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My Father and I

My Father and I

The Marais and the Queerness of Community

by David Caron

Published by: Cornell University Press

Imprint: Cornell University Press

288 Pages, 155.00 × 235.00 × 18.00 mm, 1 map, 57 halftones - 57 Halftones, black and white

Paperback
9781501705618
Published: August 2016

£23.99

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Hardcover
9780801447730
Published: February 2009

£34.00

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Description
Authors
Praise

"It is a living museum of a long-gone Jewish life and, supposedly, a testimony to the success of the French model of social integration. It is a communal home where gay men and women are said to stand in defiance of the French model of social integration. It is a place of freedom and tolerance where people of color and lesbians nevertheless feel unwanted and where young Zionists from the suburbs gather every Sunday and sometimes harass Arabs. It is a hot topic in the press and on television. It is open to the world and open for business. It is a place to be seen and a place of invisibility. It is like a home to me, a place where I feel both safe and out of place and where my father felt comfortable and alienated at the same time. It is a place of nostalgia, innovation, shame, pride, and anxiety, where the local and the global intersect for better and for worse. And for better and for worse, it is a French neighborhood."—from My Father and I

Mixing personal memoir, urban studies, cultural history, and literary criticism, as well as a generous selection of photographs, My Father and I focuses on the Marais, the oldest surviving neighborhood of Paris. It also beautifully reveals the intricacies of the relationship between a Jewish father and a gay son, each claiming the same neighborhood as his own. Beginning with the history of the Marais and its significance in the construction of a French national identity, David Caron proposes a rethinking of community and looks at how Jews, Chinese immigrants, and gays have made the Marais theirs. These communities embody, in their engagement of urban space, a daily challenge to the French concept of universal citizenship that denies them all political legitimacy.

Caron moves from the strictly French context to more theoretical issues such as social and political archaism, immigration and diaspora, survival and haunting, the public/private divide, and group friendship as metaphor for unruly and dynamic forms of community, and founding disasters such as AIDS and the Holocaust. Caron also tells the story of his father, a Hungarian Jew and Holocaust survivor who immigrated to France and once called the Marais home.

A brilliant, insightful, and moving study.... A compelling combination of personal memoir, urban history, literary analysis, and critical theory.... A detailed, expansive, and ground-breaking book. In his role as one of America's leading French scholars of both Queer and Jewish identities, Caron will undoubtedly be in great demand to offer his further thoughts on these (among other) places where French and American Queers and Jews intersect.
(South Central Review)
A fascinating and moving study.... Combining biography, memory, history, and theory, Caron offers a stirring meditation on and radical critique of the notion of community.... Undeniably bold.
(Contemporary French Civilization)
A sophisticated treatment of the relationship between homosexuality and urban space.
(Urban History)
An excellent, touching memoir.... No lover of Paris can fail to be touched by Caron's book. Yet just as importantly, it is a fascinating analysis of community and its affect, an illustration of what it means to belong, and what it means to be separated, to return, or to fail to return.
(French Forum)
Caron's insightful book offers a poignant exploration of issues of otherness and belonging.
(Choice)
David Caron is one of those rare intellectuals who manage to enliven debates about subjectivity, sexuality, and temporality. This volume, at once a personal memoir, a paean to the global capital of love, a belated letter to his father, and an essay on grief and the Holocaust, is peppered with witty excogitations about a gay man's life. An easy first read, it enthralls the reader and makes sure they will want to reread it.
(Sexualities)
David Caron's book is engaging and erudite, intellectually ambitious and historically varied. The author's elegant style and self-deprecatory wit keep us entertained through some pretty heavy subjects.
(French Studies)
I loved this book! It made me cry, think, and once I even threw it down saying, 'This is bullshit!'.... It is a brilliant piece of cultural analysis.
(AJS Review)
In this engaging work, David Caron invites us on a journey that blends personal narrative with academic pursuit.... Caron poses the question of what makes a neighborhood... [and] questions the narrative of progress and authenticity and the limiting powers these discourse have on those who do not fit into nineteenth-century bourgeois norms of development.... Weaving in historical and literary analysis with ethnographic fieldwork, Caron crafts a wonderfully compelling book. Written in an accessible style that does not shy away from dense theoretical discussions, his work speaks to many research fields (film studies, Jewish studies, queer studies, urban studies, etc.).
(French Review)
My Father and I... is a beautifully written, cunningly shaped work.... Caron is cruising, as it were, two different readerships: one of them academic yet not necessarily queer; the other both gay and non-academic. I think, and hope, that he'll reach both.
(Romanic Review)