André Pettman is a PhD candidate in French at Columbia University, specializing in contemporary French literature. Originally from Kansas City, Missouri, he graduated from the University of Arizona in 2016 with BAs in Psychology and French and with an MA in French in 2017. His dissertation, entitled “All Things Commune: The Communal Imaginary in 21st Century French Fiction & Poetry,” is a study of a literary countercurrent of radical critique that reveals a politics that is markedly anticapitalist, anarchist, and communist, one with a drive towards autonomy and community unbound from the tangled web of capitalism and state governance. His work challenges the assumption that literature is no longer a site of radical political commitment. His articles and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in French Forum, French Studies Bulletin, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: SITES, Nottingham French Studies, Yale French Studies, and in the edited volume Hip Hop en français (2020).
