Ports and seaboards in post-war French culture

Ports and the sea have played a key role in French history and culture over the centuries. With Atlantic and Mediterranean seaboards, France has been open to a diverse flow of exchange, commerce and migration over the centuries, from the accumulation of wealth during the slave trade, to the dramatic expatriation of pieds noirs to its southern shores at the end of the Algerian War. This project explores the representation of port and seaboard spaces in post-war French literary and visual culture. Working across a range of literary, filmic and visual material, it will consider various questions, such as the representation of the geography and function of port spaces; their relationship to urban space and the broader French territory; the meanings which become attached to them, and how these change. It will also consider the relationship between ports and other seaboard spaces, including coasts and beaches, and how a sense of France’s seaboard and maritime frontiers has helped shape its identity as both an Atlantic and Mediterranean country. The project will establish a relevant corpus of material drawn from post-war French culture, placing it in dialogue with some key historical antecedents and with current critical writing on borders, frontiers, maritime spaces and port locations.