A sense of place: Special number in honour of Nicholas Hewitt

Nicholas Hewitt was Managing Editor of French Cultural Studies (FCS) from 2006 until his death in March 2019. His passing came as a particular loss to the academic community who look to this journal to express a perspective that sets French studies in a broad cultural context and encourages deeper exploration of that environment. Plans were made for a commemorative event but had to be set aside with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020. This special number of the journal has been composed in his honour and takes up some of the themes that were close to his heart, most notably his insights into the sense of place in cultural experience.

Nick Hewitt's achievements were widely recognised in the months after his death and I was honoured to summarise them for an obituary in French Studies, which I will not reprise here (Kelly, 2019). For me, he was not only an inspiring scholar but also a longstanding friend, with whom I was fortunate to share many collaborations. I first met him in 1973 at the University of Warwick, where he had just begun lecturing and where I had just finished my postgraduate studentship. He was completing his doctorate on Malraux for the University of Hull, which was in my home town, though our paths had not crossed there. Warwick was one of the places we had in common, as he taught there for 15 years and I frequently returned to my alma mater. During the early 1980s, we developed a European programme of cooperation linking Warwick, the University of Caen and University College Dublin, where I was then teaching. This allowed us to develop a programme of workshops on modern French literature with Anne Chevalier and Alain Goulet from Caen, and to make several visits to each other's institutions. Conviviality was always a feature of European meetings, and Nick had a gift for facilitating lively intellectual exchanges in convivial settings.

During the 1980s, we were among the increasing number of scholars who worked for a broader view of French studies that embraced the whole of France's cultural life in its social and historical context. A key moment in crystallising this movement was the conference Nick organised at Warwick in May 1987 on the theme of ‘The Culture of Reconstruction’, which examined the literature, thought and cinema of France, Italy and German in the post-war years 1945–1950 (Hewitt, 1989). The conference was sponsored by the European Humanities Research Centre at Warwick and gave rise to intense discussions about how this kind of theme could be encouraged within the confines of the traditional literary focus of languages departments in the English-speaking world. It led to further exchanges between those who had presented papers on French topics, including Nick, myself, Brian Rigby, Colin Nettelbeck and Pierre Sorlin. One outcome was a follow-up conference at the Maison française d’Oxford in February 1989 on ‘France and the Mass Media’, led by Nick and Brian and sponsored by the same Warwick Centre (Rigby and Hewitt, 1991). Another outcome was the development of proposals for a new journal that would publish work across the entire field of French culture, which eventually became French Cultural Studies.

This was a period of great expansion in language studies in the English-speaking world and the corresponding emergence of associations and journals reflecting different geographical, thematic and theoretical identities. The diversity of initiatives was particularly visible in French, as then the largest of the modern languages groupings in the British Isles, North America and Australasia. At the same time, significant changes were happening in France, with the development of a strong current of scholarship in cultural history, formalised in the creation of the Association pour le Développement de l’Histoire Culturelle in 1999 (Cohen et al., 2011). These movements were a sign of the great vitality in the study of languages and cultures, but also reflected deep intellectual differences and sometimes bitter antagonisms, as the proponents of French Cultural Studies were to discover.

Detailed proposals for the new journal were developed during 1988 by four scholars (Nick Hewitt, Brian Rigby, Jill Forbes and myself). They were aimed to extend the scope of studies in French culture while taking care not to accentuate the fragmentation of the discipline. The opening editorial made this plain:

…the editors of FCS have chosen not to launch a new association which would compound the social fragmentation, and not to declare a new ideological or methodological orthodoxy which would compound the cognitive fragmentation. (Kelly, 1990)

Detailed proposals were presented in turn to the two leading University Presses in the UK, Oxford and Cambridge. Initially, the editorial staff were very encouraging, but in both cases the proposals were ultimately rejected by the overseeing academic boards. While we were not privy to the detailed discussions, it was clear that strong voices were raised in defence of the traditional literary vocation of academic departments who might feel undermined by the new approaches. Two or three years later, the climate had changed and Oxford University Press approached Jill Forbes and myself to edit a book introducing FCS (Forbes and Kelly, 1995). This was followed by companion volumes for German, Spanish, Italian and Russian cultural studies, edited by leading scholars each with a distinctive approach. Soon afterwards, Cambridge University Press asked Nick to edit a Companion to Modern French Culture, to which Jill and I contributed along with an array of distinguished international scholars (Hewitt, 2003). This was also followed by similar volumes for German, Spanish, Italian and Russian cultural studies.

In the event, the proposals for a journal found favour with a small commercial publisher, Alpha Academic. They already published the Journal of European Studies, whose founding Editor, John Flower, was an early contributor to FCS (Flower, 1991), and is a contributor to this special number. Alpha Academic was a family firm run by the late Richard Sadler, and his son Michael, who provided a nurturing environment for the new journal, in which Brian Rigby took the role of Managing Editor. The first issue appeared in February 1990. A dozen years later, the Sadler family sold this and other journals to SAGE, our current publishers.

In some respects, FCS has been a virtual community. The earliest issues were commissioned from contributors who were known to the editorial group, or to the wider Advisory Board. Very rapidly the journal established its reputation and received a growing number of unsolicited manuscripts and proposals for special numbers. The lack of a dedicated association or conference did not prevent the editors and contributors from meeting at conferences and other events. Nick informally took the leading role in developing networks of affinity and conviviality across the world. He encouraged and organized conferences, workshops and conference panels in the UK, France and the US. He developed relationships with contributors, advisors and supporters around the world. When Brian Rigby retired in 2006, Nick took over as Managing Editor and brought his own momentum to introduce new ideas and to extend the membership of the Editorial Board. For the 25th anniversary of the journal, he organized a memorable conference in Marseille in May 2013, which resulted in a double issue of the journal. The choice of Marseille gave a very clear sense of place to the event, echoed in the book on which Nick was working and which was published posthumously (Hewitt, 2019). The Anniversary special issue contained a rich array of scholarship across the field as well as reflections by Nick and myself on the 25 years of development (Hewitt, 2014; Kelly, 2014). Nick noted the conspicuous success of the journal over that period:

the journal has been remarkably successful, publishing articles on a range of topics which have proved extremely popular and from academics from a surprisingly rich geographical spread: the present collection has authors from the anglophone world – Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States – from France and from Brazil, while over the years the journal has played host to academics from most countries where French culture is taught and studied at university level. (Hewitt, 2014: 251)

And with characteristic brio, he concluded that:

it is not enough to simply reflect and cater for this wide area of academic interest in French cultural studies, it is important to explore and articulate the agenda for the future. This is what the journal was invented to do and this is its dual task for the next 25 years. (Hewitt, 2014: 251)

Regrettably, Nick had only a limited time left to pursue the agenda of reinvention and it is now the task of his successors in the Editorial Board of the journal. The pace of social, political and cultural change over the last three years has continued to accelerate and the task of finding new themes and new perspectives may well be more challenging than back in the 1980s. The present special number does not seek to address that task explicitly but several of the articles point to new areas of study and new ways of thinking about them.

Nick had a compendious knowledge of French culture in the twentieth century and pioneered the study of urban cultures, notably in Montmartre and Marseille. He had a strong sense of place, expressed in the cultural patterns characteristic of an area and in the interactions it facilitates. This is a particular focus of the articles collected here.

Jacqueline Dutton opens the number with reflections on French influences on Australian winemakers’ senses of place. Remembering Nick's warm links with Australia and his abiding taste for wine, she focuses on the transnational potentialities and cultural transferability of the notion of terroir in reflecting on French influences on Australian winemakers’ sense of place. She offers conclusions drawn from the particular case of French-Australian cultural transfers to demonstrate key features of the current state of terroir's globalisation.

Following a liquid theme, Edward Welch starts from Nick Hewitt's accounts of Montmartre and Marseille, which show how places on margins and frontiers channel flows of different sorts running across city, nation and world. He draws on work by Jean Rolin, Agnès Varda and the photography project France(s) territoire liquide, situating them in relation to conceptions of French territory which informed the work of post-war spatial planners, whose substantial material and infrastructural legacies reflected their own sense of territory as flux, flow and liquid force.

Wendy Michallat reflects on the place of Paris in modern languages education in the interwar period, spurred by the Leathes Report of 1916 which promoted the internationalisation of language study. She shows how the provision of safe, secure and affordable accommodation for women students was an effective counter to alarmist reports urging them to stay at home. Unfortunately, the Cité universitaire project in Paris, launched in the 1920s, had an interpretation of the ‘internationalisation’ of study that conflicted with the Leathes aspiration to an ‘immersion’ experience for students, and its completion was delayed by a decade. She shows too how feminist educators campaigned to promote international learning and teaching opportunities for women scholars.

Jeremy Lane begins with the 2009 documentary, La Dépossession, by Jean-Robert Viallet, in which the Paris suburb of La Défense is depicted as an anti-city. He elaborates this trope by showing how a range of recent novels and feature films similarly lament the destructive effects of globalised finance on French society, polity and nation. He argues that there are inherent paradoxes, ironies and contradictions, especially since the historic centre of Paris is itself the product of an earlier process of violent restructuring and dispossession driven by powerful financial forces and undertaken at the behest of a highly conservative political regime. He suggests that it is ironic that Haussmann's cityscape should now be presented as a symbol of stable, traditional, if now embattled, French national identity, and that la Défense should perhaps be imagined less as an anti-city than as a location deeply embedded in the complexities, contradictions and conflicts of French history.

Recalling that Nick Hewitt wrote wonderfully well about the significance of different places in French history and culture, and in our lives, Diana Holmes examines Colette as a chronicler of places, from the famous childhood house and garden in Burgundy, to Brittany, Provence and Paris. She suggests as her writing moves across regions and houses, home recurs as a crucial place in the emotional landscape of a human life. She shows that it is a vital and recurring theme in the work of Colette's lesser-known female contemporaries, since home as a place has particular practical and emotional meanings for women.

Emma Wilson also focuses on Colette, the house she bought outside Saint-Tropez in 1925, and moments and feelings from her time in that place. Inspired by Nick Hewitt's approach, especially his insight into ‘the unique hold exerted by Marseille on the nation's imagination’, she traces, through Colette, imaginative modes of inhabiting a space, seeing it as a psychic as much as material location, a repository for feelings. She shows how Colette invests a place with meaning through writing, so that it becomes an imaginary space, intimate, sensory and consciously feminine. Her house in Saint-Tropez offers a space of speculation and exploratory relations, in which to think too about the lived and dreamed realities of other female lives.

Turning to a less well-known writer, John Flower examines the fiction of Anne-Claire Decorvet, whose work has been recognized in Switzerland by numerous prizes. With the exception of her biographical novel, Un lieu sans raison, inspired by the life of Marguerite Sirvins, it is set predominantly in and around Geneva, and explores family and social instability, insanity and psychiatric care in the twentieth century. He explores some of the distinctive and characteristic features of her writing with a view to introducing her work to new readers.

Ruth Cruickshank takes a close look at the latest novel by Michel Houellebecq, Anéantir (2022). Placed in the context of scandals surrounding his other novels, it is described as strategically losing its political and other plots to focus on the death of its protagonist. However, this does not dispense with questions raised by representations of race, by colonial and postcolonial exploitation; and by the elision of differential impacts of climate change. She recognises that fiction is always already a form of necropolitics (textual decisions of life and death) and asks whether Houellebecq intends any kind of self-reflexive ‘ecocritique’ or whether he simply ignores the global scandal of human contributions to climate change.

Martin O'Shaughnessy concludes the special number by examining the work of Sylvain George, who is known for a series of poetic, experimental documentaries about migrants and refugees around Calais and his two ‘city symphonies’, Vers Madrid (The Burning Bright) (2012) and Paris est une fête (2018). He suggests that the principal theoretical influence on George's cinema is the work of Walter Benjamin, and shows how certain of Benjamin's concepts can help to understand George's films as they seek productive alignments and collisions between contemporary mobilisations and the history embedded in urban spaces. But he also argues that, even as they point towards a renewal of fundamental European political traditions, the films show that a politics no longer limited by national belonging remains to be found.

These articles explore the complex relationship between culture, the places where it is produced, the places it represents and the feelings and attitudes provoked. Attention to the sense of place that emerges can enhance our understanding of cultural experiences, especially in written and visual media. It can expand the awareness and the imagination of readers and audiences. It can provide a perspective through which to reflect on our own situatedness and the sense of self we derive from the places we occupy. And ultimately it may provide an impetus to care for the space in which we live, whether at the level of our home, our city or our planet. Several of the contributors explicitly recognise the importance of Nick Hewitt's inspiring work on urban spaces like Montmartre and Marseille. It will be a lasting legacy that he opened up the exploration of a sense of place as an enduring and productive perspective on ourselves and the world we live in.