Bill Marshall

Francophone Gothic Melodramas

Marshall discusses the important but under-researched corpus of francophone literature written in the nineteenth century in Louisiana. Focusing on the literary life of New Orleans, he pinpoints French-Atlantic influences which shape authors’ responses to the political tumult and racial tensions of the epoch. Locating adjacencies with melodrama and Romanticism which characterise the gothic elements of this output, he leads the reader to four key motifs—the house, skin, capitalism and the Jew, and blood—and discusses their treatment by Victor Sejour, Alfred Mercier, and Sidonie de la Houssaye.

French Atlantic Diasporas

At first sight, the notion of a French diaspora or diasporas seems counterintuitive amidst dominant readings of French history and the resulting versions of national identity. The received wisdom is of France as the centralized nation-state par excellence since 1789 and even before; as a country of immigration rather than emigration, distributing colonial officials or elites around the world, but producing no significant settler populations except in Algeria; and as a European nation that industrialized later and more unevenly than was the case in Britain and Germany, even retaining half its working population on the land well into the 1930s. In fact, the Atlantic space in particular has seen massive movements — voluntary but also involuntary — of French-speaking populations. The occlusion of these French diasporas from the French national narrative is all too familiar: as long as the field of historiography was dominated by a powerful tradition melding republicanism, nationalism, and often colonialism, the destinies of migrants who, by leaving France, had broken the implicit social contract linking them to the destiny of the nation, was neglected.1 (Weil 2005: 5)

Introduction: France/Asias

France’s contact with three Asian nations, China, India and Japan, has not been of the same order as that which bound France to territories central to the project of French imperialism (such as Indochina), whose colonial domination has been much scrutinised in Francophone postcolonial studies (e.g. Cooper, 2001; Robson and Yee, 2005). The general, ahistorical, uni-directional paradigms generated by studies of colonial discourse (most notably Edward Said’s Orientalism) fail to account for the shifting, unstable and often reciprocal relationships emerging from this contact. Studying the complexity of French–Asian transcultural exchange requires, therefore, sensitivity to context and careful attention to specific case studies. Only by exploring and comparing specific, historically grounded French– Asian axes can more generally applicable models of intercultural contact be elaborated. As the assumptions of postcolonial studies are progressively attenuated in the light of the growing field of transnational studies (see Clifford, 1997; Lionnet, 2005), there is a growing need to investigate the forms and contexts of French cultural exchange with Asia produced by dealings with national–cultural arenas occupying a position peripheral to the historical endeavour of colonial expansion. The French presence in India was both peripheral and uneven, challenged from the outset by British rule. China was subject to, but never subjugated by, commercial, diplomatic, religious and cultural incursion by the French, notably in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Japan was largely if not completely insulated from the emerging European-led imperial order, and continued to evade subordination after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and the rapid industrialisation that followed. None of these countries belongs to that geopolitical product of French decolonisation known as la Francophonie, where France’s influence remains manifest. All have nevertheless been objects of a French fascination enduring into the present and manifesting itself in a gamut of cultural artefacts and activities that includes elements as diverse as the writings on China and Japan of seventeenth-century Jesuits and eighteenth-century philosophes; the vogue of japonisme, which started around 1850; China-centred

National identity and thefilm policier: the moment of 1981

or ’popular culture’. This is all the more so since the policier is a genre which in France was central to the reconstitution of auteur/art cinema at the time of the so-called nouvelle vague (Chabrol; Godard, A Bout de souffle, 1959; Truffaut, Tirez sur le pianiste, 1959) via a negotiation with American popular film fiction. And it is worth recalling that the ’high/low art’ distinction is based upon precisely that, a system of difference and differences. A 1973 report of the CNC (Centre national de la cin6matographie) delineated the industry’s mapping out or structuring of its public or markets: public populaire, for whom the priority is a night out at the cinema, consisting of young people, regular spectators, Parisians, the least favoured socio-professional categories; and public cultive, for whom the priority is going to see a film as valorized cultural product, consisting of irregular and occasional spectators, older age groups, relatively favoured socio-professional categories. The point is, of course, that this distinction forms a considerable, shifting enjeu that is constantly being defined and redefined. The ’art’ sector, associated as far as distribution is concerned with the salles d’art et d’essai, is as much imbricated in (sectional) market considerations as the ’popular’, it constitutes

Chateauvallon: ideology and television in 1980s France

What follows is an attempt to circumscribe the conditions of possibility of Chateauvallon, a drama serial produced by Antenne 2, Telecip and Telfrance in 1983-84, directed by Serge Friedman and Paul Planchon, and broadcast in 26 episodes on A2 from 4 January 1985. The text of Chateauvallon is significant both as object (of contemplation and analysis) and as practice (partaking in the economic organization and dynamics of mass media production). It is located at a crucial turning point in the development of the production of both commodities and meaning in modern France. Within Marxist cultural debates, in seeking to elucidate the processes, ’the dialectic between conditions and consciousness&dquo; that link text and context, the Gramscian notion of hegemony is useful for seeing both the totality of ideological, political and economic practices, and the shifts, contradictions and sites of struggle within them: ’The relationship between the making of a work of art and its reception is always active, and subject to conventions, which in themselves are forms of (changing) social organization and relationship, and this is radically different from the production and consumption of an object’2. Moreover, hegemony is not restricted to cognitive-rational mappings of the world: ’It is a whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living: our senses and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world (...) It is, that is to say, in the strongest sense a &dquo;culture&dquo;, but a culture which has also to be seen as the lived dominance and subordination of particular classes’3. This emphasis on the broad category of the living (Terry Lovell calls it a ’structure of feeling and sensibility’4), is particularly important for the forms