French Cultural Studies

This introduces the special issue on mobility across media in various areas of the Francophone world. Articles treat the notion of mobility as understood in film, literature, visual art and advertising and explore how genres as well as national traditions intersect. They explore a range of representations of mobility, such as the mobility between people, between genres, between languages, between artistic forms and between texts across historical periods. We show that the terminology regarding movement is constantly mobile itself, having undergone significant slippage in recent decades. Overall, this volume does not seek to arrest, but to add to, the understanding of the diverse modes of mobility present in the contemporary world.

In 2016, the Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée in Marseille hosted the ‘Made in Algeria: Généalogie d’un territoire’ exhibition which gathered cartographic depictions of Algeria from the earliest European encounters to modern images of an independent culture still bearing colonial remnants. The contemporary pieces, notably by Franco-Algerian artists Zineb Sedira and Katia Kameli, expose multiple layers of the past as they reformulate what had been erased by colonisation and what had been silenced by the subsequent ruptures of independence. Their images, like the artists who have migrated back and forth between Algeria and France across time, show accumulated layers of colonial memory enmeshed in contemporary images of the Algerian people and landscape. By assessing the marks still visibly mapped onto Algeria in the exhibition, this article explores how what is ‘Made in Algeria’ remains heavily marked by France.

Clandestine migration across the Mediterranean is often discussed for its agitating effects on Europe’s racial anxieties; less acknowledged is the growth of intra-African racism in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. Officials in these countries have increasingly demonised sub-Saharan Africans who arrive in the Maghreb en route to Europe, and now even black North Africans describe a climate of heightened racial tension. This article analyses the ways in which black Africans are represented in the contemporary Maghreb. Specifically, I look at print and on-line journalism, novels and films that foreground questions of race to argue that Maghrebi journalists, social media activists, authors and filmmakers are critiquing racism and exposing its neo-colonial underpinnings. Their work is calling for a disciplinary realignment in North African cultural studies that focuses the field as much on ‘Africa’ as it does on ‘North’.

This article examines the adaptation from book to film of a recent Senegalese tale of clandestine migration by boat. Abasse Ndione’s Mbëkë mi (2008) foregrounds the motivations for migration for Senegalese youth and provokes readers’ sympathy for its migrating characters. It uses a heteroglossic lexicon which is nevertheless anchored in the French language on which the author must rely in order to publish his message. Moussa Touré’s film La Pirogue, by contrast, although sponsored by agents promoting francophonie, includes French and African languages in equal measure. This article examines the ethnic, religious and linguistic differences that the film points up as it represents contemporary migration.

In contemporary films like Dheepan (Jacques Audiard, 2015) and Welcome (Philippe Lioret, 2009), effects of (post)colonialism, immigration and globalisation transform French spaces into multilingual ones, in which language use is impacted by a complex network of spheres of influence. This article offers a new approach to understanding the place of the language in French films about border-crossing in today’s Europe. It paraphrases terminology from Abdellatif Kechiche’s La Graine et le mulet to examine the films Dheepan and Welcome, in which the French language is crucial to migrants’ survival, but in temporary and conditional ways. Finally, the article analyses how French co-exists alongside other languages such as Tamil, English, and Kurdish in such films, and proposes a new term for understanding the use of language by shifting and migrating subjects: the langue de passage.

Le présent article propose d’examiner la problématique de la migration des œuvres de la littérature française vers le continent d’Asie. Il tentera d’établir l’origine de cette migration, le parcours migratoire des œuvres ainsi que les conditions de leur accueil dans les pays asiatiques notamment en Chine et au Japon. Parmi les nombreux aspects reliés au transfert des œuvres vers leurs nouveaux lectorats, le rôle de vecteur que joue la traduction sera analysé. Sera aussi mis en relief le rôle de tremplin et d’intermédiaire du Japon dans l’accomplissement du transfert des œuvres françaises. Enfin Madame Chrysanthème tout comme La Dame aux camélias sera étudiée sous l’angle de leur rencontre avec la littérature locale.

This article focuses on a specific instance of migration and mobility in French film director Julien Duvivier’s career, namely his first brief stint in Hollywood in 1938. He was invited to film The Great Waltz, an expensive costume drama, for MGM, a studio renowned for its lavish attention to mise en scène. Unlike other French directors who had spent, or would subsequently spend, time in America, Duvivier succeeded in inculcating his own particular formal and visual touches into the film, while simultaneously negotiating the tricky terrain of producer interference and suspicion of a foreigner’s working methods. Duvivier’s professional leap from one cinema ecosystem to another paved the way for his enforced migration to Hollywood in 1940, when he escaped from Occupied France to work again in the studio system. For Duvivier, Hollywood did not disable his talent, but rather enabled it, revitalising his praxis and leading him towards increasingly ambitious projects back in France.

The mobility of people and objects is a central motif in the work of contemporary artist Sophie Calle. In this article, I compare two of Calle’s exhibitions that take a particularly unusual approach to mobility. In Fantômes and Prenez soin de vous, the objects are an email and works of art and their mobility arises from their displacement. In both exhibitions, Calle obliges the spectator to look at other people looking at the artefacts, which I refer to as the ‘double look’. In this article, I analyse how this technique serves to question the notion of a unitary, individual artist behind each work of art, how it questions the parameters of spectatorship, and how it challenges understandings of intimacy in contemporary culture.

Although designed to mitigate the normalising role that advertising can have on alcohol consumption, France’s Loi Évin (1991) has unwittingly channelled advertisers into reinforcing the link between their products and escapist pursuits. Where contemporary concerns about alcohol consumption in France have themselves been influenced by global trends in public health and alcohol studies, they revolve around the adoption of perceived ‘foreign’ drinking cultures, notably an embrace of drinking as a marker of leisure time and binge-drinking. Advertising strategies have accordingly countered by accentuating both leisure, in the form of travel, and intoxication. A visual semiotic analysis of recent French advertising campaigns for spirits and beer reveals layered signification of escapist themes, all in defiance of the spirit but not the letter of the Loi Évin.