Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture
by Kristin Ross

This book examines the crucial decade from Dien Bien Phu to the mid-1960s, when France shifted rapidly from an agrarian, insular, and empire-oriented society to a decolonised, Americanised, and fully industrial one. Modernization ideology, Ross argues, offered the promise of limitless, even, and timeless development. By situating the rise of 'end of history' ideologies within the context of France's transitions into mass culture and consumption, Ross returns the touted timelessness of modernisation to history. She shows how the realist fiction and film of the period, as well as the work of social theorists such as Berthes, Lefebvre, and Morin, who began at the time to conceptualise 'everyday life', laid bare the seams in the present - its disruptions and its social costs.
In this analysis of a cultural transformation, Kristin Ross finds the contradictions of the period embedded in its various commodities and cultural artifacts - automobiles, washing machines, women's magazines, film, popular fiction, even structuralism - as well as in the practices that shape, determine, and delimit their uses.