Dr Fraser McQueen
Postdoctoral Fellow, August 2022 - May 2023
Home Institution: University of Stirling
ORCID: 0000-0002-2726-6744
Dr Fraser McQueen completed his PhD, entitled 'Race, Religion, and Communities of Friendship: Contemporary French Islamophobia in Literature and Film' in December 2021, with cross-institutional supervision from the Universities of Stirling and Aberdeen. His thesis, which explores Islamophobia and community in contemporary France through a corpus of twelve literary and filmic texts, is currently under contract as a monograph with Liverpool University Press. From 2021 until 2022, Fraser was a lecturer in French Studies at the University of Stirling. His current research interests retain the interdisciplinary focus of his doctoral work, which drew on scholarship from postcolonial studies, literary theory, history, film studies, sociology, anthropology, and political science. Alongside his interest in the cultural production of the far right, which will be the main focus of his research at IASH, he has interests in the mainstreaming of far-right conspiracy theories; the work of Michel Houellebecq (on which he has published two articles in peer-reviewed journals); representations of jihadi women in media and cultural production; the role of utopianism in both propagating and opposing racism; and the national variations (or lack thereof) in the so-called 'culture wars' that have underpinned politics in recent years. A common thread in all of these apparently diverse interests is an interest in postcolonial and decolonial studies, and in the difficulties both have had in being recognised as legitimate fields of research in France (whether in the academy or public discourse). This interest has led Fraser to be an active member in, and, since 2019, communications officer of, the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies.
Project Title: Colonial Continuities in the Literature of the French Far Right
This project will explore, in comparative perspective, the role of the colonial project in novels of the French far right of the late nineteenth century and the post-2015 period. This urgent and timely interdisciplinary research will incorporate elements of literary theory, history, postcolonial studies, and political science. It will bring novels published while colonialism was at its apogee into dialogue with others published during a period when the publication of a genre I have labelled 'literary great replacements' has spiked: that is, novels which depict, typically via the generic conventions of dystopian satire, some version of the racist 'great replacement' conspiracy theory coming to pass in France. There is a longstanding tradition of engaged far-right French literature, but despite consistently high sales, the genre remains under-researched. This is despite ideologues of France’s ‘new right’ having since the 1970s described the advancement of far-right values through cultural production, including literature, as central to their project. This research will take seriously the importance they accord to fiction. Although it will enter dialogue with existing research underlining the survival of colonial mindsets in contemporary French politics, that literary focus will enable the project to complement such politically and sociologically-focused work: it will engage not only with how far-right ideologues describe the world, but how they imagine it. Areas of particular interest will be the relationships between antisemitism and Islamophobia within far-right discourses, the role of gender in those same discourses, and the ways in which colonial and postcolonial histories further our understanding of both. The research will offer new perspectives by interrogating the drivers fuelling far-right ideologies at two very different historical moments, exploring how colonial discourses continue to structure a far-right imaginary that has increasingly penetrated the mainstream in France and beyond.