Annie Ernaux's Supermarkets

ABSTRACT: In recent years, supermarkets have repeatedly surfaced in the French political imaginary, implicated, however improbably, in discourses pertaining to identity, social cohesion, and republican universalism. This article locates in Annie Ernaux's corpus a sustained attempt to think supermarkets in conjunction with the (neoliberal) nation-state—a socioliterary project that clarifies the role these commercial spaces have played, since their inception, in normative visions of Frenchness. In Ernaux's texts, the supermarket emerges as a site of contestation, where social disparities are articulated against a backdrop of staged consumer abundance, undermining narratives that would have such abundance signal a coherent, benevolent French State.