French Cultural Studies

While there has been relatively little serious analysis of colonial postcards, Malek Alloula’s influential book Le Harem colonial put forward a reading of such postcards from the early 1900s as perpetuating a harem fantasy through which French male colonists viewed North Africa. This article analyses a selection of postcards of women from France’s Indochinese colonies at the same period, and suggests that Alloula’s thesis does not fit them in a comparable way. The Indochinese postcards borrow frames of reference from pre-existing pictorial styles, taken sometimes from the harem but also from chinoiserie and contemporary European photographic portraiture; rather than portraying a single vision of the ‘Other’ they oscillate between showing the Indochinese woman as ‘same’ and ‘different’. And these images appear to have been addressed primarily to a female collector, suggesting an intended reading rather removed from Alloula’s vision of colonial postcards as pornography.

This article deals with French travel texts concerned with China and published in the mid-twentieth century, at a moment when the PRC was opening up to the West and was the object of a proliferation of narratives produced by French ideological tourists bent on celebrating the merits of the Maoist regime. It positions the authors of the texts in question, René Étiemble and Jules Roy, not as typical voyageurs idéologiques but rather as travellers driven by a desire to extract from China a form of sustenance that is finally withheld, and examines the effect on their travellers’ tales of the PRC’s refusal of various sorts of gratification. More broadly, it contributes to investigations of the particular variant of culture-contact that has obtained between France and China in the twentieth century and after.

Maryse Condé’s ironic treatment of stereotypes is a major feature of her novels. It has been much discussed in relation to plot and characterization; this article focuses instead on the small-scale discursive structures of Traversée de la mangrove, analysing them via Barthes’s concept of semiological codes and rules. Traversée de la mangrove transgresses the ‘rules’ of literary style through deliberately inelegant digressive sentences and paragraphs that disorientate the reader with a mass of irrelevant detail. This works as an ironic deflation of cultural and literary stereotypes (e.g., exoticism), and makes it impossible to construct the hierarchy of meanings that underlies Barthes’s definition of the ‘texte lisible’, while at the same time retaining a commitment to realism that disqualifies them as a ‘texte scriptible’.

Interweaving Patrick Chamoiseau and René Ménil’s representations of the city of Fort-de-France, Martinique, with notes and photographs from my personal peregrinations in the city, I show that the urban space, like a resisting text, cannot be seized, fixed, and ultimately read by the alien walker. It is precisely through the polyrhythmic movements of the urban dwellers, which Chamoiseau calls ‘djobeurs’, that the city resists and escapes the grid and other colonialist marks imposed by Metropolitan France on the cityscape. These perambulations, I argue, create an ‘oralcity’ contrasting with the city written by colonialism.

I complement Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre’s theorizing of the city by Frantz Fanon and Jamaica Kincaid’s postcolonial texts, which help articulate gendered and racialized body constructions and positioning within the space of the postcolonial city.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, France has attempted to deal with both the ‘syndrome de Vichy’ (Rousso, 1987) and the ‘syndrome de l’Algérie’ (Horne, 2001) so as to reconcile differences between official historio-graphy, individual/group memories and collective memory. This paper focuses on selected monuments (such as the December 2002 French memorial to the Algerian war), commemorations (such as the September 2001 Day of National Homage to the Harkis) and especially Jacques Chirac’s presidential speeches (since 1995) with a view to analysing how these official verbal and symbolic measures have endeavoured to foster not only national reconciliation but also the historicisation of the Vichy years and the Algerian war in general and that of the plight of the Harkis in particular.

The second part of Jean-Luc Godard’s film, Éloge de l’amour (2001) concerns a Resistance couple named Samuel, who had taken their Resistance name Bayard after the war. The couple sells the film rights to their story to the American director Steven Spielberg. A leitmotif of Éloge de l’amour is that one thinks of something by thinking of something else. This essay examines Éloge de l’amour by thinking of a heroic Resistance couple whose prewar name was Samuel, who took their Resistance name Aubrac after the war, and who sold the film rights to their story to a prominent French director, Claude Berri, whose Lucie Aubrac was released in 1997. Godard, a man with his own feelings of guilt about the heroic world of the Resistance he had never entered, suggests that Americans need the historical memories of others to survive - especially memories of resistance. Éloge de l’amour is Godard’s own act of resistance to the imperial aggression he sees himself confronting today in the form of Hollywoodization. Beginning with an examination of the complex relationship of history, memory and the hero raised by the release of Lucie Aubrac, the essay moves to an analysis of the Aubracs’ interactions with American institutions of power during and after the war. Viewed through this prism, the United States’ relationship to the experience of resistance and resisters is more imbricated than the troubled story Godard has Spielberg buy from the Bayards would suggest. The paper concludes with the transmission of memory to the generation coming of age with Éloge de l’amour in 2001, that of resisters’ grand-children, represented in the film by the Bayards’ granddaughter and for the Aubracs by the intended audience of Lucie Aubrac’s La Résistance expliquée à mes petits-enfants (2000).