Exploring the interspace: recent dialogues around the work of Annie Ernaux

National Seminar on Literature, Sociology and Theatre: ‘The Social and Political Impact of Annie Ernaux's Writing in the Construction of Identity’ (Vincennes, 28–30 October 2002)International Conference: ‘Annie Ernaux: Writing in the Interspace’ (Arras, 18–19 November 2002

Didier Eribon, restive rationalist : the limits of sociological self-understanding in Retour a Reims

This article suggests that Eribon’s autobiography is most engaging (as literature) and valuable (as social document) in those moments when the author loses his interpretative grip on the meaning of his own experience. Although a concerted attempt is made by Eribon to account for his problematic relationship to his working-class family background, in particular his father, in purely sociological terms, a restive textual indeterminacy at key junctures unwittingly exposes the limitations of this approach. By allowing us to glimpse the limits of its author’s sociological rationalism, the autobiography calls into question Eribon’s strategic rejection of psychoanalytic forms of understanding and a number of his other longstanding theoretical and political commitments. This is just as it should be: its restive moments and the critical consequences which follow from them make Eribon’s autobiography much more than a mere exercise in self-validation

Working-class whiteness from within and without: an auto-ethnographic response to Avtar Brah’s 'The scent of memory'

Inspired by and responding to Avtar Brah’s ‘The Scent of Memory’, this piece attempts to reinscribe race into an auto-ethnographic narrative where previously whiteness was unmarked. It explores the dynamics of gender, race and class through the author’s personal history as a white English woman and class migrant, and through discussion of the broader political and historical context of that trajectory. The discussion includes analysis of the impact of British Conservative politician Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech in 1968 on the author’s white English working-class culture of origin in Wolverhampton, where Powell was a Member of Parliament. The article considers the speech’s continuing ramifications in the twenty-first century and in more middle-class contexts, as evidenced by the recent evocation of the speech by historian David Starkey in discussion of the ‘riots’ of August 2011 in British cities. The personal history is reconstructed through a series of memory scenes that trace and retrace the author’s experience and understanding of race and its intersections with class and gender; this is attempted in full cognisance of the constructed nature of memory, and of the performance of identity that autobiography entails. The piece draws on the work of the class migrant white French writer Annie Ernaux, with whom the author has been in dialogue since 1997

Perry – Deep mapping and emotion in place-writing practice

Cities, Capitalism and the Politics of Sensibilities This book explores the connections between the processes of social structuring and sensibilities in contemporary cities. The transformations of capitalism on a global scale imply reconfigurations both in the way of planning and organizing cities, and in the ways of dwelling and feeling them. The generalization of the urban, the suburbanization of the metropolis, and classified and racializing segregation, just to mention some significant phenomena, not only introduce changes linked to the forms of consumption of the city and the land, the appropriation and privatization of collective places, the strategic revaluation of urban times and spaces, or the establishment of new centralities. They also involve changes in sensibilities, which translate into substantial transformations in the lives of people and groups that dwell in cities in the Global North and South. Based on various empirical records and methodological procedures, the chapters included in this book establish a fertile dialogue between collaborators from different geo-cultural contexts that locate urban experiences and sensibilities as a point of articulation to address the processes of social structuring on a global scale. Chapter Mansfield, C., Shepherd, D., Wassler, P. (2021) Perry-Deep mapping and emotion in place-writing practice Abstract This chapter proposes a preparatory method for researchers and literary travel writers who are planning inquiry into a new urban space, with the French port city of Cherbourg, presented as a case study to illustrate this process. Using theory from Onfray, Bartlett and Patron, and travel writing from Ernaux, Barthes, Mann and Sebald the work develops the research instrument of the hexis for collecting and arranging knowledge discovered during archive searches and literary reading