French Cultural Studies

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.

My essay focuses on the figure of the phantom in the work of phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the ethnographer Michel Leiris. I study their evocation of gestures as a site of communication and argue that within the colonial situation all communication—including the gestural—is ghosted by histories and cultural understandings that remain opaque.

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.

Le roller derby est une discipline sportive américaine, apparue en France en 2009 sous une forme carnavalesque. L’anti-conformisme alors affiché participait à attribuer à ce sport un caractère permissif : tout semblait y être permis. Dix ans plus tard, mon enquête sociologique menée auprès d’équipes s’est confrontée à l’euphémisation des marqueurs subversifs et à l’adoption des codes du milieu sportif fédéral. Afin de comprendre cette normalisation sportive, la mobilisation du concept de « scène » de Erving Goffman m’a permis de dissocier ce qui appartient à l’espace public, le front stage, dans lequel les équipes défendent la valeur sportive du derby, des coulisses, le back stage, où la défense de l’inclusif encourage la préservation de l’ancrage permissif disparu de la scène sportive.

The purpose of this article is to examine French literary and philosophical cultural transfers to South Vietnam through the journal Bách Khoa. This study is also part of a postcolonial perspective in that many forms of knowledge resulted from contact between France and Vietnam, a formerly colonized country ; these forms of knowledges are currently considered the intellectual heritage from the West It would thus be useful to take into account the process of imports and interpretations of Western knowledge to highlight the construction of the South Vietnamese intellectual field, which is based on an interweaving of different cultures in the aftermath of French decolonization. We will consider the journal Bách Khoa as a vector of literary and philosophical cultural transfers and the collaborating authors as mediators of French ideas in South Vietnam.