Fast Cars, Clean Bodies Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture

by Ross, Kristin

• ISBN13: 9780262680912
• ISBN10: 0262680912
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-02-28
• Publisher: The MIT Press

Summary

Winner, 1997 Laurence Wylie Prize, Association for French Culture. and Critics' Choice Award, Today's First Edition and San Francisco Review of Books. Fast Cars, Clean Bodiesexamines the crucial decade from Dien Bien Phu to the mid-1960s when France shifted rapidly from an agrarian, insular, and empire-oriented society to a decolonized, Americanized, and fully industrial one. In this analysis of a startling cultural transformation Kristin Ross finds the contradictions of the period embedded in its various commodities and cultural artifacts - automobiles, washing machines, women's magazines, film, popular fiction, even structuralism - as well as in the practices that shape, determine, and delimit their uses. In each of the book's four chapters, a central object of mythical image is refracted across a range of discursive and material spaces: social and private, textual and cinematic, national and international. The automobile, the new cult of cleanliness in the capital and the colonies, the waning of Sartre and de Beauvoir as the couple of national attention, and the emergence of reshaped, functionalist masculinities (revolutionary, corporate, and structural) become the key elements in this prehistory of postmodernism in France. Modernization ideology, Ross argues, offered the promise of limitless, even timeless, development. By situating the rise of "end of history" ideologies within the context of France's transition into mass culture and consumption, Ross returns the touted timelessness of modernization to history. She shows how the realist fiction and film of the period, as well as the work of social theorists such as Barthes, Lefebvre, and Morin who began at the time to conceptualize "everyday life," laid bare the disruptions and the social costs of events. And she argues that the logic of the racism prevalent in France today, focused on the figure of the immigrant worker, is itself the outcome of the French state's embrace of capitalist modernization ideology in the 1950s and 1960s. An OctoberBook

Author Biography

Kristin Ross is Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University. She is the author of The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(14)
La Belle Americaine	15	(56)
Car History	15	(7)
Moving Pictures	22	(32)
Cars, Couples, and Careers	54	(17)
Hygiene and Modernization	71	(52)
Housekeeping	71	(34)
Keeping House	105	(18)
Couples	123	(34)
The Great Divorce	123	(3)
The Making of the New French Middle Class	126	(19)
Neobourgeois Space	145	(12)
New Men	157	(40)
New Men and the Death of Man	157	(8)
Cadres	165	(11)
Immobile Time	176	(21)
Notes	197	(36)
Selected Bibliography	233	(18)
Selected Filmography	251	(4)
Index	255