By Lucille Lorenz, Arts & Humanities writer-in-residence

Kévin Drif is a third-year PhD student in the Department of French, with a designated emphasis in Film and Media Studies. His research largely focuses on cultural representations of children of immigrants in French media, as he explores the ways in which the idea of a French republican identity is confronted to children of immigrants’ cultural hybridity. Kévin received a BA and MA from the University of Tours in English literature, before receiving an MA in French and Francophone literature from CU Boulder. 

Can you tell us a bit about how you came to academia, and about your research interests, or current research projects? 

I have a very eclectic, some may say chaotic, journey. After I finished high school in France, I didn’t know what I wanted to do so I decided to do a short term diploma, which was, at the time, an Associate degree in Civil Engineering. During that program I realized that I wanted to study English literature. I then completed a BA and an MA in English in France, and during these programs I participated in two exchanges in the United States, in North Carolina and in Colorado. After my MA I felt the urge to come back to the US and the easiest way for me to do so was to start another program, which is why I pivoted to an MA in French studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. It was an interesting experience to reconnect with French literature. In France, we study French literature in junior high school and high school very intensely and I never really liked it. I guess I needed to go abroad and look at it from a different perspective to really appreciate it. That’s why I decided to do a PhD in French and Francophone studies.

Right now, I’m at a very interesting point in my PhD program because I am taking my qualifying exams which are technically supposed to delineate my research interests. When I started the program two years ago, I was interested in migration stories, more specifically in the positionality of children of immigrants in France. Just to give a very quick history lesson: the historical republican anchor of French culture and identity, and its core ideals of universalism and secularism, or the notion that being a French citizen should supersede any other markers such as race, ethnicity, or religion, has been drastically challenged in the second half of the twentieth century by decolonization movements which led to a lot of North African and Sub-Saharan people to migrate to France. Nowadays children of immigrants are culturally, socially and politically French citizens, and yet they still feel ostracized because of their immigrant origin. It is this paradox that I’ve been focusing on over the past two years. For my qualifying exams, I explore these ideas via education and schools, and their representations in different media—literature and cinema. 

I’ve been recently working on publications around these topics. I recently published a chapter entitled, “Gender Dynamics and Spatiality in Banlieue Education Films.”  I’m currently working on another chapter for an edited volume about education in French cinema, which I tentatively titled, “When the Banlieue Meets the Third Arrondissement: Education, Hip-Hop and Emancipation in Allons Enfants (2022).” To make a long story short, it is a documentary about a high school in a Paris upper-class neighborhood that created a hip hop dance track that welcomes students from Paris’ peripheral and underprivileged banlieues, to fill the gap between school and children of immigrants. Through an approach relying on film studies, education theories, and performance studies, this chapter investigates the representation of the school’s social and racial power dynamics in its relationship with children of immigrants, with a hope for emancipation carried out by hip hop dance and performance.

I was wondering more about studying television. Have there been difficulties with working on such a contemporary and quickly changing field? 

My relationship with television and television studies has been an interesting one. As I told you before, in France I completed an MA in English with a focus on cultural studies and cinema, for which I wrote a thesis about Black masculinity in American television, specifically in television series. Working on and writing about television has always been a central part of my research, and very important to me because it is the media I engaged with the most growing up. I think it is also the media that speaks the most to people outside of academia—across social classes, education levels and other identity markers. Since I have been adopting a cultural studies approach to my research in television, I was mostly analyzing television via narrative analysis informed by literary tools but also adapting frameworks from gender and sexuality studies, postcolonial studies, or sociology, just to name a few. Even though I have never had a class on television, I made a point very early on to read as much as I could about the field. And as you said, it is an ever-changing field. After my MA in France, I arrived in the US to do an MA in French literature, and I completely abandoned that interest, because my department was mostly a literary one. For the past two years at Berkeley, thanks to the film and media designated emphasis—which is sort of a minor in a graduate program—I’ve strengthened my analytical skills in cinema. This was a journey that I thought was necessary for me, because I saw myself working on film and visual media. But now that I am thinking about my dissertation, I’m realizing that television is what I want to do and what excites me intellectually.

To circle back to your question, I think the biggest issue that I am facing right now and will face when it comes to television studies in the context of France is that the field is still very nascent in France when it comes to French productions. A lot of researchers in France are analyzing American television. In the US you analyze a lot of American television as well, but when it comes to French television, there’s still so much to do. Even though bridges can be made between French and American television studies in terms of formal and narrative analysis, I truly think that French television and the French televisual landscape as a whole is very unique and will benefit from the development of the already existing scholarship that foregrounds its cultural specificities, which is the work that I’m hoping to do with this dissertation. 

Can you speak more on the specificities of French television? 

I think logics of production are a first good example of national televisual particularism —how things are produced, in what context, and who are producing those things. The audience is also much different in France as well, in the way they consume television and the programs they like to watch. There is an interesting culturally informed approach to certain types of programs in France, with programs that don’t exist in the US. For example, in France we have a very big tradition of very short sitcom-ish programs called “programme court” of 3–4 minutes, but this format does not exist in the US. 

I am interested to hear more about embracing an interdisciplinary framework in scholarship. Can you speak more about how scholars can do this, and what the benefits are of that approach?

Being at Berkeley and being in the United States is already half the battle. In France, academia does not always foster a welcoming ground for interdisciplinarity. When you do an MA, or even an undergraduate degree in France, you already have your major, and only study what you’re majoring in. In my BA in English literature, I only studied English literature for three years, which was intense. When you do a dissertation in France, you must stick largely to your main field of research. What I appreciate about the US, at least in the departments that I’ve been in, is that they actively foster interdisciplinary work. For example, the French department at Berkeley is at heart a literary department, but faculty members are open to dissertations about cinema, and I even have the opportunity to conduct research on television as well. When you do these things in the French department, you have to work with people who work with different frameworks— postcolonial studies, gender and sexuality studies, queer studies— so when you work across mediums, temporalities, and spaces, the interdisciplinarity comes naturally. When you conduct research, taking an interdisciplinary approach is one of the most important things, because it is only by bringing together these different frameworks, references and contexts that you can come to innovative conclusions. 

Since you’re in a language department, I was curious to hear more about your thoughts on translations.

I saw that you interviewed Professor Mairi McLaughlin, with whom I had the pleasure of taking a seminar about translation. This class was eye opening because I, as a student from France working on American and French cultural landscapes, have been exposed actively to translations, whether in literature, film, or television. I constantly have to think across languages, and about the role of translation in my research. After taking that seminar with Professor McLaughlin, I can say that there is no clear-cut approach that you should adopt when performing translation. In some cases, a word-for-word approach would be the easiest and best way to transmit information. But when you think of literary text like poetry for instance, word-for-word goes out the window because what matters the most is the form. I think, when it comes to translation, you need to find the right balance between a focus on meaning and a focus on form. You want to develop a translation that will speak to your audience. 

When it comes to film—and the work of subtitles and dubbing—these issues are even more complex. You are constrained by issues of time and temporality in cinema. I’m saying this because for Mairi’s seminar, we had to design a syllabus for a class we could teach. I designed one about the practice of translation in cinema via subtitles and dubbing. It is fascinating to think about how many things come in play: the social and political contexts, or specific cultural references which are lost in translation. You have to fit that in a specific number of words so that you can read the subtitles or match the dubbing with the actors’ lips. Translation is a very important field of study, and oftentimes we tend to take it for granted and overlook its use as a useful framework to explore. When I speak to other graduate students around me, it is interesting the way that some people may view a translation as different from the original work—not something that should be analyzed—but others see it as a reimagination of the work that is just as important to investigate.

I know that some departments are called French departments, whereas some are called Francophone Studies. What is the distinction between those two fields?

That is a question that should be addressed more in French departments across the United States. At Berkeley for example, we are the Department of French, but other universities have departments of French and Francophone studies. So, conversations need to happen around questions like: What does it mean to work on French or Francophone literature? Which version of the French language are we teaching?, and so on. 

To my understanding, the term Francophone refers to groups of people who use the French language regularly, for public or private purposes. I believe there’s still about 50 countries around the world that still use French for their daily exchanges. When it comes to literature when one speaks about French literature, they are referring to the literature produced within hexagonal France, whereas Francophone literature refers to literature created by authors in other Francophone nations, such as Senegal, Belgium, Canada, or in the Caribbean, to name a few. 

What book do you recommend to everyone reading this interview?

I thought a lot about this question. It’s a hard one! Over the past year I’ve read about 70 books, and out of all of them, one that I think would be great—not only for its content, but also its accessibility—is a French novel that was published in 2017, L’Art de Perdre or, The Art of Losing. It was written by a French author called Alice Zeniter. It is a transgenerational story about an Algerian family spread over three generations, from the 1930’s to contemporary France. It takes us through the colonial period in Algeria, the Algerian war of independence that will lead the family to immigrate to France, and then we witness different generations acclimating to their lives in France, from the children who were born in Algeria to then their children who were born in France. It explores how they reconcile their in-betweenness, stuck between their parent’s heritage and culture and their French identity. Even though the book is a work of fiction, the author did extensive historical and archival research, to present a story that would be as realistic as possible. I found it deeply compelling, not only as a researcher but as a reader, because of this mix of historical accuracy and deep affective characterization. It is a long book, it’s more than 400 pages, but I like to make people around me read it. It’s a good way to help them understand my research by exploring the journey of this family, and their difficulties to find their place in France amidst rampant French postcolonial ideals.

I also wanted to recommend a television series. One that I love, and that I think I might use in my dissertation. It is called Represent and came out on Netflix in 2023. It tells the fictional story of a young black youth leader in Paris, who decides to run for the upcoming Presidential election. It is largely a satire of French politics and society as being ready or not to accept a Black president, but I think it is also a interesting take on French contemporary racial dynamics, and the position of children of immigrants in French society.