Representations of Violence, Displacement, and Gender in Post-World War II France

FAIN: HB-251216-17

Sandrine Sanos
Texas A & M University, Corpus Christi (Corpus Christi, TX 78412-5503)

Completion of a book on the cultural and intellectual history of war and violence in post-World War II France.

This book is a cultural and intellectual history of political imagination in Cold War France from 1954 to 1967. It analyzes how war, genocide and displacement shaped political ideas and cultural identities in a "postwar" time rife with conflicts in France and abroad. While in the shadow of the Holocaust, the French empire was consumed by violence--especially the bloody and brutal Algerian War of Independence. This interdisciplinary project explores how two groups (Francophone writers and artists who had migrated to France after experiencing war, genocide, or torture as well as French anti-colonial authors) proposed new ways of thinking about political community and belonging. The gendered rhetoric they used anchored their vision of politics and framed how injured and violated bodies were discussed. While most histories of the postwar tend to cast war and displacement as exceptional, this project shows how they are central to political imagination in a post-colonial global society.