This is a superb collection. The elegant introduction presents the current situation of French and Francophone studies with icy clarity and should become required reading. The contributors add original interdisciplinary perspectives on intellectual and cultural history, race and gender, cinema and architecture, the Caribbean, the Maghreb, and Belgium. No one working in French studies can afford to ignore this book.

Françoise Lionnet, UCLA

French Civilization and Its Discontents is a rich mosaic of French and Francophone studies in the world at large. The editors take a strong critical view both of French universalism and of the civilizing mission that had marked its colonial ambitions. They show admirably how the nation is being renewed where it folds practices that had been outside of itself into the textures of contemporary life. The book is rich, variegated, and compelling. It will further galvanize our commitment to French and Francophone studies.

Tom Conley, Harvard University

With great authority, French Civilization and Its Discontents shows why, at this moment, it is scholars outside France who are best situated to perceive the compelling political and cultural transversals that allow French history and that of the Francophone world to be thought together.

Kristin Ross, Department of Comparative Literature, New York University

This is simply the most comprehensive and compelling collection on these intersecting themes. It is bound to reconfigure French cultural studies and post/colonial histories.

David Theo Goldberg, Director, Humanities Research Institute, University of California

History doesn't stand still and French Civilization and Its Discontents provides a brilliant examination of how the state of France along with its culture, language, literature has exercised a powerful and complex influence both within and outside of its borders. This book challenges traditional notions about French history, its intellectual legacy, and its importance for a wide variety of subjects and disciplines. Stovall and Van Den Abbeele both deepen and expand the importance of interdisciplinary studies and in doing so open up new ground for understanding the landscape of global politics, and its intersection with the politics of difference and the legacy of the nation. This book should be read by both students of French civilization and everybody else interested in culture, identity, and global politics.

Henry A. Giroux, McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest

At last a book that challenges the myth of French universalism. French Civilization and its Discontents exposes the workings of an assimilationist culture that has long refused to recognize the ways in which difference has in fact shaped its national identity. These essays make a strong case for accounting the ways in which colonialism, immigration, and race have been repressed in the construction of the myth of a unified, homogeneous "France." They offer an analytic model which deconstructs the oppositions between France and its 'others,' center and periphery, metropole and colonial outpost-oppositions which have sustained inequality and discrimination for too long.

Joan W. Scott, Institute for Advanced Study