","doi":"10.1177/09571558221135023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558221135023","url":null,"abstract":"Résumé Comment et pourquoi le philosophe Henri Maldiney a puisé dans les textes de la tradition esthétique chinoise issue de la philosophie du Daoïsme et du Chan dans son approche phénoménologique de l’art. En quoi les ouvrages de l’écrivain et essayiste François Cheng, traducteur et médiateur, de par sa double culture, ont constitué pour lui une ressource textuelle et une source de réflexion. Notre article place ainsi le premier dans les pas du second pour montrer d’une part la mise en œuvre, par des opérations de citation, paraphrase, reformulation et corrélation, d’une lecture active et interprétative, d’autre part pour mettre en évidence le rapprochement effectué entre les deux conceptions théoriques. Au final il en ressort un éclairage mutuel des catégories de la pensée chinoise et des concepts phénoménologiques, qui renouvelle la compréhension des unes comme des autres.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41839864","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 : 2023-07-05DOI: 10.1177/09571558231186110
S. Dawes
This article introduces the special issue ‘« Islamogauchisme » ? Moral Panics, Culture Wars and the Threat to Academic Freedom’. It begins by outlining the polemic in 2020, whereby the government accused universities of being overrun by so-called ‘Islamogauchistes’, placing this moral panic within the wider French context of ideological redefinitions of laïcité and debates on the compatibility of Islam with the universalism of a secular republic, as well as of neoliberal reforms and authoritarian crackdowns on public protest. The article then explores the history and fallacy of the concept and associated government claims, arguing that the term is best understood as an empty signifier, an umbrella term under which almost anything vaguely Muslim or left-wing could be covered, before moving on to critique the function of this kind of discourse, arguing that as well as continuing the Islamophobic scapegoating of minorities, it serves to ‘other’ the left-wing opposition and normalise the far-right while the neoliberal centre itself becomes increasingly illiberal and authoritarian. Finally, the text will place this very French polemic in the wider global context, considering it in terms of the wider culture wars that we are witnessing around the world while also focusing on what is specific to the French case – namely, a particularly republican form of racism that supplements the neoilliberalisation of the state. The introduction concludes with a summary of the contributions to the issue from Philippe Marlière, Reza Zia-Ebrahimi, Michel Wieviorka, Caroline Ibos & Eric Fassin, Houria Bouteldja & Anna Younes, Farid Hafez, and Aurélien Mondon & Simon Dawes.
{"title":"« Islamogauchisme » ? The fallacy and function of an empty signifier","authors":"S. Dawes","doi":"10.1177/09571558231186110","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558231186110","url":null,"abstract":"This article introduces the special issue ‘« Islamogauchisme » ? Moral Panics, Culture Wars and the Threat to Academic Freedom’. It begins by outlining the polemic in 2020, whereby the government accused universities of being overrun by so-called ‘Islamogauchistes’, placing this moral panic within the wider French context of ideological redefinitions of laïcité and debates on the compatibility of Islam with the universalism of a secular republic, as well as of neoliberal reforms and authoritarian crackdowns on public protest. The article then explores the history and fallacy of the concept and associated government claims, arguing that the term is best understood as an empty signifier, an umbrella term under which almost anything vaguely Muslim or left-wing could be covered, before moving on to critique the function of this kind of discourse, arguing that as well as continuing the Islamophobic scapegoating of minorities, it serves to ‘other’ the left-wing opposition and normalise the far-right while the neoliberal centre itself becomes increasingly illiberal and authoritarian. Finally, the text will place this very French polemic in the wider global context, considering it in terms of the wider culture wars that we are witnessing around the world while also focusing on what is specific to the French case – namely, a particularly republican form of racism that supplements the neoilliberalisation of the state. The introduction concludes with a summary of the contributions to the issue from Philippe Marlière, Reza Zia-Ebrahimi, Michel Wieviorka, Caroline Ibos & Eric Fassin, Houria Bouteldja & Anna Younes, Farid Hafez, and Aurélien Mondon & Simon Dawes.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"227 - 233"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-07-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46930221","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 : 2023-06-26DOI: 10.1177/09571558231182077
Kathryn M Lachman
This article reads Céline Sciamma's 2021 film Petite maman in relation to the widespread isolation and loss experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic. The film offers a poignant meditation on the mother–child relationship and the vital role of wonder and imagination in mourning. Drawing on Descartes and feminist philosophers Luce Irigary and Catherine Malabou, this article seeks to understand why wonder is so critical to empathy and presence. It then traces the ways in which Sciamma introduces wonder into the film: through the circulation of stories and objects, through a heightened diegetic use of sound that draws the spectator in, through references to fairy tales, through an elastic approach to time and a blurring of spatial and generic boundaries, through the positioning of the camera at the child's eye level, through an astonishing series of doubles and mirrors that provoke curiosity rather than fear, and through a queering of the characters’ relations to one another and to their surroundings. Ultimately, Sciamma's Petite maman explores the creative and reparative potential of wonder in forging more expansive, fluid notions of self, opening up new intergenerational connections among women, and coming to terms with the loss.
{"title":"Wonder and loss in Céline Sciamma's Petite maman","authors":"Kathryn M Lachman","doi":"10.1177/09571558231182077","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558231182077","url":null,"abstract":"This article reads Céline Sciamma's 2021 film Petite maman in relation to the widespread isolation and loss experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic. The film offers a poignant meditation on the mother–child relationship and the vital role of wonder and imagination in mourning. Drawing on Descartes and feminist philosophers Luce Irigary and Catherine Malabou, this article seeks to understand why wonder is so critical to empathy and presence. It then traces the ways in which Sciamma introduces wonder into the film: through the circulation of stories and objects, through a heightened diegetic use of sound that draws the spectator in, through references to fairy tales, through an elastic approach to time and a blurring of spatial and generic boundaries, through the positioning of the camera at the child's eye level, through an astonishing series of doubles and mirrors that provoke curiosity rather than fear, and through a queering of the characters’ relations to one another and to their surroundings. Ultimately, Sciamma's Petite maman explores the creative and reparative potential of wonder in forging more expansive, fluid notions of self, opening up new intergenerational connections among women, and coming to terms with the loss.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48782052","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 : 2023-06-18DOI: 10.1177/09571558231174583
Houria Bouteldja, Anna-Esther Younes
This conversation with French-Algerian thinker and activist Houria Bouteldja focuses on her book Whites, Jews, and Us: Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love. By zooming in on contemporary debates around racism and decolonization in France, this interview focuses on questions of how gender and masculinity, sexuality, class, and race form political relationships within the modern nation-state. In particular, it asks follow-up questions to Bouteldja's epistemology in the chapter “We, Indigenous Women,” the chapter that explicitly focuses on women, gender, and sexuality. And while gender and sexuality are always also inherently public, we follow up on tracing how her book, Les indigènes de la république (the movement of which she was the spokesperson from 2005 to 2020), and she herself have been received in French public debate, including in academia, politics and the media. Within the latter power fields, we address the role of women of color intellectuals and the challenges they pose to current debates and “moral panics” through the optics of popular decolonial movements. Eventually, a conversation unfolds where an ostensible “(too) liberal academia” has been marked by contemporary accusations of “Islamogauchisme” in a wider discourse that portrays Europe as being “in crisis” and what that means for the decolonization of Europe.
{"title":"Resistance to revolutionary love: The struggle to decolonise the republic","authors":"Houria Bouteldja, Anna-Esther Younes","doi":"10.1177/09571558231174583","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558231174583","url":null,"abstract":"This conversation with French-Algerian thinker and activist Houria Bouteldja focuses on her book Whites, Jews, and Us: Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love. By zooming in on contemporary debates around racism and decolonization in France, this interview focuses on questions of how gender and masculinity, sexuality, class, and race form political relationships within the modern nation-state. In particular, it asks follow-up questions to Bouteldja's epistemology in the chapter “We, Indigenous Women,” the chapter that explicitly focuses on women, gender, and sexuality. And while gender and sexuality are always also inherently public, we follow up on tracing how her book, Les indigènes de la république (the movement of which she was the spokesperson from 2005 to 2020), and she herself have been received in French public debate, including in academia, politics and the media. Within the latter power fields, we address the role of women of color intellectuals and the challenges they pose to current debates and “moral panics” through the optics of popular decolonial movements. Eventually, a conversation unfolds where an ostensible “(too) liberal academia” has been marked by contemporary accusations of “Islamogauchisme” in a wider discourse that portrays Europe as being “in crisis” and what that means for the decolonization of Europe.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"301 - 312"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45268387","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 : 2023-06-13DOI: 10.1177/09571558231171257
Van Quang Pham
Résumé L’objectif de cet article est d’examiner les transferts culturels littéraires et philosophiques français au Sud-Vietnam par le biais de la revue Bách Khoa. Cette étude s’inscrit également dans une perspective postcoloniale en ce que bien des formes de savoirs résultent du contact de la France et du Vietnam, pays anciennement colonisé et qu’elles sont considérées à l’heure actuelle comme héritage intellectuel de l’Occident. Il serait ainsi utile de prendre en compte le processus d’importations et d’interprétations de ses savoirs pour faire ressortir la construction du champ intellectuel sud-vietnamien, qui repose sur une imbrication entre différentes cultures au lendemain de la décolonisation française. Nous tiendrons la revue Bách Khoa pour vecteur de transferts culturels littéraires et philosophiques et les auteurs collaborateurs pour médiateurs des idées françaises au Sud-Vietnam.
{"title":"Éléments de transferts culturels franco-vietnamiens dans la revue Bách Khoa de Saigon","authors":"Van Quang Pham","doi":"10.1177/09571558231171257","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558231171257","url":null,"abstract":"Résumé L’objectif de cet article est d’examiner les transferts culturels littéraires et philosophiques français au Sud-Vietnam par le biais de la revue Bách Khoa. Cette étude s’inscrit également dans une perspective postcoloniale en ce que bien des formes de savoirs résultent du contact de la France et du Vietnam, pays anciennement colonisé et qu’elles sont considérées à l’heure actuelle comme héritage intellectuel de l’Occident. Il serait ainsi utile de prendre en compte le processus d’importations et d’interprétations de ses savoirs pour faire ressortir la construction du champ intellectuel sud-vietnamien, qui repose sur une imbrication entre différentes cultures au lendemain de la décolonisation française. Nous tiendrons la revue Bách Khoa pour vecteur de transferts culturels littéraires et philosophiques et les auteurs collaborateurs pour médiateurs des idées françaises au Sud-Vietnam.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43677404","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 : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1177/09571558221134930
Erika Wicky
Defined as the individual and recurrent association of the mental image of a color with the perception of a sound, colored hearing—including the sensory perceptions named synesthesia from the 1890s onwards—had a substantial impact on both the arts and sciences during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. During this media age, chronicles, popular essays, fiction, works by art, literary, and theatrical critics, and caricatures dealing with this modality of sensory perception multiplied in the newspaper and specialized press, in fashion newspapers, and in the satirical press. Often in dialogue with each other, these articles and drawings constitute a corpus testifying of the international reception of the arts and sciences of synesthesia. Above all, the press articles reflect a keen interest in synesthesia, which emerged as a social topic that, at times, aroused exasperation or enthusiasm but most often curiosity and perplexity. Three main postures stand out in the critical reception of synesthetic or polysensorial works of art: doubts about the reality of these perceptions, which were expressed in spite of the scientific endorsement from which the synesthesia benefited; the enthusiasm stemming from the emergence of novel perceptions likely to transform one's relationship to art and the world; and, finally, the belief that these perceptions testified to a degeneration of art and humanity. The aim of this article is to observe how these questions, fundamental to the history of aesthetic appreciation, were presented to the large and diverse reading public of the fin-de-siècle press in order to highlight the conceptions and judgments associated with synesthesia as well as the endogenous links forged among sensory perception, progress, and decadence. This approach allows us to better grasp the enthusiasm and resistance generated by questioning the hierarchies that have governed the history of the senses and the arts.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-20DOI: 10.1177/09571558231165647
Reza Zia-Ebrahimi
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 French culture wars and highlight its relevance to an understanding of transnational, particularly transatlantic, opposition to antiracist and pro-Palestinian politics. The article will also place the islamogauchisme discourse within a deeper history of racialised conspiracy thinking.
{"title":"The islamogauchisme discourse, or the power to create the inner enemy","authors":"Reza Zia-Ebrahimi","doi":"10.1177/09571558231165647","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558231165647","url":null,"abstract":"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 French culture wars and highlight its relevance to an understanding of transnational, particularly transatlantic, opposition to antiracist and pro-Palestinian politics. The article will also place the islamogauchisme discourse within a deeper history of racialised conspiracy thinking.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"250 - 274"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49557309","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 : 2023-04-06DOI: 10.1177/09571558231165249
A. Duggan
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,” used as a marketing tool by French department stores like Le Bon Marché and by chocolate producers like Poulain. Scholars such as Emily Cormack, Laura Kalba, and Pearl Michel have carried out essential research on the deployment of chromos in the rise of consumer society, but this is the first study with a specific focus on chromos that feature fairy tales. In mid-century, Victor-Auguste Poulain, a French chocolatier from Blois, found the means to mass produce chocolate and sought to transform the nineteenth-century conception of chocolate from being an elite privilege or a medicinal product to being a plearurable food accessible to the middle classes. It was under the direction of Victor-Auguste's son Albert that chromos, including fairy-tale themed chromos, became an important marketing tool for the company in the 1880s. Children in particular were encouraged to purchase the mass-produced chocolate by the insertion into the packaging of fragments of tales like “The White Cat,” “The Doe in the Woods,” and “Beauty with the Golden Hair.” Each chocolate bar would include a beautiful color chromo of the tale on the recto, with the narrative fragment on the verso. This marketing strategy becomes a desire-generating machine: the desire for more story fuels the desire to purchase more chocolate, which subsequently fuels the desire for more story. In effect, as I hope to show through this case study of Poulain's use of tales by d’Aulnoy, narrative desire gets converted into consumer desire through Poulain's marketing campaign.
{"title":"Generating desire: Chocolate, chromolithographs, and Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy's fairy tales","authors":"A. Duggan","doi":"10.1177/09571558231165249","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558231165249","url":null,"abstract":"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,” used as a marketing tool by French department stores like Le Bon Marché and by chocolate producers like Poulain. Scholars such as Emily Cormack, Laura Kalba, and Pearl Michel have carried out essential research on the deployment of chromos in the rise of consumer society, but this is the first study with a specific focus on chromos that feature fairy tales. In mid-century, Victor-Auguste Poulain, a French chocolatier from Blois, found the means to mass produce chocolate and sought to transform the nineteenth-century conception of chocolate from being an elite privilege or a medicinal product to being a plearurable food accessible to the middle classes. It was under the direction of Victor-Auguste's son Albert that chromos, including fairy-tale themed chromos, became an important marketing tool for the company in the 1880s. Children in particular were encouraged to purchase the mass-produced chocolate by the insertion into the packaging of fragments of tales like “The White Cat,” “The Doe in the Woods,” and “Beauty with the Golden Hair.” Each chocolate bar would include a beautiful color chromo of the tale on the recto, with the narrative fragment on the verso. This marketing strategy becomes a desire-generating machine: the desire for more story fuels the desire to purchase more chocolate, which subsequently fuels the desire for more story. In effect, as I hope to show through this case study of Poulain's use of tales by d’Aulnoy, narrative desire gets converted into consumer desire through Poulain's marketing campaign.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-04-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47296509","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 : 2023-03-03DOI: 10.1177/09571558231156993
I. Curtis, Andrew M. Davenport
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 sensitive to the “rage and pain” of African Americans, Baldwin thought. Baldwin's words seem surprising today: Vian, a white Frenchman, published the work as a protest novel under the false identity of a fictional African American, whom he called Vernon Sullivan. The novel was a hoax, a prank. J’irai cracher sur vos tombes tends to be viewed today in North America, rightly, as an egregious instance of cultural appropriation. The present study argues, however, that the French pastiche of a Black American protest novel baited the reading public into a debate that ignored racism, colonialism, and protest. We argue to view J’irai cracher sur vos tombes and the ensuing scandal it provoked, as an historical archive that allows us to chart a certain ideological climate in France. The public reception of the novel makes abundantly clear that, on the subject of J’irai cracher, Paris wanted to talk about sex, youth morality, and the threats of American cultural hegemony—not racism. Read as an historical affaire, the scandal exposes an extended moment of collective blindness in France. When examined as an historical incident, “the J’irai cracher Affair” reads like a dramatic ironic pronouncement, as if Vian were making a joke only he and a select audience—Baldwin, for one—would understand.
在《魔鬼找工作》(1976)一书中，詹姆斯·鲍德温对鲍里斯·维安颇具争议的小说《坟墓之旅》(1946)进行了非常慷慨的评论。鲍德温认为，维安的书对非裔美国人的“愤怒和痛苦”格外敏感。鲍德温的话在今天看来令人惊讶:法国白人维安以一个虚构的非裔美国人的假身份出版了这部抗议小说，他称这个人为弗农·沙利文(Vernon Sullivan)。这部小说是一个骗局，一个恶作剧。在今天的北美，人们倾向于把“伊拉克人的坟墓”看作是文化挪用的一个令人震惊的例子。然而，本研究认为，法国模仿的美国黑人抗议小说诱使读者进入一场忽视种族主义、殖民主义和抗议的辩论。我们主张将“jirai cracher sur vos tombes”及其引发的丑闻视为一份历史档案，使我们能够描绘出法国某种意识形态的气候。公众对这部小说的接受程度充分表明，在J 'irai cracher这个主题上，帕里斯想要谈论的是性、青年道德和美国文化霸权的威胁，而不是种族主义。从历史角度来看，这一丑闻暴露了法国长期以来的集体盲目。当作为一个历史事件来审视时，“吉拉伊·克拉赫事件”读起来就像一个戏剧性的讽刺声明，仿佛维安在开玩笑，只有他和一部分精选的观众——鲍德温——能理解。
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