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.