Suchergebnisse

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- 1 Not the right stuff Shrinking Colonial Administrators -- 2 Pierre Bourdieu's own cultural revolution -- 3 Jean Renoir's voyage of discovery From the Shores of the Mediterranean to the Banks of the Ganges -- 4 France's Black Venus -- 5 John Locke, imperialism, and the first stage of capitalism -- 6 Why, suddenly, are the americans doing cultural history? -- Afterword -- Notes -- Selected Works of American Cultural History Writing -- Index

There have always been pressures from within French society and from Africa for the restitution of items of African cultural patrimoine. Newly elected President Macron announced that it was time to return items of African cultural heritage. He appointed a commission to report what, how, and when. The article traces these recommendations, resistance to them, and outcomes. As of this writing, almost nothing has been returned. And the pandemic has halted official action for the moment and possibly for the foreseeable future. However, concerned individuals and groups are beginning to take the matter into their hands. The story is not finished.

With the opening of several new musées de la société in France we gain an exceptionally rich and revelatory way of understanding the society-wide debates about what France is and what it should be in the new millennium. Each of the museums discussed offers pieces of the contested stories of a new France in a new age. Taken together, they ask whether it is possible, or even desirable, today to tell a single and teleological national narrative, the roman national of the patriot-historians of the Third Republic. What did immigrants contribute to the making of today's nation? What is the relationship of postcolonial France to its one-time colonial empire? How did biological and cultural evolution combine to make human societies? And now, with the opening of the Musée des Civilisations de l'Europe et de la Méditerranée, how did, and how do, French vernacular cultures relate to those of Europe and the Mediterranean world? The article argues that a way of understanding this complex of questions is to follow the stories that the new museums tell – or the disagreements about what stories they ought to tell. For these questions go to matters of high state policy, international economic interests, cultural outreach, the relations of regions to capitals, tourism, and indeed claims about what it means to be French today.