Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture

As we currently define it in our faculties and course work, the study of contemporary French culture and literature separates metropolis from colonies: students specialize in “Francophone studies,” geographically defined, or in a “French Studies” that knows nothing west of Bordeaux or south of Marseilles. Although French departments in the United States have taken the lead over universities in France in their study of francophonie (a familiarity with writers and filmmakers such as Assia Djebar or Sembène Ousmane is no longer surprising in an American undergraduate French major), the danger is twofold: first, that the literature and art emanating from the former French colonies will be diminished by the separate sphere of study, and second, that the experience of empire will be effaced from the analysis of the metropolis itself.

The innovation and import of Kristin Ross’s Fast Cars, Clean Bodies is to have made the experience of colonization, and decolonization, matter for the cultural study of postwar metropolitan France. “How . . . does one represent a kind of newly omnipresent capitalist culture . . . as omnipresent while at the same time evoking the uneven development, the exclusions, on which such culture is necessarily based?” (137) This is the challenge Ross attributes to 1950s and 1960s novelists, filmmakers, and photographers (Claire Etcherelli, Georges Perec, Christiane Rochefort, Jacques Tati, René Jacques) who represent French modernization in a realist mode. It is a challenge she meets in her own study.

In readings that range from witty to deeply troubling, Ross is able to extricate the deep psychic themes of the era: an obsession with hygiene (a clean body, and an unclean colonial other), the media phenomenon of the “power couple,” the automobile as a metonym for Americanization, a new man (structuralist intellectual, or technocrat cadre), a conception of space dependent—but not always consciously so—on the drama of decolonization implicit in so much of the cultural production of the era. One of the pleasures in reading Fast Cars, Clean Bodies is to follow the ebb and tide between argument and description. On the one hand, the book is structured around a series of strongly argued historical theses (Perec’s “grand H” of History). On decolonization: Algeria is the “monstrous and distorted double” (108) of a privatizing French metropolis. The erasure of the colonizing experience from French consciousness is at the base of the neoracist consensus today. On mass culture: magazine reading, Ross argues, united a massive French urban middle class at “the dawning of image culture” (12). On postwar intellectual life: intellectuals took refuge in an ahistorical structuralism and in “the death of man” (163) at the very moment when liberation movements in the colonies were announcing the birth of a new man; Annales School historians eschewed the studies of events for the longue durée (long duration) at a time when events themselves (two world wars and a messy decolonization) were untrustworthy. Ross believes that the hegemony of the social sciences in French intellectual life after 1950 was tied up more generally with intellectuals wanting to get outside history and outside time in their approach to their subjects. (And, by implication, if today’s neoliberal French theorists can argue for the end of history, or the end of ideology, it is because the social, cultural, and intellectual conditions for such an emptying-out arose in the period and in the manner she describes.)

Surrounding this argumentative structure is a sensitivity in the writing to what is lingering and poetic in the novels and films—indeed, in daily life itself—that make up her corpus of modernity: a woman’s mindless gesture of reaching for the car radio in Sagan’s Aimez-vous Brahms; refrigerators like so many beached whales in Il sorpasso; the “cargo-cult-like, sudden descent of large appliances into war-torn French households and streets in the wake of the Marshall Plan” (4).

“America” takes its place in Fast Cars, Clean Bodies as the imaginary space that...