New series in the WIF-Australia Seminar Series on "Connectivity and Care"
The goal of this series is to bring together researchers working on women, gender and feminism in French and Francophone contexts and provide a platform for sharing new work and ideas, receiving collegial feedback, and establishing new collaborations.
Bringing together an exciting range of papers, our next seminar will be held tomorrow, the 10th of September, 2021. Outlined in the program below, the presenters will speak about their research for approximately 10 minutes, followed by a Q and A session.
To register please click on the following link: https://teams.microsoft.com/registration/lYdfxj26UUOKBwhl5djwkA,0tKTsXTANES-GVBNsMT6yA,k2pfL-sM60i7-njJvv43-Q,R3m4wBoDtkSAN-DBCxNC0w,caOIE8-hY0ivwV_3IUvHYw,mp4FCx7qjEidh6c2Ns6vvA?mode=read&tenantId=c65f8795-ba3d-4351-8a07-0865e5d8f090&skipauthstrap=1
Full program:
Women In French: Australia – Seminar 4
International Start Times: London (UK) 3 p.m. Paris (Fr) 4 p.m. Eastern Time (U.S.) 10 a.m. Central Time (U.S.) 9 a.m. Pacific Time (U.S.) 7 a.m. Mountain Time (U.S.) 8 a.m.; Melbourne/Canberra/Sydney/Brisbane (Aust.) 12 midnight; Adelaide (Aust.) 11:30 p.m.; Perth (Aust.) 10 p.m.
Times below are GMT+1 (London)
3:05 p.m. Chair’s welcome: Arline Cravens (Saint Louis University)
3:10 p.m. Marion Krauthaker, De Montfort University
‘Writing from the confines of the Massif Central: Marie-Aimée Méraville, the forgotten voice of the Cantal’
Abstract: Marie-Aimée Méraville (1902–1963), a school teacher from the rural and mountain area of the Cantal, published her first texts in 1922. Although by the end of her life she had written over a hundred and fifty articles, notes, literary critiques, as well as two novels, three volumes of short stories and five volumes of tales or ‘contes’, she is today unknown to most and her books are out of print. This disappearance from the French literary field strikes as odd when we know that Méraville not only received literary prizes, but was also supported and higher praised by many of her peers, such as Marcel Aymé and Colette.
This proposed paper is part of a research project in progress started in 2019 which aims to promote the rediscovery of this lost female voice and, ultimately, to make Méraville’s texts available again through a scholarly digital edition of her work. The presentation will explore how for a single woman with a rural origin, the choice to remain, live and write from in an isolated area where heteropatriarchy is the norm, and the refusal to follow literary conventions were a hindrance to her career as a writer and to her later recognition. Méravilles’ texts, her correspondence with other writers and archived documents will be used and analysed to examine this question.
3:20 p.m. Nevine El Nossery, University of Wisconsin-Madison
‘From Assia Djebar to Amanda Gorman or the power of poetry in Djebar’s Far from Madina’
Abstract: While Amanda Gorman’s poem ‘The Hill We Climb’ put an end to a few years of intolerance and racism, it is in response to the dreadful crimes of the Black Decade in the 1990s, as well as the patriarchal and political repressions of contemporary Algeria that Assia Djebar’s unique novel Far from Madina stands as a piece of committed literature. In this study, I examine how Djebar resuscitates the stories of some of the most emblematic female figures that lived during the birth and expansion of Islam, but had been intentionally omitted or poorly cited in historical accounts. First, I demonstrate how these women used the power of speech – whether poetry or rhetorical argumentation – to assert their agency. Second, I closely examine the chain of transmission established amongst these women, as a way of validating their words. By reinterpreting and even reinventing a version of the history of the earliest Muslims, understood as unquestionable and unaltered over time, Far from Madina challenges the limits of the Muslim canon and destabilizes the gender hierarchy encoded in it. Indeed, by exhuming these sources, I finally argue that Djebar was able to reassess the place and especially the role that Algerian women play today as both historical subjects and active commentators on the theological foundations of radical ideologies.
3:30 p.m. Q + A
4 p.m. Close
