Spring 2021 Course Listing
Paris is undoubtedly the most represented foreign city in American cinema. Its neighborhoods and streets have served as a playground for generations of filmmakers, from D.W. Griffith to Sofia Coppola, from Alfred Hitchcock to Brian de Palma. Seen by Hollywood, Paris is a city with many faces. Familiar and exotic, the French capital is a place where travelers reinvent themselves. Celebrated by Hollywood cinema but also by shows such as Sex and the City or Emily in Paris, the City of Light has become a capital of world pop culture. Between tradition and modernity, our course will connect the history of American cinema with the works of Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Gaston Bachelard and Michel Foucault.
Course taught in French
Based on an interdisciplinary, intersectional, subalternist and post-colonial approach, this course is a general introduction to the history, sociology and anthropology of the economy of the sex-trade in Africa, America, Asia and Europe from the early nineteenth century to today. It aims to clarify: 1) the historiographical situation by questioning and analyzing the French regulatory system and its many avatars in Europe, the United States and in the colonial world, but also questioning the backlash to this system that consisted firstly of the abolitionist (born in England in the second half of the nineteenth century) and then the prohibitionist movements; 2) The relationship between class, “race” and gender in the sex market via issues of human trafficking and sex tourism in Europe, America, Africa and Asia; 3) The socio-economic issue - and its political connections – in the economy of sex with particular attention to individuals (prostitutes versus sex workers), their voices, their legal status, and even their mobilization (rallies and demonstrations, community collectives and trade unions, political and/or literary publications), but also the many heated debates that these demands for recognition and these mobilizations have provoked in places as diverse as France, the Netherlands and India to take only three specific examples in the world covered in the course.
Course taught in French
This undergraduate course aims to unveil a lesser known face of Paris linked to its colonial past in order to reread the present social, political and cultural landscape of France’s capital city. By visiting the hotspots of a forgotten Parisian black history, students will learn about the legacy of a colonial past often unknown and neglected. Sites will include the Latin Quarter which saw the birth of Negritude movement in the 1930s with the encounter of African and Caribbean intellectuals (Césaire, Senghor, Damas) and the foundation of the editions Présence Africaine with Alioune Diop. We will also focus on the movement of migration from African and the Caribbean to France in the 1960s until now. This itinerant historical and sociological approach of Paris is complemented by an exploration of the contemporary cultural and artistic politics of the Black stage. By attending theater plays and dance shows, and meeting with African and Caribbean artists living in Paris (playwrights, directors, opportunity to explore Black Parisian culture from an insider’s point of view and find out what it means to be a Black artist today in France. actors, choreographers, dancers), students will enjoy the The reading and analysis of literary and cinematographic works will allow students to tackle social, political and racial issues, and explore further the global dimension of today’s diasporic and multicultural France. This course will finally question how skin color and politics are deeply intertwined by questioning discrimination on stage today. Does the cultural, intellectual and artistic capital that Paris was in the 1930s remain a cosmopolitan city open to the world?
Course taught in English