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The staff of French Politics, Culture & Society is pleased to congratulate STÉPHANE GERSON, Associate Professor of French Studies, New York University, on winning the fifth Laurence Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies (2003-2005) awarded by the Association for French Cultural Studies.

Que se passe-t-il dans les banlieues populaires françaises ? Sur le constat, il ne se trouve guère de voix dissonante : les grands ensembles de la périphérie des villes françaises sont affligés de l’ensemble des maux de la société française. Les lieux sont laids et inhumains et furent bâtis trop vite dans les années 1960 et 1970 ; ils sont également mal reliés aux centres urbains ou aux espaces plus dynamiques économiquement. Un temps tentées par la modernité de ces nouveaux quartiers, les classes moyennes les ont fuis depuis longtemps. Quant aux franges supérieures des classes populaires, elles s’efforcent de suivre cet exode ; ceux qui n’en ont pas les moyens en conçoivent une souffrance immense. Les populations immigrées que le chômage massif empêche désormais d’intégrer y sont majoritaires ; les jeunes désoeuvrés y sont sans perspectives d’avenir.

Abstracts

This forum of brief essays derives from a day-long gathering held at NYU’s Institute of French Studies to discuss Debora Silverman’s prizewinning Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000). Silverman’s groundbreaking book shows how the deeply religious and spiritual environment in which both Gauguin and van Gogh grew up helped to shape, in important ways, their perceptions of the world, perceptions fundamental to the making of their art and to our own understanding of it. Despite the two painters’ ostensibly secular views of the world,Silverman argues, their respective religious educations remained with them and underpinned their art. Religion affected not only the subject matter of their paintings but texture, surface, color, and composition as well.

Index to Volume 23 (2005)

Notes on contributors

It is now twelve years since French brinkmanship pushed American negotiators and the prospects of a world trade deal to the wire, securing the exclusion of cultural products and services from the 1993 GATT agreement and the maintenance of European systems of national quotas, public subsidies, and intellectual property rights in the audiovisual sector. The intervening period has not been quiet. Although the Multilateral Agreement on Investment was sunk when Lionel Jospin pulled the plug on negotiations in October 1998, the applications of new central European entrants to join the European Union and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have been accompanied by a continuing guerrilla battle fought by successive American administrations against the terms and scope of the exclusion.

Notes on contributors

Notes on contributors

In Charles Cogan’s article, “The Iraq Crisis and France: Heaven-Sent Opportunity or Problem from Hell?”, French Politics, Culture & Society 22, 3 (Fall 2004), it was stated on page 126 that on 21 December 2002 the French Chief of Staff visited the Pentagon.