The Body, Race, and Difference in Contemporary France

3 credits · Undergraduate

In this course we will use anthropological and historical frames to think about the body and its role in everyday life, paying particular attention to the ways that ethnicity, citizenship, race and belonging are lived and experienced in contemporary France. The broad questions we will examine center on two fundamental queries: Is the differentiated body a natural or cultural fact? When and how do racializing discourses come into play in the cultural context of France? Through interdisciplinary readings, museum visits, and fieldtrips to cultural centers, students in this course will see how myriad bodily understandings and peoples' lived experiences of racial difference are conditioned by cultural norms and historical legacies that individual subjects cannot simply shed. People can, however, speak back to them and remake them in creative ways. We will be especially attentive to how the body can become a site of expression to question long-standing social structures. We will also explore the how notions of a fixed body, identity or group change by paying close attention to how colonial legacies, issues of migration, and social mobility and immobility articulate with identity. Similarly, we will explore the role of indigenous and 'primitive art' in the European imagination, as well as future possibilities for reconciliation around heritage, repatriation and new forms of political integration within France and between the hexagon and its former territories. Lastly, we will delve into how contemporary discoveries in science, technology and medicine may shift cultural understandings of the body and human difference writ large, while societal norms about what it means to be human simultaneously shape these fields in turn. Class discussion will be in French and English, depending on how students choose to express themselves.