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ABSTRACTS Matthew Lazen (Harvard University) Regional Cultures and the Politics of Recognition I will begin with Christopher Miller's insight that Africans have generally insisted on their access to the universal because their cultures have been belittled as detours from the main routes of civilization, whereas regionalists have tended to assert their particularism rather than be fully subsumed into French culture. Regionalists have therefore sought to have regions recognized as distinct cultures and have emphasized, exaggerated, putative differences. In the first instance, Breton identity is recognized with a slap on the back as an innocuous family difference, enunciated by non-Bretons. But when a Breton becomes the subject of the same enunciation, it takes on a rather different tenor, suggesting threateningly separatist intentions. It is the former form of recognition that, I would argue, holds the upper hand in the current market for multiculturalism. Thus, while regional cultures have received much recognition in recent years by the audiences for the Pagnol remakes (set in a non-threatening past) or by Raffarin, it is because the threat of breakaway difference has been defused. Regional languages, for instance, can be taught in schools without much threat that it will unseat the national tongue even the slightest. As for Corsica, its seeming threat to French unity either elicits hostility in place of appreciation or it is neutralized by reports that the attacks are perpetrated by criminal groups rather than by true nationalists. In short, I hope to look at ways that regionalists have emphasized regional difference in an effort to gain recognition for themselves as separate, respectable entities but they have largely been recognized as colorful accents within Frenchness. I might approach this question in part by looking at analogies that some Francophone writers (such as Assia Djebar in "Les Nuits de Strasbourg") have seen between their cultures' peripheral relationship to France and that of regional cultures.

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