SFS 2024

french studies

Agents without Empire Mobility and Race-Making in Sixteenth-Century France

Antónia Szabari

Agents without Empire explores race making in this period of European history in the context of diplomatic reposts, travel accounts, natural history, propaganda, religious literature, poetry, theater, fiction, and cheap print. It intervenes in conversations in whiteness studies, race theory, theories of agency and matter, and the history of diplomacy and spying to offer a new account of race making in early modern Europe.

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

March 2024 23 b&w illus. 288pp

9781531506674 £29.99 PB now £20.99

Black France, White Europe

Youth, Race, and Belonging in the Postwar Era Emily Marker

Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize

Black France, White Europe shows that the interconnected history of colonial and European youth initiatives is key to explaining why, despite efforts to strengthen ties with its African colonies in the 1940s and 1950s, France became more European during those years.

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

August 2024 6 b&w hft, 1 map 276pp

9781501775888 £22.99 PB now £16.09

Before Trans

Three Gender Stories from Nineteenth-Century France

Rachel Mesch

Before the term "transgender" existed, there were those who experienced their gender in complex ways. Before Trans examines the lives and writings of Jane Dieulafoy (1850–1916), Rachilde (1860–1953), and Marc de Montifaud (1845–1912), three French writers who expressed their gender in ways that did not conform to nineteenth-century notions of femininity.

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

May 2024 360pp

9781503640122 £18.99 PB now £13.29

Chris Marker

Early Film Writings

Chris Marker

Translated by Sally Shafto

Edited by Steven Ungar

This first English translation of Marker’s early writings on film brings together reviews and essays, between 1948 and 1955, that span the topics of film style, adaptation, and wide-screen technologies, to contend with the rise of television. These texts document the emergence of Marker’s critical voice and situate him alongside André Bazin, Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard and more.

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS

August 2024 38 b&w illus 248pp

9781517913199 £18.99 PB now £13.29

Contemporary Francophone African Plays

An Anthology

Translated by Judith G. Miller, Subha Xavier, Ninon Vessier & Amelia Parenteau

Edited by Judith G. Miller

With Sylvie Chalaye

Bringing together in English translation eleven Francophone African plays dating from 1970 to 2021, this essential collection includes satirical portraits of colonizers and their collaborators alongside contemporary works questioning diasporic identity and cultural connections.

BUCKNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Series: Scènes francophones: Studies in French and Francophone Theater

May 2024 312pp

9781684485116 £47.00 PB now £32.90

Cruel Destiny and The White Negress

Two Novels by Cléante Desgraves Valcin

Cléante D. Valcin

Edited by Adam Nemmers & Jeanne Jégousso

Translated by Jeanne Jégousso

Foreword by Myriam J. A. Chancy

Cléante Desgraves Valcin (1891-1956) was Haiti’s first published female novelist. For the first time, her two acclaimed novels are available in English translation. Cruel Destiny (1929) tells the tragic love story kept apart by a dark family secret. In The White Negress (1934), a Frenchwoman moves to Haiti and discovers anti-colonial resentments.

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

June 2024 1 b&w images 336pp

9781978837584 £24.99 PB now £17.49

Fictions of Pleasure

The Putain Memoirs of Prerevolutionary

France

Alistaire Tallent

Out of eighteenth century France emerged over a dozen memoir novels of female libertines who eagerly take up sex work to pursue pleasure, wealth, and independence. In these anonymously published novels, the heroines proudly declare themselves prostitutes, or putains, and use their desire, skills they develop, and the network they create to ruin wealthy and powerful men.

UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS

January 2024 none 226pp

9781644533239 £41.00 PB now £28.70

France and Algeria

A History of Decolonization and

Transformation

Phillip Naylor

June In this revised and updated edition of his seminal work, first published over twenty years ago, Naylor expands his coverage of the decolonization era, drawing on new information while continuing to study the ever-evolving relationship between the two countries. These new additions expose the continually shifting relations of power, perception, and identity between the two states.

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

June 2024 2 maps 488pp

9781477328439 £49.00 HB now £34.30

Law, Order, and Empire

Policing and Crime in Colonial Algeria, 1870–1954

Samuel Kalman

Law, Order, and Empire outlines not only how failings in policing were responsible for decolonization in Algeria but also how torture, massacres, and quotidian colonial violence— introduced from the very beginning of French policing in Algeria—created state-directed aggression from 1870 onward.

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

March 2024 276pp

9781501774041 £47.00 HB now £32.90

Making Space

Neighbors, Officials, and North African Migrants in the Suburbs of Paris and Lyon

Melissa K. Byrnes

In Making Space, Byrnes considers how four French suburbs near Paris and Lyon reacted to rapidly growing populations of North Africans, especially Algerians before, during, and after the Algerian War. Byrnes uses local experiences to contradict a version of French migration history that reads the urban unrest of recent years as preordained.

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS

Series: France Overseas: Studies in Empire and Decolonization

January 2024 5 photographs, 3 illus., 2 maps, 6 tables, index 354pp

9781496237583 £25.99 PB now £18.19

Montaigne

Life without Law

Pierre Manent

Translated by Paul Seaton

Pierre Manent provides a careful reading of Montaigne’s three-volume work Essays, demonstrating the philosophical depth of Montaigne’s reflections and the distinctive, even radical, character of his central ideas.

UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS

Series: Catholic Ideas for a Secular World

July 2024 280pp

9780268107826 £29.99 PB now £20.99

Monuments Decolonized

Algeria's French Colonial Heritage

Susan Slyomovics

Susan Slyomovics follows the afterlives of Frenchbuilt war memorials in Algeria and those taken to France. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in both countries and interviews with French and Algerian heritage actors and artists, she analyzes the colonial nostalgia, dissonant heritage, and ongoing decolonization and iconoclasm of these works of art.

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Series: Worlding the Middle East

July 2024 330pp

9781503639485 £29.99 PB now £20.99

Porous Becomings

Anthropological Engagements with Michel Serres

Edited by Andreas Bandak & Daniel M. Knight

The contributors to Porous Becomings bring the inspirational and enigmatic world of Serres to the attention of anthropology. Through ethnographic encounters as diverse as angels and religious conversion in Ethiopia, the percolation of war in Bosnia, and incarcerated bodies crossing the Atlantic, the contributors showcase how Serres’s interrogation of the fundamentals of human existence opens new pathways for anthropological knowledge. Proposing the notion of "porosity" to characterize permeability across boundaries of time, space, literary genre, and academic discipline, they draw on Serres to map the constellations that connect humans, time, technology, and planet Earth. The volume concludes with a conversation between the editors and Vibrant Matter author Jane Bennett.

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

March 2024 5 illus 344pp

9781478030287 £25.99 PB now £18.19

Reading Typographically Immersed in Print in Early Modern France

Geoffrey Turnovsky

Exploring key evolutions in print in 17th- and 18th-century France, from typeface, print runs, and format to punctuation and the editorial adaptation of manuscript and oral forms in print, this book argues that typographic developments upholding the transparency of the printed medium were decisive for the ascendancy of immersive reading as a dominant paradigm that shaped modern perspectives on reading and literacy.

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Series: Stanford Text Technologies

June 2024 328pp

9781503637214 £63.00 HB now £44.10

Sentimental Education

The Story of a Young Man Gustave Flaubert

Translated by Raymond N. MacKenzie

This vibrant, new translation by Raymond N. MacKenzie includes an extensive critical introduction and annotations to help the modern reader appreciate Flaubert’s achievement. Sentimental Education intertwines the personal, the intimate, and the subjective with the political, social, and cultural, embedding Frédéric’s story in the larger arc of what Flaubert saw as France’s decline into mediocrity and imbecility in its politics and manners.

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS

January 2024 480pp

9781517914134 £16.99 PB now £11.89

Sentimental Empiricism Politics, Philosophy, and Criticism in Postwar France Davide Panagia

This book reconsiders the legacy of eighteenth and nineteenth century empiricism and moral sentimentalism for the generation of postwar French thinkers whose work came to dominate Anglophone conversations across the humanities under the guise of “French theory.” By exploring the complexities of this political aesthetic, Panagia shows how and why postwar French thinkers turned to a tradition of sentimental empiricism in order to develop a new form of criticism.

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

July 2024 8 b&w illus. 288pp

9781531506711 £27.99 PB now £19.59

The Ethnographic Optic

Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and the Turn Inward in 1960s French

Cinema

Laure Astourian

This book traces the surprising role of ethnography in French cinema in the 1960s and examines its place in several New Wave fictions and cinéma vérité documentaries during the the French colonial empire. Featuring some of the best-loved films of the French tradition, such as Moi, un Noir, La jetée, and Muriel, this is an essential book for readers interested in national identity and cinema.

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Series: New Directions in National Cinemas

June 2024 87 color illus., 50 b&w illus. 264pp

9780253069597 £34.00 PB now £23.80

The Harlequin Eaters From Food Scraps to Modernism in Nineteenth-Century France

Janet Beizer

In The Harlequin Eaters, Beizer investigates how the alimentary harlequin evolved in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the earlier Commedia dell’arte Harlequin character. By superimposing figurations of the edible harlequin Beizer shows what is at stake in nineteenth-century discourses surrounding this. The Harlequin Eaters also offers fascinating background to today’s problems of food inequity as it unpacks stories of the for-profit recycling of excess food across class and race divisions.

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS

April 2024 24 b&w illus. and 39 color plates

352pp

9781517915902 £25.99 PB now £18.19

The Intruder

Jean-Luc Nancy Foreword by Claire Denis

In 1991, Jean-Luc Nancy's heart gave out. In one of the first such procedures in France, a stranger's heart was grafted into his body. During this same period, Europe began closing its borders to those seeking refuge from war and poverty. Nancy set out in The Intruder to articulate how intrusion—whether of a body or a border—is not antithetical to one’s identity but constitutive of it.

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

April 2024 3 b&w illus 96pp

9781531506186 £16.99 PB now £11.89

The Niqab in France Between Piety and Subversion Agnès De Féo Translated by Lindsay Turner

Albertine Translation Fund and Prizes

The Niqab in France introduces a group of women each with her own life story, her own share of personal struggles, aspirations, and desires, and her own claim to a certain place in society.

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

February 2024 25 b&w illus. 208pp

9781531504649 £25.99 PB now £18.19

The Pedagogical Writings of Marguerite Long

A Reassessment of Her Impact on

the

French School of Piano John Ellis

Marguerite Long, the most important French female pianist of the 20th century, left her stamp on a whole epoch of musical life in Paris. The Pedagogical Writings of Marguerite Long presents English translations of the two major contributions of Marguerite Long to the literature of piano pedagogy.

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

March 2024 4 b&w photos, 2 line drawings, 1327 printed music items 344pp

9780253068576 £72.00 HB now £50.40

Worlds Built to Fall Apart Versions of Philip K. Dick David Lapoujade Translated by Erik Beranek

In this book, Lapoujade defines sci-fi as a way of thinking through the creation of worlds and argues that Dick does so by creating worlds that fall rapidly to pieces. Orienting Dick within philosophy and drawing connections to a wide variety of other thinkers and artists, this remarkable reading shows how he proposes unstable, fluctuating futures in which tinkering with reality has become the best means of resisting total control. Engaging with most of Philip K. Dick’s published works, Lapoujade hones in on the “war of the psyches” that underlies Dick’s critique of reality.

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS

Series: Univocal

June 2024 176pp

9781517914615 £22.99 PB now £16.09