Special Session

French and Francophone / Multiethnic and Indigenous

Alexa Barger (University of California - Los Angeles)
abar@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

This panel engages 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 and diverse encounters, and what role does language play within those works?
This panel asks how art continues to be a mirror and testament of diverse forms of experience, using "diversity" in all senses of the word, with regard to artists as well as form. This year, papers that engage with questions of the "palimpsest" are highly encouraged.
Potential themes may include:
- Multilingual and multicultural narratives, broadly explored- Multiculturalism across Francophone regions
- Layering stories and histories
- Multimodal expression
- Multilingual expression
- (un)erased expression, "lost" languages that re-emerge, etc.
- Sites of memory / lieux de mémoire
- The archive and the "anarchive" (Brozgal) created in its absence; the (un)erasure of history
- The transmission of memory- The contemporary palimpsest and its technologies
- "Obsolete" ways of expressing and being, and their return