American Culture’s Impact on Postwar France: A Positive Report

Abstract

This essay reads Jean Echenoz’s Cherokee as a novel that challenges the commonly held French belief during the Cold War that the American cultural invasion (food, movies, household appliances, clothing) along with the rampant consumerism these products encouraged, were a major threat to traditional French values. By turning his novel into a parodic form of a ciné-roman, Echenoz shows how the American Way of Life can relatively easily be absorbed into the French equivalent without doing serious harm to the latter.