Special Session

French and Francophone / Our Ruling Classes: Class, Power, Conflict

Irina Markina (University of Washington - Seattle)
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Liana Pshevorska (Wesleyan University)
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Longtime seen as the lowly offspring of literature and the visual arts, the bande dessinée (comics) has secured a growing place in university classrooms and scholarly journals. Through the hybridity of visual and verbal modes, comics propose artistically and aesthetically distinctive ways of thinking and telling. What’s more, they offer marginalized voices a powerful medium through which to bring displaced, excluded, and silenced narratives into view. The "Francophone Graphic Novels/Bande dessinée: Authority and Resistance" session invites papers from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives that approach Francophone bandes dessinées as a unique vantage point for engaging with—and challenging—official rhetoric, the ruling classes, and mainstream culture. Papers (and paper proposals) may be in English, in French, or in a combination of both.

The bande dessinée (comics) is a medium that subverts hierarchies and blurs boundaries. Longtime seen as the lowly offspring of literature and the visual arts, comics have since been culturally legitimized by scholars demonstrating their capacity to engage with complex sociohistorical, political, and cultural topics. This “Ninth Art” has gained an increasing importance in university classrooms and scholarly journals alike. Through the hybridity of visual and verbal modes, comics propose artistically and aesthetically distinctive vantage points. What’s more, they offer marginalized voices a powerful medium through which to bring into view displaced, excluded, and silenced narratives. Through the layout of panels, the use of gutters, and other visual codes, comics engage with, question, and challenge authority and dominant narratives. From Goscinny’s Astérix, who recasts the chauvinistic figure of the Gaulois in the French national imaginary, to Jessica Oublié’s Peyi an nou, which provides a counternarrative to official state discourse on BUMIDOM, the bande dessinée has often been used to undercut official rhetoric.

The "Francophone Graphic Novels/Bande dessinée: Authority and Resistance" panel seeks to discuss the ways in which Francophone comics engage with “the ruling classes” (broadly defined), through both literary and pedagogical perspectives. How do comics perform the themes of power/powerlessness? How do they engage with the hierarchies that exist in various settings and communities? How do comics decenter “standard” language practices? How can they be used pedagogically to empower students?

We invite papers from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives on comics in Francophone literature as a unique vantage point for engaging with—and challenging—official rhetoric, dominant discourses, and mainstream culture. Papers (and paper proposals) may be in English, in French, or in a combination of both.

Topics include but are not limited to:

Migration

Ecocriticism

Social justice

Gender and sexuality

Comics and memory studies

Class and labor

Comics and marginality in second language acquisition

Nationalism, cosmopolitanism, globalization

Metropole & colony, post-/decolonial studies

Monolingualism, multilingualism, language politics