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Faculty Publication: Senior Lecturer in French Agnès Peysson-Zeiss

January 26, 2021

Marseille Provence 2013: a social face-lift for an old lady?

Author: Agnès Peysson-Zeiss

Source: Urban Bridges, Global Capital(s): Trans-Mediterranean Francosphères, Edited by Claire Launchbury and Megan C. MacDonald, Liverpool University Press, 2021.

Publication type: Chapter in a book

Abstract: This collection of essays on Trans-Mediterranean Francospheres offers an original examination of cultural production and the flows between urban capitals and “capital” in and of a selection of Mediterranean cities and sites. In three parts, the book covers both familiar and overlooked terrain, in chapters which examine writing the city, the transit between different poles, film and EU designated cultural capitals. The collection therefore brings together texts and their critical readings in new comparative ways. Following Jacques Derrida’s peregrinations in L’Autre Cap (1991), the volume interrogates the what of Europe; the when or where of Paris; the who of the Mediterranean. Or might the Mediterranean fall under the rubric of paleonomy, that is, as Michael Naas recalls Derrida’s words in Positions: “the ‘strategic’ necessity that requires the occasional maintenance of an old name in order to launch a new concept.”

Department of French and Francophone Studies