Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture

October Books

by Kristin Ross

Fast Cars, Clean Bodies examines the crucial decade from Dien Bien Phu to the mid-1960s when France shifted rapidly from an agrarian, insular, and empire-oriented society to a decolonized, Americanized, and fully industrial one. In this analysis of a startling cultural transformation Kristin Ross finds the contradictions of the period embedded in its various commodities and cultural artifacts—automobiles, washing machines, women's magazines, film, popular fiction, even structuralism—as well as in the practices that shape, determine, and delimit their uses. In each of the book's four chapters, a central object of mythical image is refracted across a range of discursive and material social and private, textual and cinematic, national and international. The automobile, the new cult of cleanliness in the capital and the colonies, the waning of Sartre and de Beauvoir as the couple of national attention, and the emergence of reshaped, functionalist masculinities (revolutionary, corporate, and structural) become the key elements in this prehistory of postmodernism in France. Modernization ideology, Ross argues, offered the promise of limitless, even timeless, development. By situating the rise of "end of history" ideologies within the context of France's transition into mass culture and consumption, Ross returns the touted timelessness of modernization to history. She shows how the realist fiction and film of the period, as well as the work of social theorists such as Barthes, Lefebvre, and Morin who began at the time to conceptualize "everyday life," laid bare the disruptions and the social costs of events. And she argues that the logic of the racism prevalent in France today, focused on the figure of the immigrant worker, is itself the outcome of the French state's embrace of capitalist modernization ideology in the 1950s and 1960s.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Film, France, Cultural, Academic, Theory

274 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1994

About the author

Kristin Ross is a professor of comparative literature at New York University. She is the author of numerous books, including Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture and May '68 and its Afterlives.

Reviews

[Emilie Dunn · Rating 5 out of 5]

the way that this relatively short book brought together so many (seemingly separate ?) ideas in such a streamline way actually blew my tiny mind at points ! admittedly some of it was lost on me but ross is generally very convincing !

[Julian · Rating 4 out of 5]

For the parts I was actually able to understand and were relevant to me, such as the sections on films and the sociological assessments of post-war France, this book and its critical analyses were absolutely fantastic. Ross's adept observations concerning the obsession with "cleanliness" in post-war France in practically all aspects of daily life, especially as regards American influence in the region, were extremely thought-provoking. It really exposes how calling this period "Les trentes glorieuses" is actually a really ideologically-tinted thing to do. Gaullism was a way more powerful phenomenon than I initially thought and unfortunately I think it has a very lasting legacy in France and it's mentality.
As far as the other parts concerning like anthropology and structuralist thought, I have to say these went pretty over my head, though I don't doubt that they were also well-done. As a whole, this book probably did not need to be this academic-jargon-loaded as it is, but I don't think that's a problem with the author so much as academia in general. In spite of all this, it was a surprisingly quick read and I liked how Ross included pictures throughout to help substantiate her references. An essential piece of work for anyone looking for a critical social history of post-war France and its intellectual fads.

[T.J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an utterly engaging read that looks at France at the disintegration of its colonial empire and its rebirth as a modern European state following World War II. The losses in Vietnam and Algeria play as distant backdrops to the rising consumer culture and need for soap and automobiles in a 1960's France eager for cheap Algerian labor (before they bitterly turned against the builders of their economic success two decades later). Ross is at times dry, other times bitingly clever as she traces the history of French postwar reconstruction through popular culture, making intriguing parallels between cleanliness, domination and order through uniquely positioning laundry advertisements against the prominent idea of "water torture" against the Algerians. It's a gutsy move, and one that works of far better than Anne McClintock could ever hope for.

[Christopher Sutch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting analysis of French post-war modernization. I found the final chapter, with its analsysis/critique of structuralism, to be extremely valuable.

[Madelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The speed with which French society was transformed after the war from a rural, empire oriented, Catholic country into a fully industrialized, decolonized, and urban one meant that the things modernization needed—educated middle managers, for instance, or affordable automobiles and
other "mature" consumer durables, or a set of social sciences that followed scientific, functionalist models, or a work force of ex colonial laborers—burst onto a society that still cherished prewar outlooks with all of the force, excitement, disruption, and horror of the genuinely new."

[Devin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing book with an incredible analysis of post war France relating its modernization to the the collapse of the colonial project. I have a PhD in comp lit so I had no problem following the structuralism section and found it’s conclusion to be an absolutely brilliant assessment of one of the worst movements to plague academia.

[Romi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. It's fascinating. You will never look at France, modern culture or kitchen appliances the same ever again.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Never taking a shower again.

[Parlei · Rating 3 out of 5]

On a discourse level, Ross presents a brilliant and insightful criticism of the historical processes of decolonization in conjunction with modernization movements. She expands on the "memoricide" critiques from Benjamin Stora (that France and the French have actively forgotten about the impacts of France's colonial/imperialist roots) in order to outline the processes that contributed to this dangerous defect of, in her words, making "colonialism itself seem like a dusty archaism." The refusal to factor this in to how France conceives of itself in terms of national history and identity is a malaise that, she argues, contributes to present-day attitudes in France via discussions of immigration, integration, and intercultural engagement.

However, in some ways Ross also participates in the problem: that is, by relying so much on conceptualization and interpretation of cultural signs in the 50s and 60s, Ross fails to propose active ways of engaging the situation, of addressing the problem directly, or of developing a useful realm of critique for a series of authors, filmographers, and trends that were already losing contemporary relevance when her book was published in 1995. Her claim: "I try to provide an experience of the historicity that theories of postmodernism… seek to efface," is as much a contribution to the postmodern resistance to pinning down a clear and precise address to "real-world" (that is, political, social) problematics as the works she critiques. By turning her attention and focus to the everyday, she does not engage with the very problem itself--that is, how to usurp the hegemony of the material to more appropriately deal with the problems of colonialism as its after-effects (racism, oppression) continue to exist today.

Overall, I think Ross provides a very useful conceptualization for why so much of French literary and filmic works in the 50s and 60s completely avoided the question of France's colonial history altogether. It's a necessary text for understanding contemporary French culture, themes, and attitudes. But I wish it would have gone further in its critique and challenging of the refusal to engage with "The Question" of colonialism and its aftermath.

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is simply outstanding as a piece of cultural analysis, as a savvy piece of cultural history, and as a companion guide to the films of Jacques Tati. Tati is a recurring figure in the book (more often via his film Mon Oncle) than the common M Hulot’s Holiday or Playtime although both of them as well as Jour de fête make regular appearance. Ross presents Tati as one of the key commentators on France in the late 1950s and early 1960s – the period in question here – and her focus on the complexities of colonialism (France’s loss of empire/Algeria as well as its fraught relation with the USA) and modernity/modernisation (she convincingly presents post-war France as obsessed by cleanliness and as neophiliacs – new places, new houses, new men). The book has been highly praised in academic circles as it should have been, but should also be readily accessible to broader audiences, and anyone who can use Tati to illustrate a dense theoretical point from Marx has to be worth checking out. Simply superb: the kind of book that should give cultural studies a good name!

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a small book (less than 200 pages) but very dense. Ross, author of another great book, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune, analyzes France's rush to Americanize after WWII and its negation of the colonial struggle as an anachronism. She gives a politicized reading of the Structuralists and New Novelists, arguing that their insistence on the end of history and the end of man was an implicit collaboration with the rising new technocracy (funded by the CIA, of course). The metaphor of "nettoyage" (cleaning house) running through discourses of the time - in the social sciences, in advertising, in reference to the colonial wars - is very striking. This is a cultural studies work at its finest: clear, convincing, politically astute, and extremely insightful.

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Ross. I don’t always agree with her, and she drives social historians crazy, but she is so inventive and such a creative thinker, it’s difficult not to be smitten with her. This is her easy one, and quite different from what most people are used to in a history book. After the first chapter or so you will never be able to look at an automobile the same way again.

Her book on May 1968 is just as imaginative, but aimed squarely at other scholars and places greater demands on the reader.

[Chelsea Szendi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Working with a tight economy of words, Ross opens up the multifaceted implications of interweaving France's decolonization and modernization narratives. With a few clean strokes, she asks some very big questions. I found this book particularly provocative because some of the core themes and concepts can probably travel very well to other advanced industrial nations at the time: the role of French theory (i.e. structuralism in this context) may have been unique in France and beyond, but France was hardly the only nation to undergo "domestic colonization" in the 1950s and 1960s.

[g · Rating 2 out of 5]

this is a well-written book and everything, but most of the emphasis she puts on hygiene or cars seems rather commonplace, so i did not feel like i learned too much. still it made me think quite a bit about the timothy burke book lux women lifebuoy men -- perhaps that book must have been inspired by this one quite a bit?

[Matt Voegtle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably a must-read.