FFS 355 - Cross Currents in French Culture

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2020/21b: Paris Noir. This seminar examines the contrasting roles the French capital has played for the African diaspora, its intellectuals, and its artists from the end of World War II to the present. Paris is a celebrated place of key exchanges and dialogues as well as a platform for repeated transnational theoretical and aesthetic renewal even while its centralized cultural institutions contribute to France’s persistent difficulty in shedding the country’s imperial legacy. Through a range of novels, essays, short stories, poems, films, and music, we study the transformations in francophone African and Caribbean artists’ position vis-à-vis France’s dominant cultural and historical narratives and analyze their dynamic influence in reshaping discourses of race and belonging.

Works by Aimé Césaire, Ousmane Sembène, Med Hondo, Boubacar Boris Diop, Fatou Diome, Sami Tchak, Leonora Miano, Alain Mabanckou, Françoise Vergès, and Achille Mbembe. Patricia-Pia Celerier.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: CLS