Race, gender and modernity in 1900’s France 
30 May 2011
2pm - 3pm
Venue: Federation of Graduate Women's Room, Level 1, Old Government House
School of European Languages and Literatures seminar by Professor Martine Antle, University of North Caroline at Chapel Hill.
This talk will map the construction of race in French popular culture and in various French artistic milieus from the 1900s until today. It will demonstrate that the Africanist and Orientalist discourses characteristic of the 1900s, even as they acquire different contours and emphases throughout the decades, remain firmly embedded within contemporary French political discourses and continue to inform France’s official position towards citizens hailing from its former colonies.
Professor Antle is a specialist of contemporary French and Francophone Studies. Her research ranges from avant-garde theatre to women in surrealism, to questions of race, gender, and alterity in 20th- and 21st -century French and Francophone literature and art. She has argued that, beyond its inherent contradictions and conflicting interpretations, surrealism, through its cultural, generic and gender experimentations, played a fundamental role in our understanding of otherness and of multiculturalism in the 20th century. Among Prof. Antle’s many publications in this area are Cultures du Surréalisme: les représentations de l'autre (2001) and Théâtre et poésie surréalistes: Vitrac et la scène virtuelle (1988). She has also edited or co-edited five volumes on themes such as Franco-Arabic dialogues and lesbian and gay strategies of resistance in French and Francophone contexts. Her latest publications focus on art and on the growing contributions of Francophone artists to the international art scene, as attested to by her art catalogues and interviews with Arab American and Iranian American artists. Her current research is a book-length project on Strategies of Resistance in Contemporary Art: The Contributions of Arab Women Artists.
