Special Session

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

Aude Jehan (University of Alberta)
ajeh@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

Censorship, a historically evolving phenomenon, continues to shape artistic expression to the present, including within democratic and digitally mediated contexts. This panel examines state censorship and propaganda in the Francophone world alongside the strategies developed by writers, filmmakers, and artists working under constraint. Adopting a multidisciplinary perspective, it explores how creative practices resist silence, subvert dominant narratives, and challenge ideological control. It further engages with ethical questions surrounding representation, memory, and surveillance, as well as the stakes of freedom of expression across literary fiction and non-fiction, poetry, and cinema.

In a global context marked by the resurgence of authoritarian rhetoric, increasing political polarization, and the pervasive circulation of propaganda, renewed attention to the mechanisms and effects of censorship is urgently needed. Far from being confined to overtly repressive regimes, censorship operates across diverse political contexts, including democratic societies, where it often assumes diffuse, mediated, and less immediately visible forms—particularly within digital environments. As a mode of regulating discourse and symbolic production, it continues to shape the conditions of artistic expression.

Focusing on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in France and the broader Francophone world, this panel examines the intersections of state censorship and propaganda alongside the creative strategies developed by writers, filmmakers, and artists working under constraint. It invites contributions that investigate both the structures of censorship and the practices through which they are negotiated, circumvented, or exposed, including through case studies situated in digital and social media contexts.

Particular attention will be paid to the ways in which texts and images function as sites of resistance, denunciation, and critical intervention. Such practices may include articulating the unspeakable, subverting official narratives, destabilizing imposed silences, and experimenting with aesthetic forms in order to contest ideological control.

Beyond formal analysis, the panel engages with the ethical dimensions of artistic production, interrogating how creators bear witness without compromise, represent collective trauma under conditions of surveillance, and respond to the manipulation or instrumentalization of national narratives.

We welcome proposals offering literary, cinematic, and interdisciplinary analyses, with particular emphasis on the period from 1940 to the present. Contributions that foreground transnational perspectives and engage with digital contexts across the Francophone world are also encouraged.