The Politics of Cultural Policy in France offers a lively and iconoclastic account of cultural policy-making in France. Focusing on the policies of the Socialist governments of 1981-86 and 1988-93, the book suggests that policy towards the arts was shaped less by an all-powerful state than by influential professional interest groups. In addition to presenting unusual insights into a policy area which has rarely been studied by political science, The Politics of Cultural Policy in France thus provides significant revisions to conventional views of relations between the state and civil society in France.
This study considers contemporary policies for the arts in France and the cultural and political issues they have raised. The author concentrates mainly on the Mitterrand years and the various influences which marked them.
This book argues that French musical meanings and values in the years from 1898 to 1914 are best explained not in terms of contemporary artistic movements, but rather in terms of the political culture, which was undergoing subtle but profound transformation as nationalist leagues enlarged the arena of political action. Applying recent insights from French history, sociology, political anthropology, and literary theory, the book reveals how nationalists used critics, educational institutions, concert series and lectures to disseminate their values through a discourse on French music; and it demonstrates how the Republic and Left responded to this challenge through their own discourses on French musical values. Against this background Fulcher traces the impact of this politicized musical culture on composers such as d'Indy, Charpentier, Magnard, Debussy, and Satie.
How have cultural policies created new occupations and shaped professions? This book explores an often unacknowledged dimension of cultural policy analysis: the professional identity of cultural agents. It analyses the relationship between cultural policy, identity and professionalism and draws from a variety of cultural policies around the world to provide insights on the identity construction processes that are at play in cultural institutions. This book reappraises the important question of professional identities in cultural policy studies, museum studies and heritage studies. The authors address the relationship between cultural policy, work and identity by focusing on three levels of analysis. The first considers the state, the creativity of the power relationship established in cultural policies and the power which structures the symbolic order of cultural work. The second presents community in the cultural policy process, society and collective action, whether it is through the creation of institutions for arts and heritage profession or through resistance to state cultural policies. The third examines the experience of cultural policy by the professional. It illustrates how cultural policy is both a set of contingencies that shape possibilities for professionals, as much as it is a basis for identification and identity construction. The eleven authors in this unique book draw on their experience as artists and researchers from a range of countries, including France, Canada, United Kingdom, United States, and Sweden.
In Watteau and the Cultural Politics of Eighteenth-Century France, Julie Anne Plax engages in an interdisciplinary examination of several categories of Watteau's paintings--theatrical, military, fetes, and the art dealer. Arguing that Watteau consistently applied coherent strategies of representation aimed at subverting high art, she shows how his paintings toyed ironically with conventions and genres and confounded traditional categories. Plax connects these strategies to broader cultural themes and political issues that Watteau's art addressed throughout his career, thereby revealing the substantial unity of his oeuvre.
This book of tightly woven dialogues engages prominent thinkers in a discussion about the role of culture-broadly construed-in contemporary society and politics. Faced with the conceptual inflation of the notion of 'culture, ' which now imposes itself as an indispensable issue in contemporary moral and political debates, these dynamic exchanges seek to rethink culture and critique beyond the schematic models that have often predominated, such as the opposition between "mainstream multiculturalism" and the "clash of civilizations." Prefaced by an introduction relating current cultural debates to the critical theory tradition, this book examines the politics of culture and the spirit of critique from three different vantage points. To begin, Gabriel Rockhill and Alfredo Gomez-Muller provide a stage-setting dialogue, followed by discussions with two major representatives of contemporary critical theory: Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser. Working at the horizons of this tradition, Judith Butler, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Cornel West then provide important critical perspectives on cultural politics. The book's concluding section engages with Michael Sandel and Will Kymlicka, who work out of the Rawlsian tradition yet are uniquely concerned with the issue of culture, broadly understood. The epilogue, an interview with Axel Honneth, returns to the core issue of critical theory in cultural politics. Ranging from recent developments and progressive interventions in critical theory to dialogues that incorporate its insights into larger discussions of social and political philosophy, this book sharpens old critical tools while developing new strategies for rethinking the role of 'culture' in contemporary society.
When this book was published in 1984, it reframed the debate on the French Revolution, shifting the discussion from the Revolution's role in wider, extrinsic processes (such as modernization, capitalist development, and the rise of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes) to its central political significance: the discovery of the potential of political action to consciously transform society by molding character, culture, and social relations. In a new preface to this twentieth-anniversary edition, Hunt reconsiders her work in the light of the past twenty years' scholarship.
For more than two decades, le hip hop has shown another face of France: danced by minorities associated with immigration and the suburbs, it has channeled rage against racism and unequal opportunity and offered a movement vocabulary for the expression of the multicultural difference that challenges the universalist discourse of the Republic. French hip-hoppers subscribe to U.S. black culture to articulate their own difference, but in France hip-hop was championed by a Socialist cultural policy, subsumed into the cultural heritage, and instituted as a pedagogy. France supported hip-hop dance as an art of the suburbs: a multicultural mix of North African, African and Asian forms that circulate with classical and contemporary dance performance. French hip-hop develops into concert dance, becoming a civic discourse and legitimate employment, not through the familiar model of a culture industry, but within a Republic of Culture. It nuances an Anglo-Saxon model of identity politics with a francophone identity poetics and grants its dancers a national profile as artists who develop dance techniques and transmit body-based knowledge. This book, the first in English to introduce readers to the French hip-hop movement, analyzes the choreographic development of hip-hop into la danse urbaine, touring on national and international stages, as hip-hoppers move beyond the suburbs, figuring new forms within the mobility brought by new media and global migration.
Scholars across disciplines on both sides of the Atlantic have recently begun to open up, as never before, the scholarly study of race and racism in France. These original essays bring together in one volume new work in history, sociology, anthropology, political science, and legal studies. Each of the eleven articles presents fresh research on the tension between a republican tradition in France that has long denied the legitimacy of acknowledging racial difference and a lived reality in which racial prejudice shaped popular views about foreigners, Jews, immigrants, and colonial people. Several authors also examine efforts to combat racism since the 1970s.
