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L’Entre d’eux: Lacan, Serres and the climate emergency Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2024-03-25 Sinan Richards
My article claims that the acceleration of the generalised planetary ecological crisis has been worsened by a form of collective reasoning called disavowal. To understand why and how this mode of r...
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L’Empire qui ne veut pas mourir: une histoire de la Françafrique Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2024-03-25 Tony Chafer
Published in Modern & Contemporary France (Ahead of Print, 2024)
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Feminism’s empire Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2024-03-18 Pamela Pilbeam
Published in Modern & Contemporary France (Ahead of Print, 2024)
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In the footsteps of Flora Tristan. A political biography Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2024-03-15 Pamela Pilbeam
Published in Modern & Contemporary France (Ahead of Print, 2024)
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Signé Michel Serres: the fine print of The Natural Contract Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2024-03-15 Serge Trottein
Moving from embarkation to casting off to end finally in distress, does Michel Serres in The Natural Contract speak of the world or of himself? The work of a postmodern Rousseau, this book treats a...
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The Fuzzy Logics of Parasitism: Catachresis and Prognosis in Michel Serres Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2024-03-11 John W. P. Phillips
The article examines the sense, in the philosophy of Michel Serres, of a kind of parasitism that deviates subtly from existing understandings of the term. Parasitism is instantiated by a subtle dev...
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The Other Side of Abortion: The Doctor-Writer in Martin Winckler’s La Vacation (1989) Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Marta-Laura Cenedese
In 1989, physician and author Martin Winckler published his first novel, La vacation, in which he introduced the fictional medical practitioner Bruno Sachs. In the novel, the author focuses on Brun...
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Michel Serres’s Le parasite: the noise of the world at work Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Bernard Howells
A universal irreversible movement, a single downward-pointing arrow gives rise to a second movement, parasitic upon the first but pointing in the opposite direction, towards an ever greater diversi...
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The Weight of the World Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2024-02-21 Gary E. Aylesworth
This essay focuses upon MIchel Serres’s etymological connection between peser (to weigh) and penser (to think, or judge). I take Serres to mean the weight of the world is a judging or rendering tha...
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Experimenting with museography: the Musée des Confluences in Lyon Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2024-02-09 Marion Demossier
This article examines innovative forms of museography and their relationship to national narratives involving history, memory and locality. It seeks to assess how definitions of culture have shifte...
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Power, pacification and legacies of French colonialism in New Caledonia: public statues and Nouméa’s memoryscape Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2024-02-09 Briony Neilson
In June 2022 a new public statue was unveiled in New Caledonia. The new statue, erected in the Place des Cocotiers in central Nouméa, depicts the famous handshake between Kanak separatist leader Je...
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Serres’ textual parasitism and his search for a material language Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2024-02-08 Gertrude Postl
This paper aims to explore Michel Serres’ approach to issues of text, writing and language. In a first step, his own textual parasitism—his use of other texts without adhering to the academic conve...
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Responses to a call to action: new directions and directives in memory studies in the French-speaking world Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2024-02-09 Hannah Grayson, Nina Parish
Published in Modern & Contemporary France (Vol. 32, No. 1, 2024)
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Going beyond the guerre des mémoires in theatrical representations of the Algerian War Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2024-02-09 Fiona Barclay
This article examines the ‘guerre des mémoires’ that has defined the memorial landscape surrounding the Algerian War and seen it mired it in a competitive memory dynamic that Benjamin Stora terms ‘...
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Les nouvelles histoires : dialoguer avec les sujets et les lieux. Entretien avec Pascal Convert Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2024-02-09 Pascal Convert, Nigel Saint
Published in Modern & Contemporary France (Vol. 32, No. 1, 2024)
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Hitler’s French literary afterlives, 1945–2017 Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2024-02-09 Joanne Pettitt
Published in Modern & Contemporary France (Vol. 32, No. 1, 2024)
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Late-Colonial French cinema. Filming the Algerian War of Independence Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2024-02-09 Lia Brozgal
Published in Modern & Contemporary France (Vol. 32, No. 1, 2024)
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Interventions 2020 Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2024-01-25 Fraser McQueen
Published in Modern & Contemporary France (Ahead of Print, 2024)
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Terror. The French Revolution and its Demons Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2024-01-15 Pamela Pilbeam
Published in Modern & Contemporary France (Ahead of Print, 2024)
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Emmanuel Macron et Éric Zemmour entre roman et politique : Parcours croisé Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2024-01-08 Pierre Azou
Présentés et se concevant eux-mêmes politiquement comme diamétralement opposés, Emmanuel Macron et Éric Zemmour ont en commun d’afficher un amour hyperbolique pour la littérature, et qu’ils formule...
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Abortion in French cinema during the long 1960s and beyond Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-12-23 Marion Hallet, Elizabeth Miller
This article examines the representation of abortion in French cinema during one of the most pivotal periods for women’s rights and lives—the ‘long’ 1960s (1959–1973), one caught between post-war c...
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The paradoxes of the parasite. The qui perd gagne of the human (revisited) Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-12-21 Christina Howells
In this article I shall explore the development of Michel Serres’s understanding of the human parasite, starting from The Parasite (1980) and The Natural Contract (1990), through to Hominescence (2...
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Michel Serres and the parasitic unmaking of modernity Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-12-21 Chris Watkin
This article uses Michel Serres’s notions of the parasite and the natural contract to develop a counter-narrative to the modern idea of the state of nature. Foundational to modern thought, the stat...
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Variations on the Ethics of Mourning in Modern Literature in French Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-12-19 Kathryn Robson
Published in Modern & Contemporary France (Ahead of Print, 2023)
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Trans Identities in the French Media: Representation, Visibility, Recognition Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-12-08 Ry Montgomery
Published in Modern & Contemporary France (Ahead of Print, 2023)
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Frank French Feminisms: Sex, Sexuality and the Body in the Work of Ernaux, Huston and Arcan Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-12-06 Antonia Wimbush
Published in Modern & Contemporary France (Ahead of Print, 2023)
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Mes années folles: Révolte et nihilisme du peuple adolescent après Mai 68 Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-11-29 Michael Seidman
Published in Modern & Contemporary France (Ahead of Print, 2023)
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Il/legitimate? Annie Ernaux’s contentious path to the Nobel Prize Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-11-30 Oana Sabo
This article analyses the mass media reception of Annie Ernaux’s 2022 Nobel Prize, particularly the criticisms in the French press. After the award announcement, Ernaux was at once celebrated for h...
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Le Piège africain de Macron Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-11-28 Tony Chafer
Published in Modern & Contemporary France (Ahead of Print, 2023)
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A lesson for the world: Solange Faladé’s anti-colonial multiracialism Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-11-06 Sinan Richards
1Solange Adelola Faladé (1925–2004) was a French-Beninois doctor, anthropologist and psychoanalyst. The first woman Franco-African psychoanalyst in France, she founded her own psychoanalytical soci...
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« Annette » de Carax : une fantomachie biographique Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-11-03 Antoine Coppola
Le film de Leos Carax « Annette » projeté au festival de Cannes en 2021 n’a laissé personne indifférent : quelque chose d’important se disait à propos du cinéma et, en particulier, du cinéma frança...
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Serres’s reading of Tartuffe: hypocrisy and comic underdetermination Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-10-24 Robert Hughes
In The Parasite (1980), philosopher Michel Serres invites readers to reflect on hypocrisy in a non-moral sense. Ruminating upon the example of Molière’s Tartuffe, Serres takes up the scandalous imp...
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Statement of Removal Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-09-27
Published in Modern & Contemporary France (Ahead of Print, 2023)
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‘L’amour se dit dans un regard’? Immigration, visibility and representation in Marguerite Duras’s Les Mains négatives and Alice Diop’s Nous Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-09-14 Katie Pleming
ABSTRACT Marguerite Duras’s Les Mains négatives (1979) is a short film which interrogates the exclusion and marginalisation of immigrants in postcolonial French society by highlighting the hidden labour of Black sanitation workers in Paris. Alice Diop has described Les Mains négatives as ‘the entire subtext’ for her film Nous (2020), a documentary about people living in the suburbs of Paris. At once
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Contemporary photography in France: between theory and practice Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-09-12 Ari J. Blatt
Published in Modern & Contemporary France (Vol. 32, No. 1, 2024)
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Queer cinema in contemporary France: five directors Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-09-07 Peter Tarjanyi
Published in Modern & Contemporary France (Vol. 32, No. 1, 2024)
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Digging holes, excavating the present, mining the future: extractivism, time, and memory in Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s and Sammy Baloji’s works Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-09-07 Pierre-Philippe Fraiture
This article explores the links between creative imagination and extraction in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). This question has an undeniable memorial dimension, for extraction, as a c...
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Rupture and reconciliation: the neoliberal logics of Emmanuel Macron’s colonial memory policies Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-09-06 Dónal Hassett
First as candidate and then as President, Emmanuel Macron has elevated colonial memory policy as a key site for the performance and enactment of the dual values of rupture and reconciliation that u...
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Ni d’ici ni d’ailleurs : l’impossible appartenance de l’immigré maghrébin chez Mouloud Feraoun et Ben Jelloun Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-08-09 Gerard Keubeung
RÉSUMÉ Le présent article voudrait mettre en lumière les manières dont les personnages immigrés de Ben Jelloun et Mouloud Feraoun sont en rupture totale avec les espaces où ils se meuvent, que ce soit en terre africaine ou en France. Une analyse critique du malaise du pays d’origine révèle chez les protagonistes l’attrait du paradis français. Les mauvaises conditions de vie en France, accrues par l’exclusion
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Narratives of food insecurity in the penal colony: interpreting memories of ‘slow violence’ in French Guiana and New Caledonia Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-08-04 Sophie Fuggle
After decades of collective forgetting, heritage initiatives have resulted in the restoration of sites linked to France’s former penal colonies in French Guiana and New Caledonia which operated in ...
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Si peu que rien : topophilie et topophobie de la désindustrialisation dans les écrits de Gilles Ortlieb Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-08-04 Thibaut Raboin
Gilles Ortlieb est un des écrivains en langue française les plus prolifiques de la Lorraine et du Luxembourg. Il décrit dans son œuvre un exil marqué par la contradiction entre topophilie et topoph...
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Morbid undercurrents: medical subcultures in postrevolutionary France Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-08-03 Steven Wilson
Published in Modern & Contemporary France (Vol. 32, No. 1, 2024)
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Blaise Cendrars: the invention of life Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-08-03 Emma Wagstaff
Published in Modern & Contemporary France (Vol. 32, No. 1, 2024)
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The Holocaust in French postmodern fiction. Aesthetics, politics, ethics Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-07-11 Seán Hand
Published in Modern & Contemporary France (Vol. 31, No. 4, 2023)
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For a feminist reading of Julia Ducournau’s Grave Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-06-22 Michèle Bacholle
ABSTRACT Before receiving the Palme d’Or for her second long feature film Titane (2021), Fémis-educated, punk-looking, thirty-something director Julia Ducournau disrupted French cinema and the Horror genre with Grave (2016), awarded the Critics prize at Cannes. Grave features high-school graduate Justine as she undergoes hazing at the veterinary school her sister Alex/ia attends. Strict vegetarian
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Barthes et le cinéma-vérité dans le film « La Lutte » Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-06-09 Antoine Coppola
Le film « La Lutte » de Michel Brault a été réalisé en 1961 sous l’influence assumée de Roland Barthes et de son article « Le Monde où l’on catche ». Barthes a participé au tournage et il a influen...
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Pedagogy of the philosophy dissertation in France: paths to freedom, or thèse-antithèse-foutaise? Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-06-09 John McKeane
ABSTRACT This article studies the philosophy dissertation as a cultural practice within the educational institution in France. It argues that this cultural practice has a strong association with the preservation and ongoing creation of French national identity. I present findings from a survey of pedagogic materials offering advice for students taking the philosophy exam at baccalaureate level. Having
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Paris and the parasite: noise, health, and politics in the media city Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-06-08 Elizabeth Benjamin
Published in Modern & Contemporary France (Vol. 31, No. 4, 2023)
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Françaises, féministes et musulmanes : l’identité impossible ? Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-06-02 Malika Hamidi
RÉSUMÉ En France, les débats houleux autour de la question controversée dite du « foulard islamique » ont d’une part divisé les mouvements féministes, et, d’autre part, ils ont mis en évidence les relents racistes et colonialistes des discours tenus par certain(e)s militant(e)s et intellectuel(le)s inconsciemment, ou consciemment influencés par le passé colonial de leur pays, qui oriente par ailleurs
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Surviving the Second World War: resilience strategies within the French facially disfigured veterans’ association Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-05-26 Marjorie Gehrhardt
Veterans’ organisations boomed in the wake of the First World War, many of their members joined together by a shared experience but also the desire to make this conflict the wars to end all war. Ye...
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De l’individuel au collectif : la quête de l’identité nationale dans Le Dépaysement de Jean-Christophe Bailly Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-05-25 Dan Zhang
Arpenter le territoire français pour sonder l’identité nationale. C’est ce que fait Jean-Christophe Bailly dans Le Dépaysement, un récit qui se caractérise par un décentrement du regard vers le pro...
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Made in France: societal structures and political work Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-05-22 Raymond Kuhn
Published in Modern & Contemporary France (Vol. 31, No. 4, 2023)
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Existentialist Comics « Bande Dessinée » and the Art of Ethics Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-05-22 Cynthia Laborde
Published in Modern & Contemporary France (Vol. 31, No. 4, 2023)
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Nacira Guénif, Nadia Kiwan and Jim Wolfreys, 13 September 2022 Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-05-19 Nadia Kiwan, Jim Wolfreys, Nacira Guénif-Souilamas
Published in Modern & Contemporary France (Vol. 31, No. 2, 2023)
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Decolonial approaches to laïcité as a mode to re-think contemporary Islamophobia Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-05-10 Nadia Kiwan
ABSTRACT Over the last decade, we have witnessed the reinforcement of laïcité as a mode of governance, which increasingly focuses on France’s Muslim citizens. However, rather than argue that the reinforcement of laïcité is a response to a series of Islamist terror attacks since 2015 this article will consider the historical formations of political secularism in modern France and argue that we should
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Rethinking laïcité as a geopolitical concept Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-05-10 Christopher Lizotte
ABSTRACT Laïcité, France’s idiosyncratic religious neutrality, is a concept that governs significant aspects of daily life while being notoriously variable in its application. Alongside sociological, legal and historical understandings of laïcité, I propose an additional way to view laïcité: through a critical geopolitical perspective. I argue that laïcité has been made and unmade through geographic
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Confronting the politics of denial Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-05-04 Nadia Kiwan, Jim Wolfreys
Published in Modern & Contemporary France (Vol. 31, No. 2, 2023)
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La loi contre le « séparatisme » : mort et résurrection d’une « justice d’exception » Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-05-02 Fatima Khemilat
RÉSUMÉ Le Conseil constitutionnel français a approuvé en août 2021, avec des modifications mineures, la « loi confortant le respect des principes de la République ». Ce dispositif juridique fait suite aux discours du président Emmanuel Macron en 2020, au cours desquels il a présenté son plan de lutte contre le « séparatisme islamiste ». Parmi les mesures annoncées : imposer la neutralité des organisations
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‘Avec Vous?’ Islamophobia and the Macron presidency Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-04-20 Jim Wolfreys
ABSTRACT This article examines the entrenchment of Islamophobia during Emmanuel Macron’s first term. It explores legislation to counter ‘separatism’, the radicalisation of laïcité, the restriction of Muslimness, and the political disqualification of Muslims. The deployment of laïcité to distinguish those who are ‘really’ French and those who are not is identified as part of an authoritarian neoliberal
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‘L’esprit de défense’: separatism, counterinsurgency and the dissolution of the Collective Against Islamophobia in France Modern & Contemporary France Pub Date : 2023-04-13 Ibrahim Bechrouri
ABSTRACT At the end of 2020, the Macron government decided to dismantle the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF). The CCIF was the primary actor of anti-Islamophobia in France. Its dissolution and the end of its missions in France was a shock for Muslim communities and affected their perception of themselves as well as the trust they put in the rule of law. Macron’s government justified