Dr. André Pettman holds a Ph.D. in French from Columbia University (2024). He also holds an M.A. in French (2017) and B.A. degrees in French and Psychology (2016) from the University of Arizona. A specialist of contemporary French & Francophone literature, his research interests include critical theory, politics, film studies, and translation. His current book project examines twenty-first-century French literature as a site of radical political imagination. Through close readings of works by a diverse set of novelists and poets – including Yannick Haenel, Virginie Despentes, and Jean-Marie Gleize – his project reveals a countercurrent of twenty-first-century French literature grounded in a shared imaginary of alternative communal life and radical Leftist politics that are autonomous from the French state, capitalism, governance, and traditional political structures. Overall, his book project questions the narrow political frameworks through which twenty-first-century French literature continues to be read and demonstrates how radical politics appear in unexpected ways in a period of literature sometimes reduced to the reactionary or the apolitical.
Dr. Pettman is also an active translator whose work focuses on Francophone literatures and cultures. He has co-translated, with Soraya Limare, Assia Djebar’s inaugural speech at l’Académie Française and is currently writing a critical introduction to accompany its publication. His articles and book reviews appear or are forthcoming in French Forum, Nottingham French Studies, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: SITES, French Studies Bulletin, Modern Language Quarterly, and Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, and an entry in the Dictionnaire Assia Djebar, edited by Maya Boutaghou & Anne Donadey (Paris: Honoré Champion). His translations have appeared in Yale French Studies and in the edited volume Hip Hop en français: An Exploration of Hip-Hop Culture in the Francophone World, edited by Alain-Philippe Durand (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020).
Publications
Articles and Chapters
“Somewhere in (White) America: Hip Hop, Hyperreality, and Minstrelsy in Laurent Chalumeau’s Fuck and En Amérique.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies. Invited/Forthcoming.
“Revolution, melancholy, and the limits of constituent power: François Cusset’s À l’abri du déclin du monde.” Modern & Contemporary France. Accepted/Forthcoming.
“When Waters Rise and Birds No Longer Sing: L’Absence d’oiseaux d’eau by Emmanuelle Salasc.” The French Review. Accepted/Forthcoming.
“Académies,” co-written with Soraya Limare, entry in Dictionnaire Assia Djebar, Eds. Maya Boutaghou & Anne Donadey (Paris: Honoré Champion). Accepted/Forthcoming.
“Communal Conjuration: The Politics of Disappearance in Philippe Vasset’s La Conjuration.” French Studies Bulletin 46, no. 1, 2025, pp. 6-11.
“Vivre Sans: Deserting Capitalism, Governance, and Identity in Les Renards pâles by Yannick Haenel.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 28, no. 5, 2024, pp. 795-810.
“The Impossibility of Logging Off: Technological Disconnection in Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s La Clé USB.” Nottingham French Studies 63, no. 2, 2024, pp. 235-246.
“Get Hard or Die Trying: Impotence and the Displacement of the White Male in Michel Houellebecq’s Sérotonine.” French Forum 46, no. 1, 2021, pp. 37-51.
Translations
Dorlin, Elsa. “Me, You, Us: I, Tituba and the Ontology of the Trace.” Yale French Studies 140, 2022, pp. 74-86.
Bazin, Hugues. “The Body Politic of Hip-Hop Dance.” Hip Hop en français: An Exploration of Hip-Hop Culture in the Francophone World, edited by Alain-Philippe Durand. Landham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020, pp. 123-135.
Jacono, Jean-Marie. “Rap Music in Cities in Crisis: The Case of Marseille.” Hip Hop en français: An Exploration of Hip-Hop Culture in the Francophone World, edited by Alain-Philippe Durand. Landham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020, pp. 17-28.
Book Reviews
“Review of Morgane Cadieu’s On Both Sides of the Tracks: Social Mobility in Contemporary French Literature. The University of Chicago Press, 2024.” Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature 49, no. 1, 2025.
“Review of Olivia C. Harrison’s Natives Against Nativism: Antiracism and Indigenous Critique in Postcolonial France. University of Minnesota Press, 2023.” Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature 48, no. 1, 2024.
“Review of Annabel L. Kim’s Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature.” Modern Language Quarterly 85, no. 3, 2024, pp. 351-353.