20th/21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium
UNC Greensboro
Marriott Greensboro Downtown
Thursday, March 27-Saturday, March 29, 2025
Justice
This colloquium fosters a transatlantic conversation on the complexities of justice and inclusion in the French and Francophone context. 2025 marks key anniversary dates, namely: the first elections in which French women voted (1945), the start of the Mouvement de libération des femmes (1970), the release of the groundbreaking film, La Haine (1995), the social unrest in response to the deaths of Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré (2005), and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in France following George Floyd’s murder (2020). Cultural, literary, and artistic expressions engage concepts of belonging, reckoning, diversity, and citizenship to reveal social challenges. Literary and cultural production have been imbricated in larger political turning points and events from the French Revolution grounded in Enlightenment ideals and the Haitian Revolution to literary interventions by Victor Hugo and Émile Zola. Committed literature (Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir) and anti-colonial texts (Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant, Assia Djebar, and Maryse Condé), for instance, employ creative expression as a means of both engagement and social revolution. As contradictions pertaining to French universalist ideals, “liberté, égalité, and fraternité,” persist, literary and cultural production emerges both as a site toward and away from the political. While ongoing relationships between the metropole and Francophone spaces call for equitable environmental and social relationships, collective change is reflected through and emerges from shifts in literary and cultural production.
Greensboro has a rich history of revolutionary moments and movements: the Battle of Guilford Courthouse during the American Revolutionary War, the Underground Railroad, and the start of the sit-in movement at Woolworth’s lunch counter where four Black students from NC A&T University sat at the whites-only counter. This act of protest by David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr. (now Jibreel Khazan), and Joseph McNeil helped spark the larger U.S Civil Rights Movement. The former store is now the site of the International Civil Rights Center and Museum. This museum educates visitors about the history of the U.S. segregated south while serving as a place of memory and dialogue about current social and racial tensions. We hope that this historical and cultural backdrop will provide the occasion to examine anew representations of justice in ongoing French and Francophone literary and cultural production in a transnational context. We are particularly interested in the ways in which literature, cinema, and media, and cultural production engage with the notion of justice to produce social change and imagine capacious futures.
The organizing committee seeks papers, panels, and roundtables that address a range of topics and inquiry, including:
- Activism
- Afrofeminism/Black feminism
- Belonging
- Black Lives Matter (BLM)
- Censorship
- Citizenship
- Civil rights
- Colonial legacy and post-colonial struggles
- Committed literature
- Decolonization and decolonial thought
- Emancipatory movements
- Environmental justice/Climate justice
- Equity
- Existentialism
- Fracture sociale (unemployment, social exclusion, racial tension, banlieue)
- Futures (Afro Futures, Feminist Futures, Queer Futures)
- Gender equality and feminism
- Gilets jaunes/gilets noirs
- Immigration and identity
- Inclusion/exclusion
- Intersections of race, gender, and social class
- Justice/injustice
- Laïcité
- LGBTQ+ Rights
- Nationhood
- Poverty, food and housing insecurity
- Protest Movements
- Reckoning
- Representation in media and arts
- Resilience
- Resistance
- Responsibility
- Responses to social movements and inclusion (critiques of le wokeism)
- Revolutions
- Segregation
- Social classes/working class
- Social media
- Social movements
- Socialism, Communism, Marxism, Maoism, and international movements
- Transnational liberation movements
- Women’s literary and artistic production
- Workers’ movements
Please submit 250-word abstracts (in French or English) and a brief bio-bibliography and panel proposals by August 30, 2024.
