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Provincializing France: Meaning, Practice, and Place
| Publication Date: | 2011-08-01 (Archive) |
| Date Submitted: |
2011-04-15 |
| Announcement ID: |
184631 |
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Provincializing France: Meaning, Practice, and Place
The purpose of this collection will be to consider how locality has been differently constituted across modern and contemporary French history. It will aim both at taking stock of existing scholarly work (with synthetic overviews by established authors), and at stimulating new thinking about the changing formations of local place and identity that have accompanied processes of national and European/trans-regional/global integration. Historical study of the complex interplay since 1789 of what the French identify as pays and nation (or alternately, as the petite and the grande patrie) has by this point substantially revised an older conceptualization of essentially antagonistic local and national moorings, in which the latter mainly prevailed over the former in making “peasants into Frenchmen”. What has emerged in its place is a less linear and deterministic understanding of French nation building, one more keenly attuned both to the dynamic ways in which locality and nation have interrelated in specific contexts, and to the key role local actors and cultures have played in enabling new forms of French identification, however provisional or enduring. European, trans-regional and global frameworks of more recent provenance have likewise introduced challenges and opportunities for the promotion of ostensibly local interests, identities and products. This volume will marshal historical understanding to anticipate the ways in which the local will continue to be reinvented in the twenty first century in France as elsewhere.
Topics to be addressed by contributors may include, but are not limited to:
• The role of local agents, cultural intermediaries, organizations, and institutions in forging new forms of local, trans-regional, national and transnational interest and identity;
• The politics of locality, including questions of administrative reform, regionalism and regionalist movements, projects of decentralization and regional and local development;
• The role of commerce in engendering narratives and experiences of local place, as in the cases of local products, fairs and festivals, and tourism;
• The generation and transmission of knowledge about local place and culture by sociétés savantes, in academic disciplines of geography, folklore and ethnography, colonial administration, and popular memoir;
• How race, gender and ethnicity constitute and cut across the local, regional, trans-regional, and global levels;
• Movements of literary and artistic regionalism, ruralist, nostalgic, memory, and/or heritage currents within French cultural expression more generally;
• The influence of subjectivity, gender and other cultural practices that constitute individual and collective identities;
• Economic, political and cultural questions and conflicts related to matters of territoriality and lieux de mémoire;
• Locality and changing historical conceptions of landscape, rurality and natural environment;
• Systems and vocabularies of representation (symbolic, graphic, film, music, etc.) that situate, frame or otherwise address the antagonisms, symbioses, interdependences and elisions between the local, regional, national and global registers.
The editors envision gathering articles in English ranging from 6,000 to 8,000 words in length. The nature and range of proposals will further determine how the volume will be subdivided and pitched. For consideration, please send a 250 to 500-word chapter proposal along with a 1-page cv to both Patrick Young and Philip Whalen by August 1, 2011. The editors have initiated discussion with an American university press, to whom the completed book proposal will be sent in December of 2011. With an eye for an early 2013 publication, we anticipate a completed manuscript in late 2012.
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Philip Whalen
Department of History
Coastal Carolina University
PO Box 261954
Conway, South Carolina 29528-6054
Tel: (843) W 349-2350; H 324-0351
Patrick Young
Assistant Professor of History
University of Massachusetts-Lowell
108 Coburn Hall
Lowell, MA 01854
978 934 4276
patrick_young@uml.edu
Email: pwhalen@coastal.edu; philip_whalen@yahoo.com
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