Representation of the Banlieusard in Literature, Cinema, and Performances

Representation of the Banlieusard in Literature, Cinema, and Performances

Author: Emma Chebinou

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2024-09-05

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 1666915149

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Representation of the Banlieusard in Literature, Cinema, and Performances: Francephobia explores the complex identity of the banlieusard within French society through literature, film and pop culture, such as rap music and stand-up comedy. The banlieue, known in English as the “inner city,” is home to underrepresented and marginalized descendants of North- and West- African immigrants as well as some white European immigrants or white French individuals. Established in tall housing estates located on the wider outskirts of Paris, the banlieue is a space constructed through the systemic disenfranchisement of working-class people across genders, ethnicities, and race and through associations with crime, unemployment, poverty, etc. In face of these challenges, the banlieusard(e) attempts to claim their Frenchness but finds oneself trapped by society’s negative perception. Similarly, they are also physically trapped in their space of high-rise buildings and in a social/economic sphere with preconceived beliefs making it difficult to integrate and contribute to French society. This book aims to emphasize resistance and the agency of the banlieusard(e) rather than pointing out their marginalization by society’s preconceptions. Therefore, the spatial arrangement of the projects where they live redefines, deconstructs, reconstructs and reverses the center/periphery dichotomy, in which the center becomes the banlieue and as a result, its outcast status is diminished. Through a varied selection of novels, films, rap and stand-up comedy, Emma Chebinou exposes the necessity in examining negative stigmas created by the institutional discourse and by space and gives a broader interpretation of the banlieue.


French Cultural Studies for the Twenty-First Century

French Cultural Studies for the Twenty-First Century

Author: Masha Belenky

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2017-03-30

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 1611496381

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French Cultural Studies for the Twenty-First Century brings together current scholarship on a diverse range of topics—from French postcards and Third Republic menus to Haitian literary magazines and representation of race in vaudeville theater—in order to provide methodological insight into the current practice of French cultural studies. The essays in the volume show how scholars of French studies can effectively analyze what we term “non-traditional sources” in their historical and geographical contexts. In doing so, the volume offers a compelling vision of the field today and maps out potential paradigms for future research. This bookbuilds upon previous scholarship that defined the stakes of using an interdisciplinary approach to analyze cultural objects from France and Francophone regions and aims to evaluate the current state of this complex and constantly evolving field and its current methodological practices.


Literary Slumming

Literary Slumming

Author: Eliza Jane Smith

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-08-06

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 1793621152

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Literary Slumming: Slang and Class in Nineteenth-Century France applies a sociolinguistic approach to the representation of slang in French literature and dictionaries to reveal the ways in which upper-class writers, lexicographers, literary critics, and bourgeois readers participated in a sociolinguistic concept the author refers to as “literary slumming”, or the appropriation of lower-class and criminal language and culture. Through an analysis of spoken and embodied manifestations of the anti-language of slang in the works of Eugène François Vidocq, Honoré de Balzac, Eugène Sue, Victor Hugo, the Goncourt Brothers, and Émile Zola, Literary Slumming argues that the nineteenth-century French literary discourse on slang led to the emergence of this sociolinguistic phenomenon that prioritized lower-class and criminal life and culture in a way that ultimately expanded class boundaries and increased visibility and agency for minorities within the public sphere.


Sexagon

Sexagon

Author: Mehammed Amadeus Mack

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2017-01-02

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 0823274624

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Honorable Mention, Association for Middle East Women’s Studies Honorable Mention, 2018 Arab American Book Awards (Non-Fiction) In contemporary France, particularly in the banlieues of Paris, the figure of the young, virile, hypermasculine Muslim looms large. So large, in fact, it often supersedes liberal secular society’s understanding of gender and sexuality altogether. Engaging the nexus of race, gender, nation, and sexuality, Sexagon studies the broad politicization of Franco-Arab identity in the context of French culture and its assumptions about appropriate modes of sexual and gender expression, both gay and straight. Surveying representations of young Muslim men and women in literature, film, popular journalism, television, and erotica as well as in psychoanalysis, ethnography, and gay and lesbian activist rhetoric, Mehammed Amadeus Mack reveals the myriad ways in which communities of immigrant origin are continually and consistently scapegoated as already and always outside the boundary of French citizenship regardless of where the individuals within these communities were born. At the same time, through deft readings of—among other things—fashion photography and online hook-up sites, Mack shows how Franco-Arab youth culture is commodified and fetishized to the point of sexual fantasy. Official French culture, as Mack suggests, has judged the integration of Muslim immigrants from North and West Africa—as well as their French descendants—according to their presumed attitudes about gender and sexuality. More precisely, Mack argues, the frustrations consistently expressed by the French establishment in the face of the alleged Muslim refusal to assimilate is not only symptomatic of anxieties regarding changes to a “familiar” France but also indicative of an unacknowledged preoccupation with what Mack identifies as the “virility cultures” of Franco-Arabs, rendering Muslim youth as both sexualized objects and unruly subjects. The perceived volatility of this banlieue virility serves to animate French characterizations of the “difficult” black, Arab, and Muslim boy—and girl—across a variety of sensational newscasts and entertainment media, which are crucially inflamed by the clandestine nature of the banlieues themselves and non-European expressions of virility. Mirroring the secret and underground qualities of “illegal” immigration, Mack shows, Franco-Arab youth increasingly choose to withdraw from official scrutiny of the French Republic and to thwart its desires for universalism and transparency. For their impenetrability, these sealed-off domains of banlieue virility are deemed all the more threatening to the surveillance of mainstream French society and the state apparatus.


Paris in the Cinema

Paris in the Cinema

Author: Alastair Phillips

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-01-22

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1844578208

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This essay collection offers a new approach to the representation of Paris on screen. Bringing together a wide range of renowned French and Anglophone specialists in film, television, history, architecture and literature, Alastair Phillips and Ginette Vincendeau introduce, challenge and extend ideas about the city as the locus of screen modernity. Through a range of concrete and historically-specific case studies, this unique text demonstrates how the cinematic city of Paris now constitutes a major archive of French cultural history and memory. This is an ideal resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of Film, Media and Cultural Studies, French Studies, European or Transnational Studies, Visual Studies, and Urban Studies. Fresh and engaging, this fascinating text will also appeal to lovers of French cinema and the capital city that comprises its major home.


Global Revolutionary Aesthetics and Politics after Paris ‘68

Global Revolutionary Aesthetics and Politics after Paris ‘68

Author: Martin Munro

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-02-22

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 1793625743

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The year 2018 marked the fiftieth anniversary of May ’68, a startling, by now almost mythic event which combined seriousness, courage, humor and theatrics. The contributions of this volume—based on papers presented the conference Does “la lutte continue”? The Global Afterlife of May ’68 at Florida State University in March 2019—explore the ramifications of that springtime protest in the contemporary world. What has widely become known as the movement of ‘68 consisted, in fact, of many synchronous movements in different nations that promoted a great variety of political, social, and cultural agendas. While it is impossible to write a global history of ’68, this volume presents a kaleidoscope of different perceptions, reflections, and receptions of protest in France, Italy, and other nations that share in common a global utopian imaginary as expressed, for example, in the slogan: “All power to the imagination!” The contributions of this collection show that, while all social struggles are political, many lasting changes in individual mentalities and social structures originated from utopian ideas that were realized first in artistic productions and their aesthetic reception. In this respect the various protests of May ’68 continue.


French Civilization and Its Discontents

French Civilization and Its Discontents

Author: Tyler Edward Stovall

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 9780739106471

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What happens when the study of French is no longer coterminous with the study of France? French Civilization and Its Discontents explores the ways in which considerations of difference, especially colonialism, postcolonialism, and race, have shaped French culture and French studies in the modern era. Rejecting traditional assimilationist notions of French national identity, contributors to this groundbreaking volume demonstrate how literature, history, and other aspects of what is considered French civilization have been shaped by global processes of creolization and differentiation. This book ably demonstrates the necessity of studying France and the Francophone world together, and of recognizing not only the presence of France in the Francophone world but also the central place occupied by the Francophone world in world literature and history.


Performing the Pied-Noir Family

Performing the Pied-Noir Family

Author: Aoife Connolly

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2022-09-15

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781498537377

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This book examines literary and cinematic representations of the European settlers of Algeria known as the pieds-noirs following their mass migration to France in 1962. It breaks new ground by focusing on the family trope, including gender and youth, to reveal constructions of collective memory and identity post-Algerian independence.


Ousmane Sembene and the Politics of Culture

Ousmane Sembene and the Politics of Culture

Author: Lifongo J. Vetinde

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2014-11-12

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 0739192558

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Undoubtedly one of Africa’s most influential first generation of writers and filmmakers, Ousmane Sembene's creative works of fiction as well as his films have been the subject of a considerable number of scholarly articles. The schemas of reading applied to Sembene's oeuvre (novels, short stories and films) have, in the main, focused either on his militant posture against colonialism, his disenchantment with African leadership, or his infatuation with documenting the past in an attempt to present a balanced and nuanced view of African history. While these studies, unquestionably contribute to a better understanding of his works, they collectively ignore Sembene’s relentless preoccupation with culture in his entire career as a writer and filmmaker. The collection of essays in Sembene and the Politics of Culture sets out to fill that gap as the contributors at once foreground Sembene’s fixation on the centrality of culture in the articulation of the discourse of national consciousness and reevaluate his intellectual and artistic legacy within an overarching framework of African liberation. The contributors critically reassess the ideological underpinnings of Sembene’s thoughts, his role as one of the foundational pillars of African cultural production, and his relevance in current discourses of nationhood. They do so through a wide variety of interdisciplinary approaches that draw on linguistics, feminist theory, film theory, historiography, Marxist criticism, psychoanalysis and a host of other approaches that give novel insights in the critical analysis of the works under study. In the part entitled “Testimonies," a collection of conversations with people who worked closely with Sembene, each of the interlocutors provide illuminating insights into the man's life and work. The variety of themes and critical approaches in this critical anthology will certainly be of interest not only to students and scholars of African literature and cinema at various levels of intellectual and cultural sophistication but also anyone interested in the analysis of the nexus between power, culture, and the discourse of liberation.


Intertextual Weaving in the Work of Linda Lê

Intertextual Weaving in the Work of Linda Lê

Author: Alexandra Kurmann

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2016-01-14

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 1498514871

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Intertextual Weaving in the Work of Linda Lê: Imagining the Ideal Reader uncovers the primary textual relationship that Linda Lê (1963– ), the most prolific Francophone author of the Vietnamese diaspora, fosters with a literary precursor of Austrian descent: the feminist writer-in-exile, Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973). This study offers an overdue exploration of the notably European roots of Lê’s writerly formation. It traces an unexamined feminist import in her work to a sixteen-year inter- and intra-textual engagement with Bachmann and positions the latter as an imagined ideal reader of Lê’s oeuvre. Intertextual analyses of Bachmann’s post-war novel, Malina, with Lê’s literary essays, early fiction, and trilogy, reveal that to overcome the challenges of writing in exile Lê adopts an alternative literary fore-bear of the European tradition.