Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (October Books) [Paperback]

Kristin Ross (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0262680912 | ISBN-13: 978-0262680912 | Publication Date: February 28, 1996

Fast Cars, Clean Bodies examines 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 October Book

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A rare example of cultural studies done with zest as well asdepth...this must be the first book to make a firm linkbetween [Jacques Tati"s] Monsieur Hulot"s Holiday and[Roland Barthe"s] Mythologies." New Statesman & Society

About the Author

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.

Product Details

• Paperback: 380 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (February 28, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262680912
• ISBN-13: 978-0262680912
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #530,929 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Concise and entertaining study, July 13, 2003

By 

M. Owen (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (October Books) (Paperback)

This book does a good job of analyzing themes of modernization, Americanization, and construction of a new French identity in the period c.1955-65. A non-academic reader may be put off by the opening chapter, but after that should be able to follow the author's examples and arguments. Much of the book deals with movies, novels, magazines, and advertisements and how they display the author's themes (film stills, photos, and advertisements dot the book). In the final chapter the author moves on to discussions of theoretical work of the period. I was particularly interested in the (Marxist) critique of Structuralism and how it reflects the technocratic, "post-historical" mindset illustrated earlier in the book. This raises interesting questions of how radical thinkers from that tradition can become, although the author doesn't follow this thread to later decades. The clearest connections the author draws to present-day France are in attitudes to minorities, a point re-enforced at several points in the text.

The main quibble I have with the book is that the process of decolonization could be dealt with in greater depth. There are sections on theorists of decolonization and Algerians migrating to France, but only brief mentions of pied noirs moving to France and post-62 relations with the former colonies. Apart from that, the author successfully explores the themes raised in the text.

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fast Book, Clean Writing, August 23, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (October Books) (Hardcover)

From the Jean Baudrillard school of concise and sexy theory comes Kristin Ross's book on French culture, a culture confronted with American post-war consumerism, cars, couples, L'Express magazine, structuralism as well as the political decolonialization of Algeria and other former colonies. In this substantial inter-disciplinary work, Ross interrogates films (Mon Oncle, Pierrot le Fou, Un Homme et Une Femme) and advertisements ("Tout s'y reflete") that reflect (Tout s'y reflete) the rapid colonialization of the every day life of the French bourgeois. A sound resource for students of French history or culture, Francophonephiles, or just the average person wanting an intelligent, direct book on an extensive and interesting topic, will not need to look further than Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, which gives good clean intellectual mileage per the word.