French Civilization and Its Discontents

Tyler Stovall is the author of France Since the Second World War (2002), Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (1996), and The Rise of the Paris Red Belt (1990). He is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. Georges Van Den Abbeele, author ofTravel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau (1992) and translator of Jean-Fran_ois Lyotard's major works, is Director of the Davis Humanities Institute and Professor of French and Italian at the University of California, Davis.

This is a superb collection. The elegant introduction presents the current situation of French and Francophone studies with icy clarity and should become required reading. The contributors add original interdisciplinary perspectives on intellectual and cultural history, race and gender, cinema and architecture, the Caribbean, the Maghreb, and Belgium. No one working in French studies can afford to ignore this book.

• Part 1 The Intelligentsia and New Conceptions of French IdentityChapter 2 The Marginality of Michel de CerteauChapter 3 Disorienting Le Corbusier: Charles Edouard Jeanneret's 1911 Voyage d'OrientChapter 4 France in the WildernessChapter 5 Opacity in the Films of Claire DenisPart 6 Black Diaspora and CréolisationChapter 7 The French Language in the Face of CreolizationChapter 8 Kojève and Fanon: the Desire for Recognition and the Fact of BlacknessChapter 9 Historically Particular Uses of a Universal SubjectChapter 10 For a Caribbean Intertext: On Some Readings of Maryse Condé's Crossing the MangroveChapter 11 "Hereditary Antagonism": Race and Nation in Maurice Casseus's ViejoPart 12 Orientalism and the Maghrebian Presence in Post-Colonial FranceChapter 13 Nationalism, Colonialism, and Ethnic Discourse in the Construction of French IdentityChapter 14 French Identity, Islam, and North Africans: Colonial Legacies, Post-Colonial RealitiesChapter 15 Social Dynamics in Colonial Algeria: The Question of Pieds-Noirs IdentityChapter 16 Remembering the Jews of AlgeriaPart 17 Miscegenation, Degeneration, and other Metropolitan AnxietiesChapter 18 Decadence/Degeneration/Créolité:Rachilde's La JongleuseChapter 18 Love, Labor, and Race: Colonial Men and White Women in France during the Great WarChapter 20 The Children of Belgium