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- Author: Joseph McGonagle x
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The issue of ethnicity in France, and how ethnicities are represented there visually, remains one of the most important and polemical aspects of French post-colonial politics and society. This is the first book to analyse how a range of different ethnicities have been represented across contemporary French visual culture. Via a wide series of case studies – from the worldwide hit film Amélie to France’s popular TV series Plus belle la vie – it probes how ethnicities have been represented across different media, including film, photography, television and the visual arts. Four chapters examine distinct areas of particular importance: national identity, people of Algerian heritage, Jewishness and France’s second city Marseille.
This chapter probes several of the ways in which ethnicity in relation to France and Frenchness has been represented visually since the 1980s across a wide variety of media and sectors, including popular and auteur cinema, photography and television. It argues that, during a time of significant political and cultural debate regarding the relationship between French national identity and ethnicity, notions of French national identity across these different media have remained far from static since the 1980s. It concludes, however, that the continuing importance of whiteness as dominant cultural norm, and its links with French republican universalism as main French political philosophy, should not be underestimated.
This chapter builds on existing studies of how Algerian heritage has been represented across cinema by considering a range of case studies taken from different media, including visual arts, a TV film franchise by the director Yamina Benguigui and autobiographical trilogy by the author Leïla Sebbar. It pays particular attention to how gender and ethnicity interact in this area by focusing on works that have probed the role of women among Algerian diasporas and people of Algerian heritage more generally. As such it additionally aims to counteract the implicit focus on men and masculinity that has characterised many cinematic representations of people of Algerian heritage.
This chapter analyses how Jewishness has been represented across a wide range of works since the 1980s in French visual culture. It probes especially how contemporary Jewish experience has been represented via photography and popular cinema, but also considers films set during the Occupation era, which foreground anti-Semitism and interrogate the legacies of history and memory of World War Two in contemporary France.
By considering a range of different works from across contemporary visual culture, this chapter explores in detail how Marseille – and the ethnicities of its inhabitants – has been represented since the 1980s. It assesses the extent to which case studies taken from auteur and popular cinema, photography and television soap opera both conform with – and deviate from – traditional visions of this Mediterranean metropolis. It argues that Marseille has increasingly been deployed as a means by which to showcase ethnic diversity in contemporary France and French visual culture.