Song Huang (University of Virginia)
huan@****.com (Log-in to reveal)
"Writing Asia, Writing Asianness: French and Francophone Perspectives" invites papers that examine how “Asia” and “Asianness” are imagined, represented, contested, translated, and reworked in writing in French across metropolitan, colonial, postcolonial, and diasporic contexts. The session is deliberately broader than a focus on authors of Asian origin alone: it also welcomes analyses of French and Francophone texts that construct Asia as object of desire, fear, memory, fantasy, archive, geopolitical horizon, or aesthetic resource. In this sense, the panel foregrounds Asianness as a critical category of reading—one produced through discourse, form, circulation, and power—rather than as a fixed identity.
This field of study is significant because it helps reframe French and Francophone studies beyond its more established Atlantic and Mediterranean orientations, while also complicating the limits of area studies, national literary histories, and monolingual criticism. It allows us to ask how Orientalist legacies persist or mutate; how Asian presences and absences shape French literary modernity; how colonial histories and Cold War imaginaries continue to structure representation; and how contemporary writers, artists, and performers intervene in, inherit, resist, or strategically reuse these formations. It is equally important for understanding translation, multilingual poetics, migration, exile, adoption, war memory, and racialized embodiment across France, Québec, the Indian Ocean, Southeast Asia, East Asia, and global diasporas.
The session welcomes work engaging major critical frameworks that have shaped this domain, including Orientalism and its revisions, postcolonial and decolonial critique in Francophone studies, transnational and “French global” approaches, Sinophone studies, diaspora and minor transnationalism, translingualism/exophony, memory and postmemory, race and representation, and intermedial or performance-based methodologies.
Possible corpora include (but are not limited to) works by Asian and Asian diasporic authors writing in French—such as Shan Sa, Dai Sijie, Ying Chen, François Cheng, Linda Lê, Anna Moï, Kim Thúy, and Elisa Shua Dusapin—as well as French and broader Francophone authors who write about Asia and construct Asian/Asiatic imaginaries, particularly in contemporary literature (for example, Nicolas Bouvier, J.-M. G. Le Clézio, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Éric Faye, Jean-Luc Coatalem, and other writers engaging Asia through travel, memory, history, geopolitics, or transcultural fiction). Travel writing, colonial archives, graphic narratives, film, theater, dance, and visual culture are also welcome. Comparative, cross-period, and cross-media papers are especially welcome. By bringing together scholarship on both Asian/Asian diasporic authors and broader writings of Asianness, this session aims to map an emerging, urgently needed conversation in French and Francophone literary and cultural studies.