Research Interests
My research interests lie on the interface of culture and politics in the French-speaking world since 1900, using theory to explore that relationship. My first book, Victor Serge The Uses of Dissent (1992), explored the novels and thought of a Franco-Russian anti-Stalinist revolutionary, who was born in Belgium and died in exile in Mexico. In particular, Mikhail Bakhtin's theories on dialogism and the novel helped me to pinpoint the differences between political and literary language, in Serge's writings and in general. My second book, Guy Hocquenghem (1996), looked at one of the founders of the contemporary gay movement in France, who died of an AIDS-related illness in 1988. Hocquenghem was a great iconoclast who refused to fit into the orthodoxies of either gay 'identity' or the vaguely left-wing social and political settlement that emerged in France in the aftermath of May 1968 and Mitterrand's first election victory of 1981. The close engagement with the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who were very influential on Hocquenghem, was a great help to my next project, on Quebec National Cinema (2000). Here I tried not only to bring some very interesting films (popular comedies as well as works by auteurs such as Denys Arcand and Robert Lepage) to the greater attention of those working in French and Film Studies, I also tried to sort out what we mean by 'national cinema' and the tensions contained in the concept. These three book projects, while seemingly disparate, were all ways for me to work out ideas on the key political questions of class and revolution, gender and sexuality, and nationhood. I returned to studies of Quebec in the edited volume Montreal- Glasgow (2005), based on a successful conference held in Glasgow. I have also written widely on various aspects of French film and media, and have a monograph on André Téchiné forthcoming (2007) in the French Film Directors series from Manchester University Press. My major research project over recent years has been in Atlantic Studies, where I have sought to develop a notion of ‘the French Atlantic’ in order to investigate de-centred, diasporic, mobile and ‘minor’ (in the Deleuzean sense) notions of Frenchness. The territory was mapped out in a three-volume Encyclopedia I edited on France and the Americas (2005), and I am currently completing a monograph entitled The French Atlantic: Travels in Culture and History.