This article is an analysis of the 2011 French comedy, Case départ, in which two contemporary black Frenchmen are sent back in time to the eighteenth-century Caribbean and endure slavery and captivity. The film is placed in the contexts (amnesic and controversial) of the historical and public memory of the French Atlantic slave trade, of the (paucity of) its cinematic representation(s), and of the cultural production of French comedy, particularly in relation to ethnic minorities. After an examination of the film’s reception in the Caribbean, the textual dimension is explored in relation to humour and the communities of laughter the film summons in relation to national identity, and to the time travel genre, via Freud, and Homi Bhabha.

This article brings together three essential elements of Jean Renoir’s masterwork, La Règle du jeu (1939): its generic instability and capacity to destabilise contemporary spectators; its mobilisation of automata and other machinic elements to activate an Enlightenment imaginary and ground its historical depth-of-field; its use of Benjaminian phantasmagoria to make sense of a period when appeal to an rational Enlightenment subject no longer seemed viable. Pulling the three elements together, the article argues that the film’s bewildering generic mix and mobilisation of an array of cultural and historical references constitute it as a phantasmagoria which confronts its spectators despite themselves with the failure and destructiveness of their civilisation. The article draws on Renoir’s La Marseillaise (1938) for comparison. A key intertext for La Règle du jeu, La Marseillaise has the kind of clear-sighted, radical, collective actor whose absence in the later film means its society is condemned to decaying stasis.

Beginning from Keith Reader’s diagnosis that the political decline of the French Communist Party (PCF) was accompanied by a drift away from Marxism, this article agrees that this intellectual movement peaked in France in the early 1980s and became less fashionable as other movements dominated the public forums. Nevertheless, it continued to be espoused by several groups of intellectuals, including groups close to the PCF and groups that were critical of it. The article explores the long twilight of French Marxism, examining some of the ways intellectuals have adapted its ideas and insights to try to understand the world as it has changed since the end of the Cold War. They include communist, structuralist, non-communist and existentialist varieties of Marxism, some of which have been influential in the English-speaking world.

Bruce Robbins has criticised Bourdieu’s account of the State and of the cultural values it promotes through its educational institutions. So all-encompassing is Bourdieu’s denunciation of the ideological nature of the State’s claims to universalism that it leaves no grounds on which to defend those values against the neo-liberal onslaught, according to Robbins. On the face of it, it is easy to refute Robbins’s criticisms: in his work of the 1980s and 1990s, Bourdieu increasingly sought to emphasize the vital role of the State as a guardian of certain universal values in opposition to neo-liberalism. Nonetheless, these late defences of the State seem to sit uneasily with Bourdieu’s earlier denunciations of what he termed ‘l’idéologie jacobine’ and his claim that it was precisely through its claims to embody universal, egalitarian values that the French Republican School could perform its objective function of naturalising and reproducing social distinctions and class divisions. This article explores the potential contradictions in Bourdieu’s approach to questions of the Sate, education, and culture, questioning to what extent he might be guilty of having thrown the baby out with the bathwater, undertaking so uncompromising a critique as to have unwittingly lent fuel to the neo-liberal onslaught he later came to oppose.

Keith Reader’s The Abject Object (2006) brought together the Lacanian concept of the phallus with the Kristevan notion of abjection to theorize representations of emasculated and failing masculinities across a range of modern French texts. This article brings Reader’s Lacanian-Kristevan model up to date with a discussion of recent developments in online cultures. The past twenty years are marked by the rise of the feminist movement known as #Metoo/ #BalanceTonPorc, the invention of the personage of the ‘incel’ (involuntary celibate) in the misogynistic corner of the internet termed ‘the Manosphere’ and, latterly, a particularly high-profile French rape trial, the Pelicot case, in which the perpetrator sought other men online to abuse his drugged wife. The article examines whether the theoretical model of masculinity Reader proposed almost 20 years ago may offer generative ways of thinking about the new crises potentiated by contemporary digital sexual cultures.

In a wonderfully-titled article published in Paragraph in 1992 – ‘How to avoid becoming a middle-aged fogey, with reference to three recent popular French films’ – Keith Reader discusses the literary-inspired, ‘determinedly non-realistic’ (97) direction of late ‘80s film-making in France, considering his chosen films as ‘symptomatic of the ideological and political watering-down of French society’ during the Mitterrand era (108). Despite later reflections from film scholars such as O’Shaughnessy (2010) noting the re-emergence of politically-engaged French cinema from 1995 onwards, by 2015 the then-editor of Cahiers du Cinema, Stéphane Delorme, would lament in a cover story for the journal the ‘vide politique’ of contemporary French cinema, resolutely restricted, as he saw it, to ‘des imageries coupées du réel’. A visual medium more traditionally associated with such a description, the bande dessinée, appears to have followed an opposing thematic trajectory to that of cinema in recent decades. Once largely restricted to juvenile subject matter – although frequently harnessed as a propaganda tool aimed at maintaining already-dominant ideologies amongst its young readerships – the Francophone bande dessinée has, since its 1990s transformation, increasingly engaged with political questions via a growing number of approaches. This chapter will consider how this art form, contrary to the recent thematic evolution of French cinema, has developed since the Mitterrand era to become, arguably, the visual medium of choice for political activism in current-day France. It will study the progression of thematic trends from the emergence of BD reportage in the mid-1990s, to the visual chronicalling of French presidential elections from the turn of the millenium onwards, before finally examining the mobilisation of the form in the last ten years as a form of artistic challenge to political decision-making in France and its adoption to this end by journalists and film-makers previously unfamiliar with bande dessinée creation.