What happens when the study of French is no longer coterminous with the study of France? French Civilization and Its Discontents explores the ways in which considerations of difference, especially colonialism, postcolonialism, and race, have shaped French culture and French studies in the modern era. Rejecting traditional assimilationist notions of French national identity, contributors to this groundbreaking volume demonstrate how literature, history, and other aspects of what is considered French civilization have been shaped by global processes of creolization and differentiation. This book ably demonstrates the necessity of studying France and the Francophone world together, and of recognizing not only the presence of France in the Francophone world but also the central place occupied by the Francophone world in world literature and history.

Tyler Stovall is the author of France Since the Second World War (2002), Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (1996), and The Rise of the Paris Red Belt (1990). He is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. Georges Van Den Abbeele, author ofTravel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau (1992) and translator of Jean-Fran_ois Lyotard's major works, is Director of the Davis Humanities Institute and Professor of French and Italian at the University of California, Davis.

Chapter 1 The Intelligentsia and New Conceptions of French IdentityChapter 2 The Marginality of Michel de CerteauChapter 3 Disorienting Le Corbusier: Charles Edouard Jeanneret's 1911 Voyage d'OrientChapter 4 France in the WildernessChapter 5 Opacity in the Films of Claire DenisChapter 6 Black Diaspora and CréolisationChapter 7 The French Language in the Face of CreolizationChapter 8 Kojève and Fanon: the Desire for Recognition and the Fact of BlacknessChapter 9 Historically Particular Uses of a Universal SubjectChapter 10 For a Caribbean Intertext: On Some Readings of Maryse Condé's Crossing the MangroveChapter 11 Hereditary Antagonism: Race and Nation in Maurice Casseus's ViejoChapter 12 Orientalism and the Maghrebian Presence in Post-Colonial FranceChapter 13 Nationalism, Colonialism, and Ethnic Discourse in the Construction of French IdentityChapter 14 French Identity, Islam, and North Africans: Colonial Legacies, Post-Colonial RealitiesChapter 15 Social Dynamics in Colonial Algeria: The Question of Pieds-Noirs IdentityChapter 16 Remembering the Jews of AlgeriaChapter 17 Miscegenation, Degeneration, and other Metropolitan AnxietiesChapter 18 Love, Labor, and Race: Colonial Men and White Women in France during the Great WarChapter 18 Decadence/Degeneration/Créolité:Rachilde's La JongleuseChapter 20 The Children of Belgium