Beyond Berets and Baguettes: Re-envisioning French Cultures from Couture to Cuisine
Presented by Alison Rice
This seminar will reflect on how cinematic storytelling can enable viewers to identify stereotypes, expectations, and projections related to French culture and adopt more nuanced understandings of contemporary France, its inhabitants, and the aesthetics and attitudes that contribute to shaping this location. Our sessions will be devoted to an examination of recent films that complexify what it means to qualify someone or something as “French” today, in a period marked by migration and globalization. A variety of sources are currently contributing to the enrichment of French traditions, opening up French culture to diverse influences in areas that range from food to fashion, from music to monuments, from history to humor. Studying films that depict characters from a range of backgrounds who are presently exerting an influence in France will set the tone for an in-depth exploration of how the chic clichés that have long made up a global mindset — and set up an immense attraction for all things French — are currently being transformed, yielding to more realistic representations of French cultures, in the plural, and celebrating the ways they are flourishing at present.
About Alison Rice
Professor Alison Rice specializes in 20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone literature and film. She has published two books on French-language autobiographical writings by authors from the Maghreb. Her recent third book, Worldwide Women Writers in Paris: Francophone Metronomes (Oxford University Press, 2021), focuses on the present proliferation of women writers of French from around the world. It is accompanied by a website featuring filmed interviews with eighteen women writers of French who hail from such different locations as Senegal, Slovenia, and South Korea. She is also the editor of a recent volume titled Transpositions: Migration, Translation, Music (Liverpool University Press, 2021) that explores a wide range of innovations in Francophone film, literature, theater, and art. Alison is in her third year as Chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. Prior to taking on this position, she served as Director of the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at Notre Dame. She is a Concurrent Faculty member in Gender Studies and a Faculty Fellow of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies.