Synopses & Reviews
Cinema in an Age of Terror looks at how cinematic representations of colonial-era victimization inform our understanding of the contemporary age of terror. By examining works representing colonial history and the dynamics of spectatorship emerging from them, Michael F. ORiley reveals how the centrality of victimization in certain cinematic representations of colonial history can help us understand how the desire to occupy the victims position is a dangerous and blinding drive that frequently plays into the vision of terrorism. Films such as
The Battle of Algiers,
Days of Glory,
Caché, and recent works by Maghrebien filmmakers all exemplify, in different ways, how this focus on victimization can become a problematic perspective—one in fact seeking to occupy ideological territory. Their return of colonial history to our contemporary context, although frequently problematic, enables us to see how victimization is very much about territory—cultural, spatial, and ideological—and how resistance to new forms of imperialist warfare and terror today must be located outside these haunting images from colonial history. Although such images of victimization ultimately only return as spectacular acts that draw our attention away from the cyclical contest over territory that they embody, those images nonetheless have the last word.
Michael F. ORiley is an associate professor of French and Italian at Colorado College. He is the author of Francophone Culture and the Postcolonial Fascination with Ethnic Crimes and Colonial Aura and Postcolonial Haunting and Victimization: Assia Djebars New Novels.
Review
"A very thoughtful book which deserves to be read both widely and attentively."—Philip Dine, H-France Review
Philip Dine
Review
“
Against Autobiography immediately establishes its author as one of the worlds foremost authorities in the field.”—Peter Schulman, author of
The Sunday of Fiction: The Modern French Eccentric
Review
and#8220;Andersen convincingly demonstrates the integral ways in which pronatalism influenced Franceand#8217;s colonial strategizing and, correspondingly, how the demographics of empire influenced pronatalist plans. Original, fascinating, and well written.and#8221;and#8212;Carolyn Eichner, associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsinand#8211;Milwaukee and author of Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune
Review
and#8220;Sachs weaves together disciplines that have traditionally been distinct (literature, literary theory, reading pedagogy, film studies, history), and he does so in a way that is strikingly original and provocative.and#8221;and#8212;Mortimer Martin Guiney, author of Teaching the Cult of Literature in the French Third Republic
Synopsis
The work of Tunisian Jewish intellectual Albert Memmi, like that of many francophone Maghrebian writers, is often read as thinly veiled autobiography. Questioning the prevailing body of criticism, which continues this interpretation of most fiction produced by francophone North African writers, Lia Nicole Brozgal shows how such interpretations of Memmis texts obscure their not inconsiderable theoretical possibilities.
Calling attention to the ambiguous status of autobiographical discursive and textual elements in Memmis work, Brozgal shifts the focus from the author to theoretical questions. Against Autobiography places Memmis writing and thought in dialogue with several major critical shifts in the late twentieth-century literary and cultural landscape. These shifts include the crisis of the authorial subject; the interrogation of the form of the novel; the resistance to the hegemony of vision; and the critique of colonialism. Showing how Memmis novels and essays produce theories that resonate both within and beyond their original contexts, Brozgal argues for allowing works of francophone Maghrebi literature to be read as complex literary objects, that is, not simply as ethnographic curios but as generating elements of literary theory on their own terms.
Synopsis
Following Franceand#8217;s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870and#8211;71, French patriots feared that their country was in danger of becoming a second-rate power in Europe. Decreasing birth rates had largely slowed French population growth, and the countryand#8217;s population was not keeping pace with that of its European neighbors. To regain its standing in the European world, France set its sights on building a vast colonial empire while simultaneously developing a policy of pronatalism to reverse these demographic trends. Though representing distinct political movements, colonial supporters and pronatalist organizations were born of the same crisis and reflected similar anxieties concerning Franceand#8217;s trajectory and position in the world.
Regeneration through Empire explores the intersection between colonial lobbyists and pronatalists in Franceand#8217;s Third Republic. Margaret Cook Andersen argues that as the pronatalist movement became more organized at the end of the nineteenth century, pronatalists increasingly understood their demographic crisis in terms that transcended the boundaries of the metropole and began to position the French empire, specifically its colonial holdings in North Africa and Madagascar, as a key component in the nationand#8217;s regeneration. Drawing on an array of primary sources from French archives, Regeneration through Empire is the first book to analyze the relationship between depopulation and imperialism.
Synopsis
French school debates of recent years, which are simultaneously debates about the French Republicand#8217;s identity and values, have generated a spate of internationally successful literature and film on the topic of education. While mainstream media and scholarly essays tend to treat these works as faithful representations of classroom reality,
The Pedagogical Imagination takes a different approach.
In this study of French education and republicanism as represented in twenty-first-century French literature and film, Leon Sachs shifts our attention from and#8220;whatand#8221; literature and film say about education to and#8220;howand#8221; they say it. He argues that the most important literary and filmic treatments of French education in recent yearsand#8212;the works of Agnand#232;s Varda, and#201;rik Orsenna, Abdellatif Kechiche, Franand#231;ois Band#233;gaudeauand#8212;do more than merely depict the present-day school crisis. They explore questions of education through experiments with form.
The Pedagogical Imagination shows how such techniques engage present-day readers and viewers in acts of interpretation that reproduce pedagogical principles of active, experiential learningand#8212;principles at the core of late nineteenth-century educational reform that became vehicles for the diffusion of republican ideology.
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About the Author
Michael F. ORiley is an associate professor of French and Italian at Colorado College. He is the author of Francophone Culture and the Postcolonial Fascination with Ethnic Crimes and Colonial Aura and Postcolonial Haunting and Victimization: Assia Djebars New Novels.