Bill Marshall is Professor of Modern French Literature at the University of Stirling. Previous books include Andre Techine (Manchester University Press, 2007) France and the Americas (editor, Oxford & Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2005), 3 vols. Musicals - Hollywood and Beyond (co-edited with R.Stilwell, Exeter: Intellect Books, 2000).
This book is in some sense a continuation of the project that Bill Marshall inaugurated in 2005 with his edition of the encyclopedia France and the Americas: Culture, Politics and History (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO). It also shares similarities with Christopher L. Miller's The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008; see FS, 63 (2009), 121-22); but it covers a far wider area, both geographically and thematically: while the slave trade is a recurrent theme in Marshall's book, it is by no means the only one. Given Marshall's previous work in French Canadian culture, the latter's prominence here comes as no surprise. But what is both new and very stimulating in relation to previous work in cultural history is the use of place as the organizing category. The book's seven main chapters are devoted to Nantes, La Rochelle, Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, Quebec City, New Orleans, Cayenne, and Montevideo; each one combines a historical account concentrating on patterns of French migration and settlement in the city (or islands) in question, with a discussion of its representations in literature and film. There is a conscious concern to ground the cultural analysis in its material determinants, and also to focus on less canonical places: Guyane rather than Martinique or Guadeloupe, Quebec City rather than Montreal, Nantes and La Rochelle rather than Bordeaux. The book's central aim is to replace the centre-periphery model of Frenchness, in which the metropole is endowed with the prestige of source and origin, with a mobile diasporic topography and a sensitivity to the interaction of centripetal and centrifugal forces. The introduction develops this theoretical framework in relation to three precursors: Paul Gilroy's conception of the Black Atlantic, Edouard Glissant's creolization and Relation, and, above all, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Mille plateaux. Deleuzean notions of deterritorialization, the 'minor', and the 'molecular' inform the whole book: Marshall is careful not to draw general conclusions, but produces series of fairly brief, often witty, descriptions of particular, discrete texts and historical incidents. This 'molecular' attention to 'the line of flight of particles' (p. 18) demands a certain mental agility on the part of the reader, who occasionally - in this reader's case, anyway - feels that too many molecules have been crammed into one sentence. It also means that the book is rather curiously positioned in relation to the notion of argument: its whole structure, the selection and organization of its material, and its theoretical introduction constitute an argument against a more conventional conception of Frenchness and its diffusion; but within each individual chapter, the book is entirely descriptive. Thus it is the level of sheer interest aroused by Marshall's descriptions - particularly of previously underdocumented areas such as the very significant French immigration to Uruguay, the role of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon during prohibition in the USA, or the interaction between slaves and French convicts in Cayenne - that fully vindicates the book's commitment to opening up a new perspective both on the French Atlantic and on cultural history more generally. Marshall's is not a typical monograph. Rather, he weaves together a variety of academic disciplines in a complex narrative examining French influence in the Atlantic world by focusing on two ports (La Rochelle and Nantes) in the Old World and five locations--islands, cities, and a nation (St. Pierre and Miquelon; Quebec City; New Orleans; Cayenne, French Guiana; and Montevideo, Uruguay)--in the New World. An unapologetic Marshall (Univ. of StirIinig) confronts readers with a dizzying array of statistics and details, mostly in English but sometimes in French. Thus, readers learn about French involvement in slave trading and mortality among crews and slaves; percentages of French immigrants in Montevideo in certain periods; and the composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk, who, while associated with New Orleans, spent two years moving between Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Marshall compresses this and an enormous additional amount into a little more than 300 pages of text. A challenging but worthwhile book--those patient enough to wade through it will be rewarded. Indexed, with extensive notes, good bibliography, and fine colored illustrations. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. A challenging but worthwhile book -- those patient enough to wade through it will be rewarded. Indexed, with extensive notes, good bibliography, and fine colored illustrations. It is the level of sheer interest aroused by Marshall's descriptions - particularly of previously underdocumented areas such as the very significant French immigration to Uruguay, the role of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon during prohibition in the USA, or the interaction between slaves and French convicts in Cayenne - that fully vindicates the book's commitment to opening up a new perspective both on the French Atlantic and on cultural history more generally. In The French Atlantic: Travels in Culture and History, Bill Marshall has produced a truly original and very engaging book that will be of great interest to readers in French, Francophone, and Atlantic Studies. This study is unique, quirky, and stimulating. This unique volume takes as its starting point the concept of diasporic notions of Frenchness, particularly the ways in which French and Francophone communities in the Americas implanted a lasting transatlantic presence even as their differences from one another undermined the myth of the singularity of French language and culture. Following a theoretical and methodological introduction, Marshall examines the cultural history of seven different French Atlantic spaces, paying particular attention to the ways in which their very presence reformulates accepted notions both of Atlanticism and of francite'. Marshall's study begins by probing what he calls "anxieties provoked by the 'Atlantic' in the wider French culture" (p. 2), emphasising the national(ist) focus that effectively excludes much of the colonial past and its corollaries of conquest and settlement from narrative formulations of the French nation-state. If the notion of the 'French Atlantic' exists problematically within a discursive, geographical and cultural network that the metropole seeks determinedly to disavow, it simultaneously compels us to come to terms with France's conviction of its own exceptionalism, despite the fact that "the Atlantic has involved massive movements of French speaking populations" (p. 4). Marshall cites the perspective of Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, whose reinscription of the African experience of slavery and diaspora into accounts of Western modernity allows Marshall to postulate that "It is engagement with others, with difference, that constitutes what we term cultural or national identities" (p. 11). He then evokes the Martinican novelist and philosopher Edouard Glissant's vision of the cultural creativity and cross-breeding that emerged from the Caribbean colonial encounter, "a harbinger of [...] de-centred [...] and profoundly relational cultural realities" (p. 12). What is arguably most important here is that the twin positions articulated by Gilroy and Glissant allow him to posit the related models of diaspora and hybridity as the conceptual underpinning of the French experience in North America. Marshall expands this thesis across seven chapters, tracing a vague arc from France across the Atlantic to French Canada, and then down through New Orleans into the Caribbean and ending (somewhat surprisingly) in Uruguay. Each chapter is devoted to a specific city in this odyssey, an argumentative and analytical structure that literally 'reads' the city from a multitude of perspectives; using history, geography, demographics, culture and language as so many discursive and analytical lenses allows him to excavate a thoroughgoing portrait of each city in turn before turning to representations of each city in literature and film. In reading Nantes, for example, Marshall quickly links the city's shipping and shipbuilding history with the Passage Pommeraye shopping arcade, a central historical, architectural and economic symbol of the city whose construction dates back to 1843. This allows him to evoke both literary and cinematic inscriptions of the city -- the one through Julien Gracq and the other through Jacques Demy -- that uncover the hidden history of the slave trade in which the city played a central role. Indeed, by reanimating the occulted figure of the slave ship, Marshall is able to reinscribe the city within a framework of transhistorical and transracial spatialisation. From the outset of the next chapter, key facets of La Rochelle's slave trading history are succinctly traced, showing that it takes second place to Nantes. But this by no means diminishes the scale of the efforts of the rochelais in this regard; by mapping family ties and generational intermarriage onto the principal economic nodal points of France's colonial enterprise (New Orleans, Saint-Domingue), Marshall is able to clearly demonstrate the centrality of this city, framed specifically through "the overall figures for expeditions from La Rochelle", in what he calls "the routine of slave trading" (p. 61). Thus the "relatively small urban space of La Rochelle has [...] been seen to generate vast realities in the French Atlantic because of commerce in goods and people, (religious) ideology, and the links between them" (p. 94). It is the demographic, commercial and cultural confluences of these cities, then, that also link them to the collectivite' territoriale of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, islands of 236 square kilometres situated 25 kilometres off the coast of Newfoundland. Despite this displacement from the metropole, Marshall proposes a 'telescoping' view of geography that posits the territory as resembling a "microcosm of France [...] in its infrastructure of pre'fecture, gendarmerie, airport and other institutions that elsewhere would cater for a community a hundred times more populous" (p. 109). This seeming anomaly in French geopolitics gives way to a fuller rendition of the results of French trade as it interacted with French transnationalism; the history and growth of Quebec City and Montreal attest to the depth and breadth of the French diasporic presence in North America. From Quebec City's start as an "obvious centre for French settlement and trade" (p. 138) to its "dual function as port and fortress" (p. 137), the French mercantilist system made it a hub of trade and export as well as cultural and population growth until it was overtaken in population and importance by Montreal and Toronto, in turn, before the end of the nineteenth century. Key transformations in the demographic, colonial and national framework of North America meant that Montreal as a centre of francite' would be reinscribed over time as "a space of immigrant, second-generation, hybrid, intercultural and trilingual identities" (p. 170). Similar forces attend the trajectory of what is arguably Marshall's most intriguing and informative chapter, his reading of New Orleans. Typically subject to reductive rehearsals of nationalism that represent it either as a last outpost of francophonie, or a bastion of multiculturalism on an Anglophone-dominated continent, the multivalent, multinational network that nourished New Orleans highlights Marshall's theme of "the French Atlantic emphasis on routes rather than roots" (p. 219), and emphasises its "relation to Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, British colonies, and to woodlands and plains Indians" (p. 178). Indeed, paradoxes of intersectionality meant that while the French Code noir was amended in 1724 and 1728, "in particular to limit interracial sexual relationships" (p. 184), the period of Spanish rule that followed the 1763 Treaty of Paris saw new arrivals that were "overwhelmingly French or Acadian" (p. 185). Its long-standing connection to Saint-Domingue, especially as a point of relocation and refuge for those fleeing the Revolution, made the diasporic presence of the latter "crucial for the prolongation of francophone culture" in this American city; the shifting shape of francophone culture in the Americas mediated "key contributions by this group [...] to literary and cultural life in nineteenth-century New Orleans", aspects also to be seen in "the culture of voodoo, and in the Louisiana Creole language" (p. 190). If New Orleans is "the pivot or nodal point of the French Atlantic, the place where native, French, French-Canadian, Spanish, Caribbean and Anglo-American influences and forces pass, settle, combine and are productive of the new" (p. 219), Cayenne and Montevideo form its southern border. Long known primarily for the notorious Devil's Island prison and its representations in film and literature, Cayenne here traces an alternative to French Atlantic articulations of francite', with the fallout from departmentalisation, underpopulation, rocketry and France's only surviving indigenous population shaping the identity of South America's only non-sovereign territory in very specific ways. And so while some Guyanese literature -- Juminer, for example -- arguably reflects "the fear of the diglossic reality of Guyanais society" (p. 248), the work of others, like Damas, is "characterised by a virulent denunciation of colonialism and assimilation" (p. 241). On the other hand, while French migration to Montevideo -- given impetus by the loss of Canada -- had peaked by the mid-nineteenth century, "in 1843 the French [...] represented over half the foreign population, and a quarter of Montevideo's as a whole" (p. 263). As a result, given the absence of a framework of conquest, "French populations contributed significantly to one of the distinguishing characteristics [...] of Uruguay [...] namely the large urban middle class", and the further implantation of francophone outposts in South America (p. 269). Remarkable in its range, then, this study combines geography, history, demographics, language, culture, literature and film to provide a unique perspective on the ways in which francophonie has been constituted in difference outside the French mainland. It deserves a place wherever 'French Studies' is taught or archived. ...this study combines geography, history, demographics, language, culture, literature and film to provide a unique perspective on the ways in which francophonie has been constituted in difference outside the French mainland. It deserves a place wherever 'French Studies' is taught or archived. Bill Marshall's book The French Atlantic: Travels in Culture and History is an exploration of the legacy of French colonialism within the specific framework of Atlantic studies. A professor in the French department at the University of Stirling, Bill Marshall convenes courses on Quebec, Cinema and the French Atlantic. His research interests lie in the exploration of the interaction of culture and politics via theory. His book Quebec National Cinema and the encyclopaedia he edited, France and the Americas, are essential texts in the study of the French postcolonial legacy and culture within North America. Marshall divides this book into seven chapters, each of which is site-specific. He begins with the French cities of Nantes and La Rochelle, key sites within metropolitan France's (often referred to as 'the Hexagon' due to its roughly six-sided form) history of transatlantic trade and enterprise. He then moves west to address St Pierre et Miquelon and Quebec City, before moving south to discuss New Orleans, Cayenne, Guyane, and in the final chapter, Montevideo. By comprising historical, cultural and economic analyses within this study of 'differences and hybridities' (p.19) Marshall manages to create not only an effective exploration of the French Atlantic and the enduring legacy of French colonial history but also an extensive demonstration of the potential of this category to enhance scholarship relating to France, the French language and the Francophone world. Marshall deliberately adopts a narrow interpretation of the term 'Transatlantic' in order to distinguish between French links with North and South America and those links that exist between France and Africa. In the introduction to the text, Marshall sets out three distinct types of Atlantic history established by David Armitage and defines how his work will relate to these definitions. The first of these is circum-Atlantic history, one that incorporates the whole Atlantic shoreline and movements that occur within it. The second type is trans-Atlantic history, a form made possible by the first category; this looks at the links between sites within the Atlantic world that were previously held to be distinct. Finally, there is the category of cis-Atlantic, a history that is site-specific and concentrates on the ways in which places are characterized not only by their local conditions, but also by the part they played in Atlantic history. Marshall hopes to situate his work between each of these categories, creating an Atlantic analysis that is site-specific, yet conscious of the whole Atlantic, opening up connecting pathways between the different sites. To Marshall the concept of a French Atlantic is not one that is acceptable to France's unquestioned, centralized vision of itself. The dispersal of 'Frenchness' from the Hexagon and movements between these sites, for example the removal of Acadians from Nova Scotia in 1755, are therefore rarely examined within French institutions. He posits what is needed is a 'counter narrative of the French nation, of which the French Atlantic might be an example or a part' (p.8). He also establishes a specific need to question the category of France and that of the French language within the academic discourse of the Anglo-Saxon world. Marshall incorporates the work of several different theorists, such as Edouard Glissant and Gilles Deleuze, into his analysis. However, he sees a failure in Glissant to fully acknowledge the French experience outside the Caribbean. Marshall's French Atlantic extends Glissant's concerns by including within it the territory of France itself. Marshall also proposes a return to the writings Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari that so deeply influenced Glissant. For them '"minor" languages and cultures are to be understood in terms not of numbers but of the relationship between becoming and process of territorialisation and deterritorialisation' (p.17). Where this study is at its most effective is in the way it combines cultural and economic analysis. Such is the case in the chapter on St Pierre et Miquelon which takes the fishing industry and examines how this material factor, and the enduring influence of French policy, have impacted on the development of the archipelago. Similarly, the section addressing Nantes, and specifically the role of the passage Pommeraye in the city's economic and cultural history, is highly effective. The French Atlantic: Travels in Culture and History is nonetheless a fascinating and thorough exploration of key identities and spaces within the French Atlantic. This compelling book is a timely addition to the growing corpus of schol-arship on the cultural links between France and America, 'so frequently and inaccurately cast as a binary opposition' (p. 57). It primarily focuses on 'French ness' and its dispersals and many metamorphoses (or 'archipe-lagization') on the American continent. The French Atlantic builds on Bill Marshall's previously published work on Francophone cultures. notably his Quebec National Cinema. (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press. 2001) and France and the Americas. (Oxford & Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio. 2005). The approach is comparative and multidisciplinary (intertwining fiction, film, bande dessinee, music. chanson. dance, painting and architec-ture) and is informed by an overarching ambition to explore the evolving representations of the continent through seven sites (of memory) that best exemplify (although the author is careful to add that other sites - e.g. Bordeaux, Casablanca, Rio de Janeiro - could have equally fulfilled this role) the development of an Atlantic imaginary. Some of these. Nantes (I) and La Rochelle (lI). are located on France's most western shores whereas the others follow. on the opposite side of the Atlantic Ocean. a north-south axis: Saint-Pierre and Miquelon (HI), Quebec City (IV), New Orleans (V), Cayenne (VI) and Montevideo (VII). This fascinating journey is a robust and cogent response to an over-whelming tendency in French historiography (but also in Anglo-American university French departments) to neglect. in the name of some exclusive and inward-looking Franco-French (and republican) national narratives, French colonial ventures in the Americas and, by way of consequence, Francophone minorities that cannot be easily subsumed by these centrip-etal models. The investigation is predicated upon the Glissantian notion of the archipelago. Although this concept was primarily applied to the Antilles as a tool to denote the rhizomatic (non-totalitarian. non-filiative) features of Caribbean cultures. Bill Marshal! argues convincingly - notably via Deleuze and Guattari's theorization of minor cultures - that Glissant's use of the term can be enlarged to account for the cultural isolation (and subsequent transformations) of French-speaking diasporas and minorities in America. The enquiry privileges the material traces produced by transatlantic exchanges and each chapter provides a solid historical contextualization of the tangible realities behind trade (e.g. indigo. furs, sugar. cotton and tobacco). technology and slavery. Often. as in Chapter I ('Passages of Nantes'), a concrete place. in this case the passage Pommeraye (a shop-ping arcade built in the centre of the city in 1843), is used to explore the 'encounter between art and commerce' (p. 42). In this analysis, the arcade is elevated to the status of spatial metonym to appraise Nantes's 'West Coast' ambience and examine the city's links to America, urban moder-nity and 'slavery's vestigial presence' (p. 26). Jacques Demy's Lola (1961)-a film which is set in Nantes - provides the starting point of a deftly conducted intertextual enquiry in which the readers are invited to reap-praise the psycho-geographical boundaries of the city through the eyes of other significant figures such as (among others) Agnes Varda, the illustra-tors Schuiten, Peters and Tardi, Jules Verne, A, P. de Mandiargues, Andre Breton and Julien Gracq. The latter's La Forme d'une ville (1985) reflects masterfully upon one of the main critical themes of this study, that is, the relationship between 'place' and 'space' (as these notions were theorized by Michel de Certeau or Henri Lefebvre, see p. 304). The subsequent six chapters are devoted to further inter-textual explo-rations of this transatlantic poetics of space. Chapter II shows, notably through some of Georges Simenon's interwar novels, the crime novelist's ability to conjure up La Rochelle's cross-Atlantic features in a genre (the roman poNGier) which sites itself ambiguously between France and America. Chapter III explores (via Chateaubriand and Patrice Leconte) the little-known and hitherto rarely studied islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon. Marshall argues very convincingly that the spatial configuration of these two French collectivites territoriales - 'played out across this tension between openness and closure' (p. 107) - reflects the dichotomy that Deleuze and Guattari establish in Mille Plateaux (another major theoretical source of this study) between espace lisse and espace strie. Chapter IV focuses on Quebec City and argues, by way of an array of novels - by Anne Hebert. Jacques Poulin and Jacques Ferron -. Radio/TV series (Des Plouffe/ The Plouffe Family, 1981), and feature films such as De Confessionnall The Confessional (1995) by Robert Lepage, that the city represents the epit-ome of French Atlantic processes. In this respect, the author highlights the exemplariness of Le Confessionnal as a film which illustrates the city's tension 'between destiny and choice, past sediments and an open future' (p. 176). In the next three chapters the author engages with the Caribbean and Latin-American features of the French Atlantic. Chapter V focuses on New Orleans and marks a shift to the 'Black Atlantic'. Beside the inevita-ble analysis of slavery, its memorialization and long-term effects, this chapter also unearths hitherto unexplored literary territories such as the very rich nineteenth century francophone corpus from Louisiana which is 'not even available in the Bibliotheque nationale de France' (pp. 196-7). Edgar Degas is another surprising guest of this cultural journey. His visit to New Orleans in 1872-73 - he was through his mother directly related to local Creole planters - enables the readers to look at Impressionism from the other side of the Atlantic (J. Wilson-Bareau's Manet and the Sea [2003] springs to mind here). Chapter VI assesses the role of Cayenne as a place which evokes France's colonial and repressive system but also as a meet-ing point of South-American, European and African influences exempli-fied, among many other Creolized manifestations, by local folklore and the touloulou ball. Chapter VII returns to poetry - especially surrealism and magical realism (as understood by Alejo Carpentier) - and focuses on Montevideo and a migratory dynamic of (bilingual) cross-Atlantic jour-neys between France and Uruguay. The author teases out the Hispanic and South-American elements of Lautreamont's Chants de 'mal d'horror' (p. 281) and reads Jose Maria de Heredia's and Jules Supervielle's texts against this Franco-Uruguayan context. Bill Marshall's The French Atlantic is a very impressive achievement. Its sheer richness - which of course cannot be fully conveyed here - forces us to rethink the boundaries between French, Francophone, African and American cultures. It is an indispensable book. Let us hope now that its own journey is not over and that it will be imported into France and translated into French. This compelling book is a timely addition to the growing corpus of schol-arship on the cultural links between France and America ...Bill Marshall's The French Atlantic is a very impressive achievement. Its sheer richness - which of course cannot be fully conveyed here - forces us to rethink the boundaries between French, Francophone, African and American cultures. It is an indispensable book.
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