Postcolonial Duras: Cultural Memory in Postwar France - Hardcover

Winston, J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312240007 ISBN 13: 9780312240004

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002

Synopsis

This book transforms our understanding of Marguerite Duras and a crucial swath of 20th-century French literary and cultural history by reading each through the lens of the other. This is the first book to read Duras in relation to colonial education, colonial propaganda, the postwar radicalization of left-wing intellectuals in France, and the work of artists of the African-American and Francophone Vietnamese diasporas.

About this title

Synopsis

Taking an innovative approach, Jane Winston's "Postcolonial Duras" radically revises our understanding of both Duras and a crucial swath of French cultural and literary history by studying each one through the lens of the other. This book reads Duras's work in relation to the broad historical contexts excluded from our analytic optics since the 1950s colonial education and propaganda, the post-war, left wing political radicalization of intellectuals and their challenge to the French cultural subject and the anti-racist writings of African-American Richard Wright, as well as in relation to the fin de siecle work of Vietnamese diasporic artists Tran Anh Hung and Linda Le. Rewriting Duras into this broad historical context, establishes Wright's central role in the post-war French literary field and Duras's crucial intermediary place between the French literary and cultural fields and their Francophone successors.

Around them rises up an account of post-war France locked in the struggle for its cultural memory, as representational tools deployed in the conservative 1950s still seek to maintain their exclusions, while the ongoing displacement of peoples from the former colonies continues to transform its cultural and literary fabrics.

About the Author

JANE BRADLEY WINSTON is Assistant Professor of French at Northwestern University. Her volume, co-edited with Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier, Of Vietnam: Identities in Dialogue is forthcoming (Palgrave 2001). Winston has completed a manuscript 'White Borders and Cultural Change: the groupe de la rue Saint-Benoît' and is at work on a project concerned with Francophone women writers and filmmakers and the issue of utopia.

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0312240007
• ISBN 13: 9780312240004
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 267