MLA 2022
Voices of Empowerment: French and Francophone Perspectives” : WIF Call for papers
While written for the January 2021 inauguration of a US president, the incipit to Amanda Gorman’s poem speaks to a larger global moment and ethos. Her lyrical call demands a cooperative and coalitional vision of humanity that looks to the past for reparative force and perspective; that acknowledges the challenges of the present without shuddering at their expansiveness; and that eyes, without naiveté of the difficulties of achieving, a more just and inclusive future. At a time when violent and extremist, white-supremacist social movements, epidemiological crises, and fragile neoliberal economies challenge our individual and global understandings of our present and future, Gorman empowers us to focus on her voice.
This WIF Call for papers centers the power of voice (understood broadly), indeed, the potential and impact of diverse and/or multilingual perspectives to (re)think our pasts, (re)contextualize our presents, and (re)imagine our futures. We invite papers that celebrate memorial, remembrance, and testimony through the presentation and amplification of lost, erased, forgotten, or silenced (broadly conceived) voices throughout the Francophone world. We are especially interested in proposals that complicate and/or dialogue notions of empowerment, aesthetics, memory, identity, bodies, language(s) and multilingualism, space, and borders.
Please send an abstract of 200-350 words
to both co-organizers CJ Gomolka, DePauw University (
cjgomolka@depauw.edu) and E. Nicole Meyer, Augusta University (
nimeyer@augusta.edu) by March 1, 2021. WIF membership is required.
How the French 17th Century Invented (or Not)…
What ideas, practices, forms, or genres can be ascribed to 17th-century France and what should be reconsidered in light of a different temporality or geographic origin? Send 300-word proposals to harrisod@grinnell.edu by 1 March 2021.
Restarts in 17th-Century France
Instances of “starting over” in 17-century French literature, art, philosophy, culture, and politics, and the rhetorical or performative gestures of beginning again. Send 300-word proposals to erwelch@email.unc.edu by 1 March 2021.
Francophonie and the Early Modern: Intertextual Connections
Ways 20th/21st-century Francophone authors engage with early modern literary works or colonial histories; anti-racist/decolonial approaches to researching and teaching early modern texts.
Collaborative, non-guaranteed roundtable organized by Francophone and 17th-Century Forums.
Send 300-word proposals to ajosephg@umich.edu and awilliar@mailbox.sc.edu by 15 March 2021.
The Political Ends of Early Modernity
How have early modern texts, images, and ideas been used to promote or justify contemporary political discourses and actions, such as white supremacy or imperialism? Non-guaranteed roundtable. Send 300-word proposals to anna.rosensweig@rochester.edu by 1 March 2021.
