Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.