Abstracts
p. 241-245
Texte intégral
1Didier Aubert — Histoire générique et clichés de l’histoire : la Farm Security Administration revue et corrigée par Lars von Trier
2In 2003 and 2005, Danish director Lars Von Trier raised controversy with the first two instalments of his planned “USA – Land of Opportunities” trilogy. Although shot on nearly empty sound stages, Dogville and Manderlay were meant to conjure up Great Depression America, and followed a young woman’s attempts to nurture kindness, dignity and fellowship in two secluded communities she happened to stumble on while crossing the country. In both cases, her idealistic visions failed the test of reality twice. This paper looks specifically at the intrusion of “reality” at the end of Von Trier’s cruel allegories. The final credit sequences of both movies are montages of classic American documentary photographs, many of them produced by the famous Farm Security Administration. This sudden change of the movies’ visual regime (from fiction to documentary) was the focus of numerous negative comments by critics, who suggested that Von Trier’s use of these images betrayed the deeply misanthropic bend of his work, as portraits of “real” Americans were associated with cruel parables about exploitation and slavery. I offer, however, that the brutal transition from fiction film to documentary pictures is meant to question the status of FSA photographs as emblematic of 1930’s America, and more generally as icons of poverty – not only in the United States but also internationally. Von Trier’s iconoclasm brings to light the construction of the documentary imagination, the posterity of Great Depression clichés and the world-wide circulation of American visual culture.
3Paul Groth — Les minimal bungalows, ou l’inscription des valeurs de progrès de la classe moyenne dans la construction de l’habitat ouvrier (1900-1930)
4In the early 1900s, industrialists developed huge new factory areas in American cities, prompting the creation nearby of large new blue-collar residential districts. Simultaneously, middle-class reformers and commercial retailers were learning how to further a subtle revolution in the ideas, technologies, and social practices for workers’ homes. Northern California’s “minimal bungalows” — small houses, often less than 800 square feet (74 square meters) — compared to earlier worker-built cottages, record how home buyers, reformers, retailers, and builders promoted and adopted notions of a single, visually uniform, and permanent national home culture for working class America. The resulting minimal bungalow neighborhoods of 1900-1930 represent new rules for house interiors linked to parallel ideas and practices at the larger scales of yard, streetscape, block, and district.
5Richard Hutson — Renaissances américaines : de la jérémiade au western
6Tocqueville, observing the U.S. in the late 1820s, noted that America had a revolutionary culture, but also that it had really not had a revolution. It is possible that the Puritan traditions of Jeremiad sermons, as well as the secularized version of the idea of rebirth popularized by Frederick Jackson Turner, have had more to do with the idea of revolution in the U.S. than political theory. By looking at a few instances of popular culture – and notably William S. Hart’s 1916 western film Hell’s Hinges – I wish to note that the apocalyptic imagination in the U.S. is always readily available as a way of clearing the slate of the past and starting over from scratch.
7France Jaigu — La révolution pollockienne à l’épreuve de l’histoire : de Clement Greenberg au Jackson Pollock ’51 de Hans Namuth
8This papers shows how Pollock, an uncategorizable artist, came to embody the two conflicting meanings of the word ‘revolution’: although originally saluted as a great heroic breakthrough, Pollock’s art would in time be analyzed by critics as hovering on the edge of time, engaged in a circular motion. The paper will also show how a short nine-minute film shot by Hans Namuth in 1951 was ultimately responsible for restricting interpretations of Pollock’s work, framing the artist within strict chronological boundaries.
9Robert Lee — La natte coupée : l’histoire et le corps chinois-américain
10Beginning with the account of his father’s cutting his queue given by Pardee Lowe in Father and Glorious Descendent, this essay examines the complex and multivalent meanings queue cutting among Chinese men in America in the first decade of the 20th century. Queue as a marker of racial and ethnic identity had radically different meanings and associations in the United States and China and was contested for different reasons on both sides of the Pacific.
11Margaretta Lovell — Fitz Henry Lane, spectateur de l’histoire
12A brooding consciousness of history is not usually attributed to American nineteenth-century painters. We usually understand this cohort as beginning with Tocquevillian enthusiasm and unfolding into Whitmanesque exuberance as they recorded the seemingly-untouched landscapes of rural America and painted the ideology of Manifest Destiny. The painter Fitz H. Lane was different — he was unusually alert to history and to change: while painting the scene before him in his native New England he deliberately incorporated sites of vividly-remembered combat with English armies decades before and with Native Americans centuries earlier. His works also evidence a desire to participate in and endorse cultural change as it unfolded into a novel future. He grasped in particular the burgeoning importance of tourism, the visual appetite of the traveler dedicated not to activity but to looking at activity, and, in canvas form, taking home the view.
13Sanda Lwin — Une romance à message : Dark Princess de W.E.B. Du Bois et l’enjeu de la « ligne de couleur »
14Almost three decades after Du Bois first introduced well-known formulation, “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color-line,” he published his fantastical novel Dark Princess: A Romance (1928), in which he imagines the possibility of an end to white imperialism. Describing the novel to his publishers as a “romance with a message,” Du Bois envisions an allegoric resolution to the problem of the color line that is configured through an interracial and international romance. Set in the early 1920s, Dark Princess fantasizes about the fall of European empires in Asia and Africa and the overthrow of systems of racial subordination in the United States against the backdrop of a love story between a South Asian woman and an African American man. This essay considers the political prophesy Du Bois first published in Souls of Black Folk (1903) alongside the fictive prophesy he sets forth in Dark Princess, of the end of Western imperialism. Through a close reading of the novel, the essay traces Du Bois’ simultaneous turn towards internationalism as well as his continued enchantment with democracy – an as of yet unrealized democracy that we might understand as, to borrow a phrase from Jacques Derrida, a “democracy to come.” Why does Du Bois choose the genre of romance to tell a story of anti-imperial internationalism and radical democracy? What are the limits and the possibilities of Du Bois’ deployment of this particular racialized sexualized romance? Moreover, what exactly is the message of Du Bois’ “romance with a message?
15Françoise Palleau-Papin — La fragmentation des mythes nationaux dans l’écriture de David Markson et W.G. Sebald
16This paper examines the literary strategies of two contemporary writers, W.G. Sebald and David Markson, who offer a literary response to totalitarianism in their novels. By fragmenting their composition and reducing their topics to brief formulations in carefully organized succession, they dismantle their national mythologies and provide an open narrative structure, involving the reader in connecting the pieces together. We become active agents in the reading puzzle they compose, thereby taking part in their criticism of a well-rounded, total discourse which too often obfuscates the crimes of a nation.
17Ruxandra Pavelchievici — La « Révolution conservatrice » dans l’ordre socio-économique américain : mécanismes, trajectoire et forces en présence
18The objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the “Conservative Revolution” that occurred in the US socio-economic order in the 1980s resulted essentially from the combination of three forces: the rise of neoliberalism, the 1970s crisis, and the growing mobilization of business. We attempt to demonstrate that the last two of them acted as catalysts for the first one. Assuming that it is an unfinished process, we explore the evolution of the “Conservative Revolution,” and we also question its durability.
19Susan Smulyan — Une critique révolutionnaire de la consommation est-elle possible ? Romanciers et intellectuels dans l’Amérique de la guerre froide
20Between 1946 and 1960, advertising industry insiders wrote and published at least twenty three novels set in advertising agencies and eight others that took up allied institutions like television stations and public relations firms. These novels presented a sustained critique of mass culture written by the forward scouts of the culture of consumption, those who worked in advertising, broadcasting, marketing, and public relations. Working to expand the realm of consumption, advertising professionals saw, before most people, the drawbacks to a consumer culture. Their novels outlined the dishonesty of the advertising business and the meaninglessness of advertising as a profession; bemoaned the conformity of commodified life; and decried the emptiness of consumption.
21The critiques presented by the novelists have been dismissed because they occurred in popular novels or because they were formulaic. Yet, I maintain that the fiction writers’ trenchant social protests sometimes succeeded as important explorations of the individual’s place in mass culture and usually failed to present a radical alternative to the culture of consumption that they deplored. But their critiques shared these successes and failures with more well-known radicals and need to be considered alongside them.
22Laura Wexler — « La nature de l’ennemi »
23Soon after Pearl Harbor, on June 13, 1942, the Office of War Information was established within The Office of Emergency Management, precursor one might say to the current Department of Homeland Security. The job of the OWI was to coordinate information about the war that the government wanted disseminated, or controlled. The OWI both commissioned and accumulated photographs by commercial and official photographers of all the service branches, to be used in OWI exhibitions. It also acquired some photographs from official foreign outlets, and from non-military branches of the government such as the Soil Conservation Service and the Farm Security Administration.
24Many of these photographs were published in magazines such as Victory, Rural America, The Parade, and USA. But the OWI also mounted live exhibitions that attracted thousands of members of the public. Rockefeller Center was considered highly desirable as a venue on account of its generous outdoor as well as interior public spaces and, as well, the cooperative local presence of the NBC broadcasting studios. In 1943 the OWI sponsored there a six month, six-part series of exhibitions including “United Nations,” “The Nature of the Enemy,” “Sacrifice,” “Armed Forces,” “The Home Front,” and “The Issues.” They included sculptures, live performances by prison camp survivors, recorded sound, photographs, and actual artifacts of war on display, such as bombs. NBC broadcast speeches that were made as part of these events. OWI photographers made a photographic record of these exhibitions as well. Using previously unpublished photographs from the Library of Congress archives, this paper examines OWI photographs of “The Nature of the Enemy” exhibition that opened at Rockefeller Center on May 17, 1943. It analyzes the roles played by former FSA photographers such as Gordon Parks, Esther Bubley, Marjory Collins and Leo Rosten in creating and documenting these OWI exhibitions. I argue that the exhibition shows how hard the OWI photographic staff had to work during the war to “educate” the population to distinguish “the nature of the enemy” from the virtues of the “four freedoms,” so as to convince them to support the war.
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