By Kristin Ross
This paintings examines the the most important decade from Dien Bien Phu to the mid-1960s whilst France shifted speedily from an agrarian, insular, and empire-oriented society to a decolonized, Americanized, and completely commercial one. during this research of a startling cultural transformation, Kristin Ross unearths the contradictions of the interval embedded in its quite a few commodities and cultural artifacts - autos, washing machines, women's magazines, movie, renowned fiction, even structuralism - in addition to within the practices that form, ensure, and delimit their makes use of. In all the book's 4 chapters, a critical item of legendary photograph is refracted throughout various discursive and fabric areas: social and personal, textual and cinematic, nationwide and foreign. the auto, the hot cult of cleanliness within the capital and the colonies, the waning of Sartre and de Beauvoir because the couple of nationwide realization, and the emergence of reshaped, functionalist masculinities (revolutionary, company, and structural) turn into the main parts during this prehistory of postmodernism in France. Modernization ideology, Ross argues, provided the promise of unlimited, even undying, improvement. through situating the increase of "end of historical past" ideologies in the context of France's transition into mass tradition and intake, Ross returns the touted timelessness of modernization to background. She indicates how the realist fiction and picture of the interval, in addition to the paintings of social theorists reminiscent of Barthes, Lefebvre, and Morin who begun on the time to conceptualize "everyday life," laid naked the disruptions and the social expenses of occasions. and she or he argues that the good judgment of the racism everyday in France this day, occupied with the determine of the immigrant employee, is itself the end result of the French state's embody of capitalist modernization ideology within the Fifties and Nineteen Sixties.
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Additional info for Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (October Books)
Sample text
It was a revolution that permeated every aspect of everyday life: the automobile at this time became the center at once ora new ''sublime" everydayness, a new subjectivity (whose circumference. unlike that of domestic subjectivity, is nowhere and everywhere), and of a new conception of nation. And it was a revolution that saw Page 23 the dismantling of all earlier spatial arrangements, the virtual end of the historic city, ill a physical and social restructuring that matched the transformations of a hundred years earlier.
The richness of the reflexive discourse surrounding the car, perhaps more than the car's material ubiquity, points to a particular historical situation. In fact, the centrality of the car in movies, novels, in the print consciousness of the period to a large extent precedes the car's becoming commonplace in French life. As such, the discourse, on the whole, is futuristic: anticipatory and preparatory in nature, fascinated or horrified, but generally permeated with anxiety. In 1961, only one in eight French people (as opposed to one in three Americans) owned a car.
The unusual swiftness of French postwar modernization seemed to partake of the qualities of what Braudel has designated as the temporality of the event: it was headlong, dramatic, and breathless. The speed with which French society was transformed after the war from a rural, empire-oriented, Catholic country into a fully industrialized, decolonized, and urban one meant that the things modernization needededucated middle managers, for instance, or affordable automobiles and other "mature" consumer durables, or a set of social sciences that followed scientific, functionalist models, or a work force of ex-colonial laborersburst onto a society that still cherished prewar outlooks with all of the force, excitement, disruption, and horror of the genuinely new.