Department of French and Italian

Taking an interdisciplinary perspective from postcolonial studies and film studies, this course will examine the representation of race and ethnicity in French cinema as a contested field of cultural production and of sociopolitical discourse. We will consider to what degree film and other audio-visual mass media (television, internet, social media) serve both to reify and to contest institutional power structures and administrative practices inherited from the colonial period, as well as deeply ingrained modes of imagining racial and ethnic difference as part of or in contradistinction to French national identity.