MLA 2022: Women in French Session. January 6-9th, 2022, Washington DC
“When day comes, we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade?” Youth poet laureate Amanda Gorman, 2021
While written for the January 2021 inauguration of a US president, the incipit to Amanda Gorman’s poem speaks to a larger global moment and ethos. Her lyrical call demands a cooperative and coalitional vision of humanity that looks to the past for reparative force and perspective; that acknowledges the challenges of the present without shuddering at their expansiveness; and that eyes, without naiveté of the difficulties of achieving, a more just and inclusive future. At a time when violent and extremist, white-supremacist social movements, epidemiological crises, and fragile neoliberal economies challenge our individual and global understandings of our present and future, Gorman empowers us to focus on her voice.
This WIF Call for papers centers the power of voice (understood broadly), indeed, the potential and impact of diverse and/or multilingual perspectives to (re)think our pasts, (re)contextualize our presents, and (re)imagine our futures. We invite papers that celebrate memorial, remembrance, and testimony through the presentation and amplification of lost, erased, forgotten, or silenced (broadly conceived) voices throughout the Francophone world. We are especially interested in proposals that complicate and/or dialogue notions of empowerment, aesthetics, memory, identity, bodies, language(s) and multilingualism, space, and borders.
Please submit abstracts of 200-350 words to both co-organizers, CJ Gomolka, cjgomolka@depauw.edu and E. Nicole Meyer, nimeyer@augusta.edu by March 1, 2021.
