This issue of Yale French Studies offers an interdisciplinary exploration of the French-speaking world during the "long" decade of the 1950s--from the Liberation (1944) to the Evian accords between France and the provisional government of Algeria (1962). The volume focuses broadly on the reshaping of national identities in these years. The unsettled landscape that emerges stands in dramatic contrast to the myth of stability that was actively constructed for the French 1950s--a product of the long-standing French tendency toward immobilisme that existed alongside social, political, and artistic ferment.
Contents
Susan Weiner Editor's Preface: The French Fifties
Anne Simonin The Right to Innocence: Literary Discourse and the Postwar Purges (1944-1953)
Debarati Sanyal Broken Engagements: Sartre, Camus, and the Question of Commitment
Michèle Cone Pierre Restany and the Nouveaux Réalistes
Winifred Woodhull Mohammed Dib and the French Question
Michael Kelly Demystification: A Dialogue Between Barthes and Lefebvre
Romy Golan L'Eternel Décoratif: French Art
in the 1950s
Richard Kuisel The Fernandel Factor: The Rivalry Between the French and American Cinema in the 1950s
Karl Britto History, Memory, and Narrative Nostalgia: Pham Duy Khiem's Nam et Sylvie
Eileen Julien Terrains de Rencontre: Césaire, Fanon, and Wright on Culture and Decolonization
Serge Guilbaut 1955: The Year the Gaulois Fought the Cowboy
Tyler Stovall The Fire This Time: Black American Expatriates and the Algerian War.