Alexa Barger (University of California - Los Angeles)
abar@****.com (Log-in to reveal)
This panel welcomes submissions that engage with contemporary questions of multicultural and multilingual experience in the Francophone world. How do contemporary artists look at multicultural and diverse encounters - and what role does language play within those works?
This panel welcomes submissions that engage with contemporary questions of multicultural and multilingual experience in the Francophone world. How do contemporary artists look at multicultural encounters and questions of diversity - and what role does language play within those works?
In her 2020 book Afropea: utopie post-occidentale et post-raciste (Afropea: A Post-Western and Post-Racist Utopia, forthcoming translation by Gila Walker), French Cameroonian author Léonora Miano affirms the following about artistic expression in France: “La France se connait à travers sa littérature. Celle-ci est à la fois son miroir et son testament.” (France is known through its literature. This is both its mirror and its testament). This panel seeks to expand this consideration of literary expression to the global Francophone world, particularly through the lens of language. It asks how art continues to be the mirror and testament of lived experience - as related to diversity in all senses of the word.
Potential themes may include:
§ Multilingual writings, broadly explored
§ Multicultural experiences in the Francophone world
§ Language as site for diverse expression: of culture, gender and sexuality, ability, and more
§ Filmic language and questions of diversity
§ Language and (trans)class status
§ Literatures of migration, displacement, and diaspora
§ Créolité and engagement with creole languages
§ The role of “regional languages:” the place of creole language, contemporary roles of Alsatian, Basque, Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Occitan, and others
§ Solidarity movements and language(s)
§ The self and her languages (ex. Djebar)
§ Translation within the text (literary and oral interpretation) and beyond
§ Art and vernacular language - within and beyond verlan