Editors’ Introduction

Un médium n’est pas un moyen ou un matériau « propre ». C’est une surface de conversion : une surface d'équivalence entre les manières de faire des différents arts, un espace idéal d’articulation entre ces manières de faire et des formes de visibilité et d'intelligibilité déterminant la manière dont elles peuvent être regardées et pensées.

—Jacques Rancière, Le destin des images

Almost 60 years ago, in Understanding Media (1964), Marshall McLuhan coined the prescient phrase, “the medium is the message” and provoked debates in communications studies and the arts more broadly that continue to this day. The apparent straightforwardness of the declaration has meant that it has arguably received more attention than the larger work of which it is but the opening chapter. Its place in the zeitgeist is so secure, in fact, that it is cited by some dictionaries as an exemplary definition of “medium.” Indeed, McLuhan’s catchphrase was an invitation to think through the entanglements of “medium” and “message” and especially the blurred boundaries between materiality and immateriality, producer and consumer. By focusing on medium as more than simple conveyor, it is perhaps easy to overlook McLuhan’s insistence that content, be it the written word or even spoken language itself, was also another kind of medium. Thus, language is an “extension of man,” as the subtitle makes clear. This is why, even as he foresaw the future era of mass communication, characterized by incessant flows of intermedial and multimodal texts, images, and sounds, transmitted and consumed across an array of platforms and devices, McLuhan cannot be reduced to a technological determinist.

Some forty years later, in Le destin des images (2003), Jacques Rancière sought to dispel the persistent notion that the material or technological properties of a given media determine the meaning of its content. Like McLuhan, when talking about what a medium is or is not, Rancière starts with a declarative sentence, this time in the negative: “un médium n’est pas un moyen ou un matériau propre,” he writes (87, emphasis added). What matters is not the physical qualities of a medium, like a book, screen, or a piece of canvas but rather, he continues, “une surface de conversion” (87). The movement that Rancière locates in medium as a “surface”—between “les manières de faire des différents arts… et des formes de visibilité et d’intelligibilité déterminant la manière dont elles peuvent être regardées et pensées” (88)—is relational, in the sense that visual processes of perceiving a painting or a film are also shaped by the discursive and linguistic norms and practices of a given “regime” of art. Likewise, images are not simply things seen or artistic representations in a visual field. They are “opérations : des relations entre un tout et des parties, entre une visibilité et une puissance de signification et d’affect qui lui est associé, entre des attentes et ce qui vient les remplir” (11). Rancière urges his readers to look past the binary of form and content to see what he calls “le travail de l’art” (9).

Le Destin des images belongs to a body of Rancière’s work focusing on the tight connection between aesthetics and politics. It is a collection of essays on visual arts (painting, film, architecture) that follows La fable cinématographique (2001)—which, as Tom Conley remarked, announced Rancière’s entry into “the pantheon of film theory” (96)—and just precedes Malaise dans l’esthétique (2004). These texts articulate the growing discontent that Rancière detects in media studies, schools of thought which theorize that the kind of dissent and disruption necessary to emancipatory politics has all but disappeared.

Rancière’s sustained interrogation of the complexities of mediation leads to guiding questions for a study of contemporary French and Francophone cultures. What kinds of aesthetic experiences shape and are shaped by social, political, and environmental conditions in the global francosphere? What forms of visibility, intelligibility, and affect are being mediated—creating and obscuring meaning, meeting and frustrating expectations? How do different media interact, crossing prescribed boundaries and configurations of form and expression? How do such intermediality (Rajewsky 2005) and remediation (Bolter and Grusin 1999) allow for new uses of older media, creating new communities and networks of artists, producers, and audiences? Indeed, from literature to cinema to art installations and innovative web-based platforms, we witness a real explosion of available forms and content, whose shape and reach constantly evolve with the social and technological shifts that make them possible.

The ubiquity of media platforms in daily life has created contradictory affects that are both global and also specific to French and Francophone societies for quite a long time. The very term “francophone” does remind us that the colonial heritage and its implications do play a role, and the particularities of the “French exception,” with its echoes of “tradition, prestige and high culture,” is also to be taken into account. Even when talking about the more “traditional” forms of print culture—be it literature, comics, or essayistic genres—we encounter all sorts of issues concerning the social politics of media participation. Sometimes, the adoption of the French language itself gives rise to important critical questions, in terms of register, regional inflections, or generic adoption, as the author’s choices already constitute an imaginary audience.

Issues of diffusion and production are equally relevant and controversial. On the other hand, a genre such as the graphic novel has migrated through a seemingly inexhaustible variety of social and cultural Francophone contexts, from fantasy to pedagogy, from erotica to social commentary, progressively diversifying its audience in terms of gender, race, and social background.

The presence of French and Francophone cultures in the ever-expanding world of visual media has been a pioneering and consistently relevant one on a transnational scale. This is true both at artistic and critical levels. Cinema, of course, is the most exemplary case in point, as Rancière’s writings at the turn of the millennium make clear. And yet, newer forms such as television and an increasingly diversified array of streaming and digital platforms attest to a highly idiosyncratic and quite distinctive development in the French cultural landscape. Maybe more interestingly, we are starting to see how a certain level of hybridization is occurring between traditional and more innovative media platforms. Literary classics—such a staple of the French education system—have been revived as graphic novels or video games, after decades of cinematic and televised adaptations. Within the novel itself, new media are present at the level of both content and form, as various forms of messaging make their appearance in the modalities of literary dialogue. This creative intermedial transformation might be capable of ensuring the survival of the literary in its more traditional forms well into the 21st century, although it is hard to gauge its hold on the newer generations.

The promise of hybridization was kept also in the organization of the 2022 annual French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium: while costly and technically complex, the fact that the attendees could participate either in person or remotely made possible a variety of interventions from people who could not have contributed otherwise. From slam research sessions to virtual “mixers,” the organizers made the most of the potentialities implicit in the new media landscape, using them as an expressive rather than anxiety-creating feature of our current cultural and social paradigm. Once again, we are reminded of Jacques Rancière’s position vis-à-vis media culture, firmly rooted in the belief that the interaction between different media is always happening, as he considers them as surfaces of “conversion,” all engaged in making visible and intelligible our aesthetic worlds.

This double issue of Contemporary French and Francophone Studies / SITES comprises a selection of papers from the colloquium, hosted by the Department of French and Italian at the University of Pittsburgh. The two volumes are organized thematically, around five main clusters: film and visual art, graphic novels, new digital media, literature and music, and literature and cultural politics. The first volume collects the articles that consider the first three clusters, including documentary film and film theory (Richard McLaughlin on Chris Marker; Marcus Dominick on Agnès Varda; Catherine Webster on Varda and Catherine Frot; Rosemarie Scullion on Jean Grémillon and Robert Ménégoz; Marie Kondrat on the male gaze in French theory), feature films, television, photography, and public art (Emily Wieder on the cinema of Germaine Dulac; Haniyeh Pasandi on Maghrebi cinema; Salvador Lopez Rivera on the television series by Édouard Louis and Michaela Coel; Perrine Gaudry on queer photography; Sophia Khadraoui-Fortune on monumental commemoration of the abolition of slavery), graphic novels (Cristina Álvares on Denis Lapière, Eduard Torrents, and Bruno Loth; Isabelle Chen on Alain Munoz, Henri Fabuel, and Jean-Marie Minguez; and Elke Defever on Jacques Ferrandez), and new digital media (Odome Angone on Selma Sardouk’s podcast; and René Audet on digital literary anthologies).

The second volume includes contributions addressing the remaining two clusters: literature and music (Julia Praud on Henri Lopes and jazz; Casja Zerhouni on music in Assia Djebar and Leïla Sebbar; Hollie Harder on Proust and Beethoven; and Francesca Aiuti on French rap music as “néolittérature”), and finally literature and cultural politics (Pat Nikiema on literature of African utopias; Donald Joseph on Bahaa Trabelsi’s queer Maghrebi literature; Corentin Lahouste on Muriel Pic’s poetic plurimateriality; Sean Singh Matharoo on Marie Darrieussecq and science fiction; Chase Cormier on Cajun food writing; Alina Cherry on the journal writings of Dany Laferrière and Ryoko Sekiguchi; Frédérique Chevillot on black women authors and antiracist literature; Amin Erfani on Jean Genet and the act of writing and its relationship to death; and Bernadette Cailler and Alexis Chauchois on the writings of Michaël Ferrier).

Altogether, these contributions show that the old question of the relation between form and content is sure to remain challenging and relevant in the forever changing mediascape of French and Francophone cultures.

Giuseppina Mecchia, John P. Walsh
Guest Co-Editors
Roger Célestin, Eliane DalMolin
Editors

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Giuseppina Mecchia

Giuseppina Mecchia is Associate Professor of French and Italian at the University of Pittsburgh. Her work is situated at the crossroads of esthetics, cultural and literary critique, philosophy and political theory on authors such as Jacques Rancière, Marcel Proust, Stendhal, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Madame de Duras and Michel Houellebecq. In Film studies, she has published on the cinema of Raoul Ruiz, Michael Haneke, and Paolo Sorrentino. She is now working on a book on the politics of the sublime in 19^th and 20^th century French literature and cinema.

John P. Walsh

John P. Walsh is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of two books: Free and French in the Caribbean: Toussaint Louverture, Aimé Césaire, and Narratives of Loyal Opposition (Indiana UP, 2013) and Migration and Refuge: An Eco-Archive of Haitian Literature, 1982–2017, (Liverpool UP, 2019). He is at work on a third book project, “Climate Fictions of the Global South.”

Roger Celestin

Roger Célestin is Professor emeritus of French & Comparative Literary and Cultural 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 emerita 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 Cultures 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).