French Connections

During the second half of the 1990s, Paris experienced a dance music revolution thanks to groundbreaking artists like Daft Punk, Air, Super Discount, Motorbass, Cassius, Dimitri from Paris, Bob Sinclar and many, many more. It was a scene that became known as French Touch and was heralded throughout the world as the epitome of dance music cool, forever placing Paris on the dance culture map. Journalist and author Martin James was there right from the start, documenting the scene from its inspirations to its earliest moments and onto its global breakthrough. In the process, he inadvertently provided the French Touch moniker that became adopted throughout the world. Drawing on a dazzling array of exclusive interviews with the biggest names in French electronic music history, French Connections explores France’s significant contribution to dance music culture that paved the way for the French Touch explosion.

To write this secret history, the authors questioned participants and observers of arcane groups in every milieu and every class in France. From the mountain "red necks" to the "brotherhood" of the Mediterranean Coast, from the Charente clan to the new capitalists' club, they lift the veil from all these subterranean understandings that glue together society.

Although the women's liberation movement is very much an international phenomenon, it has developed very differently in different countries. Debate and exchange between feminists is often difficult, not only because of language barriers, but also because things do not always make sense when removed from their particular social, political, and cultural contexts. The feminist movement in France has been too often regarded as interesting but largely irrelevant, concerned more with reflection and theory than with seeking practical solutions to concrete problems. In this anthology, Claire Duchen attempts to change that image, demonstrating that although the French movement is indeed characterized by much intellectual debate, it shares the same concerns and struggles of feminists everywhere. The first part of the volume contains selections on the French Women's Liberation Movement (mouvement de libération des femmes, known as the MLF) itself, reflecting on its history, character, and prospects for the future. The second part contains selections on four areas of debate that have both theoretical and practical dimensions: psychoanalytic feminism, heterosexuality and lesbianism, women's "difference," and the relationship between feminism and the political Left. The book contains fifteen contributions from eight important writers: Françoise Collin, Christine Delphy, Catherine Deudon, Marie-Jo Dhavernas, Colette Guillaumin, Annie Leclerc, Françoise Picq, and Elaine Viennot.

The study of literature still tends to be nation-based, even when direct evidence contradicts longstanding notions of an autonomous literary canon. In a time when current events make inevitable the acceptance of a global perspective, the essays in this volume suggest a corrective to such scholarly limitations: the contributors offer alternatives to received notions of 'influence' and the more or less linear transmission of translatio studii, demonstrating that they no longer provide adequate explanations for the interactions among the various literary canons of the Renaissance. Offering texts on a variety of aspects of the Anglo-French Renaissance instead of concentrating on one set of borrowings or phenomena, this collection points to new configurations of the relationships among national literatures. Contributors address specific borrowings, rewritings, and appropriations of French writing by English authors, in fields ranging from lyric poetry to epic poetry to drama to political treatise. The bibliography presents a comprehensive list of publications on French connections in the English Renaissance from 1902 to the present day.

The French Connections of Jacques Derrida offers stimulating and accessible essays that address, for the first time, the issue of Derrida's relation to French poetics, writing, thought, and culture. In addition to offering considerations of Derrida through studies of such significant French authors as Mallarme, Baudelaire, Valery, Laporte, Ponge, Perec, Blanchot, and Barthes, the book also reassesses the development of Derrida's work in the context of structuralism, biology, and linguistics in the 1960s, and looks at the possible relationships between Derrida's writing and that of the Surrealist and Oulipa groups. Derrida is introduced as one whose work is as much poetic as it is philosophical, and who is strikingly French and yet not unproblematically so.

With a new introduction by the author. The true, absorbing and sometimes frightening documentary of the world's most successful narcotics investigation, The French Connection is one of the most fascinating crime accounts of our time. When New York City detectives Eddie "Popeye" Egan and his partner Sonny Grosso routinely tail Pasquale "Patsy" Fuca, after observing some wild spending at the Copacabana, they quickly realize that they are on to something really big. Patsy is not only the nephew of a mob boss on the lam but also a key negotiator in an impending delivery of narcotics from abroad. His incongruous connections are with several distinguished Frenchmen, including Jean Jehan, the director of the world's largest heroin network, and Jacques Angelvin, a star of French television. For many suspense-filled months, through opulent Manhattan nightclubs, dark tenements in Brooklyn and the Bronx, tree-lined streets of the genteel Upper East Side, and in Paris, Marseilles, and Palermo, the duel is on -- the prize 112 pounds of pure heroin, worth ninety million on the streets. Over three hundred investigators from local, state, federal, and international agencies are ultimately involved in the hours of weary surveillance, the skilled intuition, the luck -- both good and bad -- and the danger.

Ten months after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Warren Commission reported that Lee Harvey Oswald, alone, killed the president on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas. Oswald had no confederates, nor did any foreign power aid him in his deadly deed. Case closed. However, what most Americans do not know is that one day after the assassination, the FBI deported a known French assassin-a member of the militant, anti-Charles de Gaulle organization called the OAS. Jean Souetre was sent to either Mexico or Canada. He was involved in anti-de Gaulle terrorist activities in Europe and even tried to recruit the CIA in his efforts to oust the French President. During his career, he used at least 11 identities, including those of two real people. Why was a known French assassin in Dallas on the exact day that the president of the United States was killed, and what role, if any, did he play in the monstrous deed? This book delves into three major areas of study: (1) the investigation of Jean Souetre and the two other men whose identities he used; (2) the investigation of the identities of two European assassins, QJ/WIN and WI/ROUGE, and their use in the CIA’s assassination unit called ZR/RIFLE-Executive Action; and (3) the role of the CIA in the drug trade after World War II. Chapters include: The First Assassin; The Mafia and Uncle Sam; The Heroin Trail; MKULTRA; QJ/WIN and Patrice Lumumba; The US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence “Assassination Reports”-The CIA and Lumumba; Who Was Souetre?; Who Was Mertz?; The Steve Rivele Investigation; The Guns of Dallas; more.

French Connections examines how the movement of people, ideas, and social practices contributed to the complex processes and negotiations involved in being and becoming French in North America and the Atlantic World between the years 1600 and 1875. Engaging a wide range of topics, from religious and diplomatic performance to labor migration, racialization, and both imagined and real conceptualizations of “Frenchness” and “Frenchification,” this volume argues that cultural mobility was fundamental to the development of French colonial societies and the collective identities they housed. Cases of cultural formation and dislocation in places as diverse as Quebec, the Illinois Country, Detroit, Haiti, Acadia, New England, and France itself demonstrate the broad variability of French cultural mobility that took place throughout this massive geographical space. Nevertheless, these communities shared the same cultural root in the midst of socially and politically fluid landscapes, where cultural mobility came to define, and indeed sustain, communal and individual identities in French North America and the Atlantic World. Drawing on innovative new scholarship on Louisiana and New Orleans, the editors and contributors to French Connections look to refocus the conversation surrounding French colonial interconnectivity by thinking about mobility as a constitutive condition of culture; from this perspective, separate “spheres” of French colonial culture merge to reveal a broader, more cohesive cultural world. The comprehensive scope of this collection will attract scholars of French North America, early American history, Atlantic World history, Caribbean studies, Canadian studies, and frontier studies. With essays from established, award-winning scholars such as Brett Rushforth, Leslie Choquette, Jay Gitlin, and Christopher Hodson as well as from new, progressive thinkers such as Mairi Cowan, William Brown, Karen L. Marrero, and Robert D. Taber, French Connections promises to generate interest and value across an extensive and diverse range of concentrations.