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This article explores how the installation Le grand couvert by Malagasy artist Amalia Ramanankirahina intersects colonial plantations and a French Parisian orchard to decolonize contemporary French ecological thinking. As this article explores how French rural ecologies are embedded within a wider variety of environments and their violent plantationocenic histories, it argues that Le grand couvert performs 'aesthetic marronage', a form of fugitivity that breaks through 'traditional' plantation visual cultures – ones that freeze plantations into a space of leisure and exoticism, albeit a violent one. Tracing the contours of the material, economic and ecological, 'legacies' of the plantationocene in and across contemporary France and its overseas territories, this article ultimately demonstrates how Le grand couvert helps interrogate what Stephanie Posthumus has called 'ecological dwelling', the evolving processes of bodies in and with space. While Posthumus understands ecological dwelling primarily along urban/rural paradigms, Ramanankirahina's decolonial work injects new perspectives on this concept. In Le grand couvert, the plantation bleeds into the colonial space of a former rural space now known as a banlieue. At the intersection of the plantation and the banlieue, aesthetic marronage reveals the tensions of dwelling ecologically in sites that racially and economically restrict one's subjective formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The visual culture and artistic accumulation that societies have been developing since the past is reflected in the works done in different fields. In the production of comics, basic features such as character design and color applications sometimes vary between cultures. Therefore, although the artist who produces the comic determines the visual basic features of a comic, the culture of the cartoonist is effective in the development of his style. Comics are produced in many parts of the world. Different design approaches and styles in comics may vary from region to region in terms of geography. In addition to the "comics" in the USA or the Japanese "manga", the form of comics produced by French-speaking countries is one of the important schools today. The Franco-Belgian comic style has a deep-rooted historical development process back to pre-printing times. There is important information to support this proposition. Therefore, in the article, the historical development process of the comics in France was explained in basic terms, the effect of the historical development of the French-Belgian comics on the linear language, character designs and subject selection in the context of style was examined with examples, and information was given about its place in popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, the popular eighteenth-century Jansenist periodical, is a bellwether for changes in the priorities of the Jansenist movement. The annual frontispieces that decorated many editions of the paper from 1727 to 1763 are a site where these priorities are presented in an evolving visual rhetoric. Early images that focus on theological struggle, centered on ecclesiastical actors, gradually give way to a neoclassical visual sensibility in conjunction with an increasing emphasis on "bon François" political concerns. By examining these frontispieces, we can trace a gradual Jansenist shift towards patriotic politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the representation of the persecution of the Jews during the First Crusade in visual culture in France in the 19th century. It remembers the popularity of Crusader themes in France during the century, including depictions of historical events. The portrayal of the Crusade and crusaders in the theater and artworks is also discussed.

Journals offered vibrant new professional vehicles for fin-de-siècle writers and, in less obvious ways, for visual artists. A handful also served as laboratories for the transformation of literary and visual culture, and for new forms of interplay between visual culture, belles-lettres, and journalism. This essay looks at one of the most generative of these, Revue blanche, which facilitated and advanced a syncretism of the pictorial and the literary arts in the nexus of print and press culture. This in turn contributed to the development of the livre d’artiste, concrete poetry, and the twentieth-century visual and intellectual strategies of futurism, Dada, and surrealism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The arrival of designer Hedi Slimane at Christian Dior in 2000 marked an epoch change in men's style. Slimane's reputation is founded on having streamlined and rejuvenated the male silhouette through the promotion of a skinny style appropriated from youth subcultures. Slimane's rebranding of the Dior menswear line (from the fusty Christian Dior Monsieur to the hip Dior Homme) adapted a range of urban street styles to suit the in-house tradition of classicism and bourgeois elegance. This article sets out to assess the designer's conscious reworking of masculinity, replacing virile men with skinny boys, perceived as the clearest paradigm shift in male fashion imagery since Armani, as well as tracking Slimane's impact on the landscape of contemporary fashion. Along with Tom Ford, Slimane is emblematic of the rise of the "creative director" engineering not only the various collections but also the brand's visual identity right down to store design and the architecture of the Dior Homme boutiques worldwide. This article situates Slimane's designs more broadly within the history of popular culture and the visual arts through a contextual focus on his cultural references and influences (notably David Bowie's Berlin and the British rock music scene), alongside coverage of his recent photographic work on American youth cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is an essay about the interplay of objects, art and visual culture in several community museums and historical sites dedicated to local social history in coastal Brittany. There, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Breton maritime culture invented a range of compensatory ritual objects, sites and practices to account for loss of life at sea. The presentation of this material culture of mourning in small museums, regional museums and ecomuseums on the Breton North Coast and the islands of Sein and Ouessant are examined in this essay. These material objects once bore material witness to crucial moments in the life of the family and today serve to represent the community’s collective memories and to narrate the community’s heritage to the outside world. In several cases examined in this essay, literary representations, art and visual culture are compared to heritage sites and museums. Methodologies are drawn from social art history, studies of tourism and collecting, museum studies, material culture studies and feminist interests in the politics of the everyday. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the complex inscription of modernist Cuban imaginaries within Atlantic cultural and political networks. I consider the tropes of cultural intelligibility and epistemic opacity in the fields of visual culture and cultural hierarchy. Through historical contextualizations of Wifredo Lam's The Jungle (1943) within the Paris and New York art scenes of the late 1930s and early 1940s, I address the questions of intelligibility and relative value in the international reception of exotic cultural forms. I examine some of the ways in which discourses of Lam and The Jungle have been constructed, appropriated, and made to illustrate national, regional, and global necessities. Finally, I engage with issues of insularity and cultural specificity within the context of an ongoing production of racialized images of 'Third World' political chaos in today's global Atlantic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyzes a shift in racialized regimes of visual signification in French metropolitan culture during the long eighteenth century. The author explores two symbolically central figures--the dismembered black slave and the black rapist/lover who is "duly punished"--by undertaking an intertextual reading of two sets of illustrations of Voltaire's Candide (1759) designed by Moreau le Jeune. Separated by the French and Haitian Revolutions, Moreau's two sets of Candide illustrations (1787 and 1803) register an important shift in the French cultural imaginary. The figure of the maimed black male slave was put directly in circulation in French visual culture during the eighteenth century. In contrast, interracial sexuality remained "unrepresentable" in French visual culture throughout the century. By the time Haiti declared its independence (1804), this taboo was contravened by Moreau's metaphorical substitution of the figure of the monkey in 1803 to picture the black male as a bestial rapist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]