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.

Preliminary Material /Buford Norman and James Day -- France's First Revolution: Hamlet and the "Unresolved Man" of 1589 /George Hoffmann -- On Civility: The Model of Sparta in Montaigne's "Defence de Seneque et de Plutarque" /Sue W. Farquhar -- Of Cannibals, Credo, and Custom: Jean de Léry's Calvinist View of Civilization in Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Bresil (1578) /Scott D. Juall -- Bien m'en avés rendu le conte: Redeeming economies in Yvain /Marcella Munson -- La Civilisation du goût: Savoir et saveur à la table de Louis XIV: (ou, Gastéréa et l'histoire de la cuisine française au dix-septième siècle) /Béa Aaronson -- Un idéal de la culture française entre humanisme et classicisme: "civiliser la doctrine" /Emmanuel Bury -- De la société de salon à la société de cour: l'ambivalence du processus de civilisation /Sophie Rollin -- Les traces ineffaçables de la civilisation dans Paul et Virginie /Murielle Perrier -- Work, Machines, and Vapors in Late Eighteenth-Century France /Laura Balladur -- La représentation des populations noires dans l'œuvre de Paul Morand: enjeux idéologiques et politiques /Nicolas Di Méo -- Roman et société dans la France contemporaine /Denise Brahimi -- L'image de la France dans le dialogue de Gaulle-Sirius: Suprématie politique et leadership humaniste /Liliane Ayad Toss -- Civilité: une certaine modalité du vivre-ensemble /Hélène Merlin-Kajman.

Hip-Hop en Français charts the emergence and development of hip-hop culture in France, French Caribbean, Québec, and Senegal from its origins until today. With essays by renowned hip-hop scholars and a foreword by Marcyliena Morgan, executive director of the Harvard University Hiphop Archive and Research Institute, this edited volume addresses topics such as the history of rap music; hip-hop dance; the art of graffiti; hip-hop artists and their interactions with media arts, social media, literature, race, political and ideological landscapes; and hip-hop based education (HHBE). The contributors approach topics from a variety of different disciplines including African and African-American studies, anthropology, Caribbean studies, cultural studies, dance studies, education, ethnology, French and Francophone studies, history, linguistics, media studies, music and ethnomusicology, and sociology. As one of the most comprehensive books dedicated to hip-hop culture in France and the Francophone World written in the English language, this book is an essential resource for scholars and students of African, Caribbean, French, and French-Canadian popular culture as well as anthropology and ethnomusicology.

Volume 39 of FLS French Literature Series features ten articles on the topic of the environment in French and Francophone Literature and Film. Contributors engage with the work of such authors, filmakers and cartoonists as Michel Serres, Luc Ferry, Patrice Nganang, Marie Darrieussecq, Yann-Arthus Bertrand and Plantu, and such topics as human zoos, eco-colonialism, queer theory, and the environmental catastrophes of WWI and, globally, of human civilization as recorded in the recent eco-documentary, HOME. Wide-ranging, provocative and topical these articles both broaden and deepen the efficacy of ecocriticism as a tool for enriching our understanding of the field beyond the English and American “nature writing” at the theory’s core.

Recasting French literary history in terms of the cultures and peoples that interacted within and outside of France's national boundaries, this volume offers a new way of looking at the history of a national literature, along with a truly global and contemporary understanding of language, literature, and culture. The relationship between France's national territory and other regions of the world where French is spoken and written (most of them former colonies) has long been central to discussions of "Francophonie." Boldly expanding such discussions to the whole range of French literature, the essays in this volume explore spaces, mobilities, and multiplicities from the Middle Ages to today. They rethink literary history not in terms of national boundaries, as traditional literary histories have done, but in terms of a global paradigm that emphasizes border crossings and encounters with "others." Contributors offer new ways of reading canonical texts and considering other texts that are not part of the traditional canon. By emphasizing diverse conceptions of language, text, space, and nation, these essays establish a model approach that remains sensitive to the specificities of time and place and to the theoretical concerns informing the study of national literatures in the twenty-first century.

French Cultural Studies for the Twenty-First Century brings together current scholarship on a diverse range of topics—from French postcards and Third Republic menus to Haitian literary magazines and representation of race in vaudeville theater—in order to provide methodological insight into the current practice of French cultural studies. The essays in the volume show how scholars of French studies can effectively analyze what we term “non-traditional sources” in their historical and geographical contexts. In doing so, the volume offers a compelling vision of the field today and maps out potential paradigms for future research. This bookbuilds upon previous scholarship that defined the stakes of using an interdisciplinary approach to analyze cultural objects from France and Francophone regions and aims to evaluate the current state of this complex and constantly evolving field and its current methodological practices.