Research and Innovation

Co-edited with Karine Bertrand (Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada), this special issue focuses on the tensions between local, national and transnational as they are expressed, and shape Québec cinema and (new) media since 2000. Re-examining the role of nationalism within Québec evolving culture, exploring increasingly diverse and inclusive representations of Québec, and constantly redefining what it means to be "Québécois," Québec cinema and (new) media are evolving under the influence of new global tendencies while remaining deeply preoccupied with defining and redefining itself.

Browne’s analysis of the film Opera Aoi, which premiered at Hyper Japan in London in 2014, reveals the artistic possibilities and limitations of the combination of bunraku puppetry and Vocaloid music within the film. She argues that Opera Aoi suggests that these technologies, whether the centuries old bunraku or the 21st century Vocaloid, requires a human element to reach its expressive potential.

This invited conference at the Université de Bretagne in May 2021 examined the transnational experience of Raoul de Roussy de Sales, who covered events in the United States for the French press at the beginning of World War II. A bi-national French/American writer and intellectual, Roussy became an influential figure in France-United States cultural and diplomatic relations. As the author of articles published in The Atlantic Monthly and other north American outlets, he provided a bi-cultural view on the American experience. A version of this conference will be published in proceedings in 2022.

More specifically, this article examines the thematic and aesthetics implications of ennui in Stéphane Lafleur’s Tu Dors Nicole (2014) and Rafael Ouellet’s Gurov & Anna (2014) to better understand this new trend in the post-referendum Quebec context of the new millennium, which is simultaneously marked by weariness in the face of the question of national sovereignty, and an acceleration of cultural and economic globalization. To do so, I will first look at how ennui shapes films from the Quebec New Wave; I will then see how the films Tu Dors Nicole and Gurov & Anna both approach the question of ennui differently by questioning concepts of realism, reality, fantasy, and fiction; and finally I will explore the centrality of ennui in the Quebec New Wave in connection with the current socio-political conjuncture of Quebec. Full reference: “Cinéma indé et esthétique de l’ennui dans le renouveau du cinéma québécois,” Contemporary French Civilization, vol. 44, nos. 2-3, 2019, pp. 201-219.

This essay focuses on the representation of the worker in one of the major examples of Italian political cinema—The Working Class Goes to Heaven (Elio Petri, 1971)—by proposing an approach that looks at the worker as a figure. The essay argues that a figure should be understood as the point of dialectical articulation between figuration and its opposite, namely, disfiguration. A figure comes into existence as the intersection between a form and its undoing, and is best described as a process in which figuration and disfiguration are not in a reciprocal position of inoperative externality, but one participates in and presupposes the other and vice versa. By way of this dialectic, the image doesn’t just aim to represent reality, but thinks the possibility of the emergence of a political subject. In Petri’s film, this political subject—the worker—is at the same time the protagonist of radical political struggle and the victim of an irreversible crisis due to the capitalist restructuring of production. In this quasi-schizophrenic split the essay locates the snapshot of the decline of a once-hegemonic figure that is slowly losing its centrality with the advent of a new form of capitalist organization.

This article assesses the creation of an enemy image of France and the French in the United States in two separate historical contexts. Although France and the United States have usually enjoyed rather positive relations throughout history after the signing of the Treaty of Amity and Commerce in 1778, the French were widely depicted as America’s enemy during the late 1790s Quasi-War, and more recently after France refused to support U.S. military intervention in Iraq in 2003-2004. In the first instance, an undeclared naval war opposed the two countries as the French government allowed for seizure of American ships in the wake of the 1795 Jay Treaty the US had signed with Great Britain, a conflict which escalated when U.S. navy later began to fight the French in the Caribbean. In 2003-2004, an acute diplomatic crisis induced a confrontation between the two nations when France suggested it would use its veto power to block passage of a United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing a U.S.- led military operation against Iraq. The aim of this study is to provide an understanding of the process through which the image of France was transformed, in both historical contexts, from that of ally and friend into that of a threatening other. Particular attention is paid to the creation and use of cultural stereotypes in statements by American officials, as well as in the media campaigns that characterized both diplomatic crises. Although the enemy image of France underwent significant changes between 1797 and 2003, our research shows that a number of cultural stereotypes that were created during the Quasi-War were revived during the 2003 diplomatic crisis. Chief amongst those is the association of France with terror and tyranny. This article also examines the deep political divisions that pitted Federalists against Republicans in the 1790s, and Neo-Conservative “hawks” against anti-war “doves” in 2003. These disputes shed light on the creation of enemy images of France in the United States. In both cases, the French antagonist was as mirror and a scapegoat that provides as much information on American identity and U.S. political debates as it does about American views on France and the French.

Modern treatments of Sufi love theory have had a pronounced tendency to disembody and "straighten" Sufi eroticism in various ways. Focusing primarily on a series of anecdotes from the hagiography of the thirteenth-century Persian poet and profligate Sufi lover, Fakhr al-Dīn ʿIrāqī, the author argues that the centrality of bodies and embodied textual performances of Sufi love theory in Sufi hagiographic works not only militates against efforts to reduce this form of desire to a disembodied or philosophical love of "beautiful forms," but it also helps us to re-embody a particular type of beloved: a same-sex beloved who often gets obscured and metaphorized out of corporeal existence in much modern scholarship. Medieval Sufi eroticism, the author concludes, should not be viewed as a rejection of the body and sexuality, but rather an effort to harness the considerable affective potency inherent in these phenomena for spiritual ends.

This article shows how François de Belleforest (1530–83) adapted a variety of historical and geographical sources to meet the demands of the histoire tragique genre in composing three narratives set in the Americas. One recounts the destiny of conquistador Francisco Pizarro; another is the story of Marguerite de Roberval, who was allegedly marooned on a Canadian island; the third concerns Taino cacique Enriquillo’s heroic rebellion in 1520s Hispaniola. These narratives fostered a tragic image of the Americas that had a considerable influence on early modern readers, inviting them to ponder essential questions about European encounters with the American continent and its inhabitants.

In June 1835, writer John Sanderson traveled to France, where he stayed until May 1836. Upon his return to Philadelphia, he published his Sketches of Paris: In Familiar Letters to His Friends by an American Gentleman, which met with great success on both sides of the Atlantic. Printed in Philadelphia in 1838, the Sketches were published in London the same year with the title The American in Paris. A few years later, French novelist Jules Janin produced a successful adaptation in two volumes. This article contends that the Sketches were written by an author whose perspective represents the paradigm of American democracy as described by Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s: Sanderson observes and attempts to understand French mores and institutions through the prism of equality of condition, decentralization, public participation in politics, social mobility, the separation of powers, and the influence of commerce and industry. The second portion of the article examines Jules Janin’s adaptation of the Sketches of Paris in his two volumes titled Un hiver à Paris and L’été à Paris. Contrary to what Janin would have his readers believe, the volumes are a very loose adaptation rather than a translation of Sanderson’s work. Whereas the American writer was highly critical of French society under the July Monarchy, Janin portrays Sanderson as an enthusiastic “Yankee,” an “American LaBruyère,” who was supposedly a fervent admirer and defender of the culture and institutions of Louis-Philippe’s France. The history and legacy of Sanderson’s Sketches represents, therefore, an intriguing form of cultural, literary, and political transference: in order to show that the July Monarchy was the logical, inevitable, and admirable outcome of French history, a French author – who, in 1870, was elected to the seat of Sainte-Beauve at the Académie française – appropriated the work of an American author who examined France through the prism of the young American democracy.

This article deals with representations of France–United States relations at the time of the treaties of Paris and Versailles (1783). It provides a study of the numerous texts and abundant iconography that dealt with the treaties in the years 1783-1784 on both sides of the Atlantic. Written from the perspective of cultural history, its goal is to go beyond traditional historiographic perspectives and show that the French and the Americans did not share the same vision of the relationship between their two nations. As the American War of Independence ended and a new world order arose, a divide soon developed between, on the one hand, an idealized vision of the French–American friendship and, on the other hand, the realities of international trade and politics. The images and representations analyzed in this study played a key role as France–United States relations were being shaped: as such, they provide important insights into interactions between the two nations in the 1780s and beyond.