Stars and Strife: Writing America in Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures
America is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled version. America ducks the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth. Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual present.
—Jean Baudrillard, America
The essays, interviews, and poetry assembled for this special edition of Contemporary French & Francophone Studies/SITES do not propose to rehash the causes of traditional Franco-American antagonisms. Rather, they provide a look at new tendencies in French and Francophone writing which describe, criticize, and sometimes admire the goings-on of a country to which surrealism could never be imported, since it frequently appears to be part of the fabric of American daily life.
In his L’Ennemi américain: Généalogie de l’antiaméricainisme français (2002) Philippe Roger observes that anti-Americanism is the only anti-word in French formed on the basis of the name of a nation (l’Amérique). While anti-Americanism, as chronicled by Roger, held sway for a long time, particularly in the Hexagon, it was probably most virulent in the period dating from the end of World War II to the American collapse in Vietnam. Directly after the war, the French, or at least the intellectual caste, suspected that the Marshall Plan was a ploy to insure the American presence and eventual dominance in France. They were equally appalled by American racism and violence, as well as the eventual Yankee meddling in Asia and the Middle East. An American postwar occupation of France was also a genuine and justified concern; after all, the occupation currency had already been printed and de Gaulle himself was to be sent off by the Allied Powers as Governor General of faraway Madagascar. In What Soldiers Do. Sex and the American G.I. in World War II France (2013), Mary Louise Roberts chronicles the social havoc created by the prolonged American presence on French soil. On a more prosaic level and as the immediate postwar turned into the Fifties, the widespread importation of American products and popular culture was perceived as a challenge to the rather amorphously conceived “French Way of Life.” Finally, what further exacerbated the situation was the French conviction that, in the postwar era, the political choices were essentially Manichean: either one supported the United States or the Soviet Union in the developing Cold War; there was no place for a third option.
In the Hexagon, the tide of anti-Americanism began to abate in the waning years of the Cold War. The pristine image of the Soviet Union as a workers’ paradise was becoming increasingly tarnished due to Stalin’s show trials, the discovery of the gulags, and the invasion of Hungary. At the same time, the dreaded American cultural invasion of France did not wreak the projected havoc on traditional French values. In fact, in certain quarters, particularly among housewives, the “American way of life” in the shape of sudden access to dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, and washing machines, surely made the American presence in France somewhat more palatable. The idealism and struggles of the American Civil Rights movement made sweeping condemnations of Americans as racists less convincing, while the counter culture and anti-war movement of the late Sixties projected the image of an idealist and even utopian America. Decades later, 9/11 would provoke an outpouring of sympathy for the United States in France.
In the twenty-first century, the often-voiced contempt for American politics and culture began to yield to a new curiosity about a country that could sandwich a black, liberal, Harvard-educated president between two conservative Republicans with little interest in social reform. The contradictions in American society, frequently decried in the past, were beginning to be viewed with a certain new interest.
It is perhaps these contradictions and paradoxes around race relations that have most contributed to a shift in the perspective towards the United States by colonized and post-colonial French-speaking writers throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For France’s post-war (post-)colonial immigrant subjects, the U.S. became a means of triangulating the dynamics of race relations in France. Vincent Cassel’s frame-by-frame revision of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing on police brutality in La Haine (1995) is only one of the most overt examples of how racially-driven urban segregation in the U.S. has offered useful parallels and divergences for French artists and cultural workers engaging in France’s debates about intégration or communautarisme. Despite radically different concepts of citizenship and identity politics across the Atlantic, and whether as a model or cautionary tale, the U.S. serves as an inescapable comparative barometer for questions of immigration, multiculturalism, and France’s historical debts to slavery and colonialism. For example, with the election of Obama in 2008, the Martinique-born public intellectuals Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau took the opportunity to tie global processes of creolization to the potential represented by the icon that was Obama at that moment. In one of the articles in this issue, Justin Izzo revisits Glissant and Chamoiseau’s short text, which writes Obama’s rise and election victory into planetary histories of creolization. As Izzo proposes, the text appears outdated or even naïve today, since Glissant and Chamoiseau’s reading of Obama seeks to inaugurate new narratives of American historical and political time that seem entirely foreclosed by the arrival of Donald Trump on the world stage. And yet, Izzo argues, we can recuperate and reactivate utopian threads in Glissant and Chamoiseau’s text that provoke us to reread contemporary U.S. politics in the light of these imagined futures. What appears at first glance to be a fantastical reading of the Obama presidency actually opens up new ways of imagining utopian political strategies today, as Izzo’s essay illustrates.
For writers in France’s former and still-extant colonies, the “strife” of the stars and stripes remains significant, and is deeply rooted in colonial history. Both Haiti, located squarely in the United States’ Monroe Doctrine-identified political “sphere of influence,” and Vietnam, caught in the Cold War anti-communist dynamics, were subject to not only cultural occupations but military invasions. Haiti’s subjection to direct political interference throughout the twentieth century starting with the intense social and governmental restructuring during the 1915–1934 U.S. Occupation has resulted in the U.S. becoming a site of migration for Haitian writers as articles by Robert Sapp, Alexis Chauchois, and Gilles Glacet discuss in this issue.
Sapp’s article analyzes Évelyne Trouillot’s 2013 novel Absences sans frontières, a work that juxtaposes the attack on the World Trade Center and the devastating earthquake of January 12, 2010 in Haiti. Trouillot’s juxtaposition of the two events leads to an examination of how catastrophe is lived on local and international levels. Framed within a discussion of Disaster Studies, Sapp’s article considers how catastrophic events in both the United States and Haiti are experienced in the novel and what impact catastrophe has on Haitian literary and public consciousness. Trouillot’s investigation of catastrophe considers how international disaster is experienced differently within Haiti and the United States and probes Haitian attitudes toward catastrophic events whose horrific singularity is contradicted by their seemingly incessant recurrence. Indeed, the reality that Trouillot depicts follows a cycle of cover-up and discovery powered by an interplay between image and disaster: catastrophic events uncover artifice while photos distort and obscure reality. This article considers what the reality unearthed by disaster in Absences sans frontières reveals about relations between the U.S. and Haiti, and to what extent disaster influences these relations.
Chauchois and Glacet’s article examines the itinerary of a Haitian writer who left his island at the age of twenty-one, Jean-Claude Charles. As the article shows, Charles was a particular type of exile. As he explains in the concept of enracinerrance that he himself created, he did not become established anywhere else, as did many Haitian refugees; his exile never ended and he kept on moving. His wandering took him especially to France and the United States. Many thought that Charles then became uprooted, yet the article shows that it is precisely in his wandering that he managed to find new roots, to “take root.” Metaphorically and by writing, he established a bridge between the two continents.
As writers like Charles explored collective and individual experiences of migration, immigration to France was forcing the French to rethink their own self-image. The United States was perceived as a conservative, indeed reactionary country which, despite progress in certain areas, remained a racist country. Yet it was becoming increasingly obvious that so too was France, whose so-called “visible minorities” were indeed becoming increasingly visible on the national scene at the same time as the country was entering a period of economic hard times and structural unemployment. Relatively quickly, large numbers of people from different cultures and religions, people of color and Muslims most notably, were entering French consciousness either through immigration or through the activism and the cultural visibility resulting from films, music, and literature produced by children and grandchildren of immigrants, the famous “Beur generation” among other instances. However, according to some, many of these immigrants and their French-born offspring displayed little interest in integrating the French way of life, and the Front National in particular was quick to add this phenomenon to its list of grievances to which the “real French” were being subjected. France was experiencing growing pressure to move to the right and, even, to the extreme right.
On the more literary front, Antoine Bello’s, “Le Pouvoir de la fiction,” begins by contrasting French and American fiction, proposing that while French literature favors the imaginative and flights of fancy, the American equivalent seeks to anchor itself in reality. On the basis of this debatable dichotomy, the essay segues into a discussion of the distinction between fiction and truth, a distinction the author finds woefully simplistic.
Alain-Philippe Durand’s “La Partie émergée de l’iceberg: Frédéric Beigbeder,” discusses the numerous and complex influences of American literary theory and practice on one of France’s leading contemporary novelists. This analysis of Beigbeder’s post-realist aesthetics resonates with Bello’s remarks, suggesting a facet of contemporary French writing that emerges from an engagement with U.S. literary practices. Likewise, Bruno Thibault’s exploration of the “polar” genre in “L’Amérique et la mise en abyme dans trois polars francophones contemporains” turns to the U.S. not for how its political economy or history is viewed in France, but for how its literary market and popular genres provide an escape hatch from the aesthetic expectations of the French intellectual sphere for the three “polar” authors, Dicker, Bello, and Allamand.
In “American Culture’s Impact on Postwar France: A Positive Report,” William Cloonan shows how Jean Echenoz’s Cherokee (1983) defies commonly held assumptions that the French detested American cultural imports by providing an account of a successful Franco-American cooperation in the making of a film. Martin Munro’s article reads the work of Haitian artist Edouard Duval-Carrié as a form of visual translation between the Francophone Caribbean and North America, specifically Florida, the liminal space that he presents as a borderland, a site of conflict and possible creative conciliation, a creolized world that bears the traces of the common history of the plantation. The article draws mainly on selected works featured in his 2018 exhibition at Florida State University, Decolonizing Refinement, a show that drew parallels between processes of production and commodification across the plantation Americas, and which pulls North Florida into this sphere, dredging up aspects of its history that lie restless, and that are part of the “living history” that Anthony Bogues traces in Duval-Carrié’s work.
The complex set of attitudes explored in the special issue are rehearsed in Salim Bachi’s essay “De la littérature américaine en Algérie,” which both chronicles an attachment to writing by figures like Faulkner, and rejects U.S. criteria for literary canon-formation or even an idea of U.S. literature as such. The collection is completed by two interviews, with Felicia McCarren and Antoine Bello, and poetry by Abdourahman Waberi.
William Cloonan, Martin Munro, and Jeannine Murray-Román
Roger Célestin and Eliane DalMolin Editors
Guest Co-Editors
Additional information
Notes on contributors
William Cloonan
William Cloonan is the Richard Chapple Professor of Modern Languages (Emeritus) at Florida State University. His most recent book is Frères Ennemis: The French in American Literature, Americans in French Literature (Liverpool UP, 2018).
Martin Munro
Martin Munro is Winthrop-King Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Florida State University. He previously worked in Scotland, Ireland, and Trinidad. His recent publications include: American Creoles: The Francophone Caribbean and the American South (Liverpool UP, 2012); Different Drummers: Rhythm and Race in the Americas (U of California P, 2010); Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide (U of Virginia P, 2010); Haiti Rising: Haitian History, Culture, and the Earthquake of 2010 (Liverpool UP/UWI P, 2010); and Writing on the Fault Line: Haitian Literature and the Earthquake of 2010 (Liverpool UP, 2014). In 2015, he published one monograph, Tropical Apocalypse: Haiti and the Caribbean End Times (U of Virginia P, 2015), and an edited volume of Caribbean ghost stories. His translation, Over Seas of Memory by Michaël Ferrier was published in 2019 by U of Nebraska P. He is Director of the Winthrop-King Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies at Florida State.
Jeannine Murray-Román
Jeannine Murray-Román is an assistant professor of French and Spanish in the Department of Modern Languages at Florida State University where she teaches courses on Latin American literature, Francophone studies, and comparative Caribbean literatures and cultures. She is the author of Performance and Personhood in Caribbean Literature: From Alexis to the Digital Age (U of Virginia P, 2017). Her current research interests include figures of partial death in Caribbean writing, environmental justice and the debt crisis in Puerto Rico, and Fanon’s performative writing.
Roger Célestin
Roger Célestin is Professor of French and Comparative Literature and chair of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Connecticut. He has written on travel literature, detective fiction, film, and translation, among other topics. He is the author of From Cannibals to Radicals. Figures and Limits of Exoticism (U of Minnesota P, 1996), co-editor (with Isabelle de Courtivron and Eliane DalMolin) of Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1980–2001 (Palgrave/St. Martin’s, 2002), and co-author (with Eliane DalMolin) of France From 1851 to the Present: Universalism in Crisis (Palgrave, 2007).
Eliane DalMolin
Eliane DalMolin is Professor of French at the University of Connecticut. She has published numerous articles on modern and contemporary poetry and on cinema and is the author of Cutting the Body: Representing Women in Baudelaire’s Poetry, Truffaut’s Cinema, and Freud’s Psychoanalysis (U of Michigan P, 2000), co-editor (with Roger Célestin and Isabelle de Courtivron) of Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1980–2001 (Palgrave/St. Martin’s, 2002), and co-author (with Roger Célestin) of France From 1851 to the Present: Universalism in Crisis (Palgrave, 2007).