"Hexagonal Variations "provides an essential overview of key debates about contemporary French society and culture. Concise, challenging and comprehensive, its chapters each address the processes of change and redefinition that characterise France today. Contributors analyse and situate cinematic, literary, online and visual texts, mediatic, political and everyday discourses, in each case pinpointing how diversity, plurality and reinvention inflect cultural and social evolution in France. The chapters in the collection share a key set of thematic concerns and raise topics for debate among scholars and students alike. Central to these are questions about France's uncertain place and role in Europe and the wider world; the morphing topography of its capital; and the many conundrums posed by the persistence of Republican paradigms in a global environment. If France is no longer the exception, what are the versions and varieties of being French that are lived, thought and imagined in the new millennium?

"Exile Cultures, Misplaced Identities" takes a transnational and transcultural approach to exile and its capacities to alter the ways we think about place and identity in the contemporary world. The edited collection brings together researchers on exile in international perspective from three continents who explore questions of exilic identity along multiple geopolitical and cultural axes-Cuba, the USA and Australia; Colombia and the USA; Algeria and France; Italy, France and Mexico; non-Han minorities and Han majorities in China; China, Tibet and India; Japan and China; New Caledonia, Vietnam and France; Hungary, the USSR, and Australia; and Germany, before and after unification. The international and crosscultural span of this collection represents an important addition to the fields of exile criticism and cultural identity studies. "Exile Cultures, Misplaced Identities" will be of interest to readers, scholars and students of exile, diasporic and transmigration studies, international studies, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, language studies, and comparative literary studies.

Collective Memory examines the difficult transmission of memory in France of the Algerian war of independence (1954-62). Emphasizing the current lack of transmission of memories of this war through a detailed case study of three crucial vectors of memory: the teaching of school history, coverage in the media, and discussion in the family, author McCormack argues that lack of transmission of memories is feeding into contemporary racism and exclusion in France. Collective Memory draws extensively on interviews with historians, teachers, and pupils as well as secondary sources and media analysis. McCormack proposes that a greater 'work of memory' needs to be undertaken if France is to overcome the division in French society that stems from the war. There has been little reconciliation of divisive group memories, a situation that leaves many individuals without a voice on this important subject. 'Memory battles' dominate discussion of the topic as many issues periodically flare up and cannot yet be overcome.