Alice Diop: French Cinema and Postcoloni

This seminar is the first comprehensive course on Alice Diop's cinema, from her confidential beginnings in 2005 (Clichy pour l’exemple) to her international success in 2022 (Saint Omer). An analysis of the Double Vague, a term coined by French-Burkinabe film critic Claire Diao, will inform our detailed review of six of Diop’s films. The Double Vague refers to a generation of French filmmakers from postcolonial origins, working from the banlieues. Since the 2000s, these filmmakers have breathed new life into national cinema and highlighted alternative narratives of French society.

Alice Diop is a young Black woman of Muslim culture, born in the banlieues from an immigrant family of modest means. Each of these six identities alone make her an outsider in a traditionally Parisian, white, bourgeois and heavily male French cinema environment. Taken together, these characteristics form the main thread of this seminar: the aesthetics, intersectional identities and universalist aspirations in Alice Diop’s that interrogate contemporary France.

This class will present foundational themes of Diop's work, themes that are intimately weaved throughout the life of the filmmaker. Through these themes, we will analyze the theories of consciousness that are transforming French society at the beginning of the 21st century. Through Alice Diop's cinema and our guest speaker's works, this seminar will review the mutations of universalism à la française, from Ronsard and Montaigne's pre-Enlightenment notions of universalism as humanism to the current debates in the articulation of race, class, gender and citizenship.