French Studies in universities is often dominated by an approach centering on France the nation-state and even adopting a French cultural nationalism. The burgeoning interest in francophone studies often struggles to avoid peripheralizing those French-speaking territories that exist outside metropolitan France. This is sometimes due to the fact that, unlike Britain, Spain or Portugal, France was the only imperial European nation not to be overtaken in terms of population and power by any of its former colonies. An Atlantic approach to French Studies succeeds in overcoming this tendency, placing a French Atlantic world firmly back into any history of the western hemisphere, whether in terms of, for example, early European exploration of the North American continent, eighteenth and nineteenth-century republicanism, or in the domain of cultural exchanges. This is a much more fruitful approach than the traditional one of seeing 'France' and 'America' as fixed and finished entities mostly autonomous of, or even antagonistic to, one another. As well as its other benefits, the volume thus has important conceptual ambitions, attempting as it does a paradigm shift within French and francophone studies and a questioning of the latter term. The aim is to rethink Frenchness as diasporic and profoundly hybrid. Theoretical underpinnings include Deleuze and Guattari's distinction between major and minor cultures or modes of culture, in which the 'minor' is seen as proliferating and pluralising, refusing or undermining the 'major's' pretensions to mastery, and Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic of 1993. In Gilroy's re-inscription of the black African experience of slavery and diaspora into accounts of western modernity, and his simultaneous challenge to black nationalism and Afrocentrism from the point of view of cultural hybridity, the ship is deployed as a central organising symbol, "a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion", the middle passage as that of a circulation of ideas.

A justification for 'diasporic Frenchness' can be found in the often untold stories of French migration: the Huguenots after 1685, of whom Paul Revere was a descendant, political dissidents in the nineteenth century, massive French-Canadian immigration to New England later that century. While it is difficult to give a totalising account of so massive a phenomenon, it is possible to discern several specificities: an early more fluid and hybrid relation with North American native peoples; the culturally transformative role of displacement, relocation and exile, as for example in the change from being 'French' to being 'canadiens' in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the unsettling of centre/periphery and displacement of Paris in this perspective in favour of, for example, ports like Nantes and La Rochelle; the complementary but also competing political and cultural modernities of the American and French Revolutions; the French Atlantic as part of the Black Atlantic; the fact that transformation and displacement are not one-way streets, and so American influence on modern French culture will be analysed, but in a way that seeks to surpass simple binary oppositions between the two.