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Race and the Aesthetic in French and Francophone Cultures (L’Esprit créateur, special issue)

Race and the Aesthetic in French and Francophone Cultures (L’Esprit créateur, special issue)

Publié le par Marc Escola (Source : Cécile Bishop)

Call for articles / Appel à contributions

L’Esprit créateur, special issue, Summer 2019

Guest-edited by Cécile Bishop (NYU) and Zoë Roth (Durham)

Race and the Aesthetic in French and Francophone Cultures

 

Bringing into dialogue critical race studies and French and francophone literature, this special issue will explore the specific contribution the study of the aesthetic can make to emerging conversations about race in France. Today, the French Republic is constructed around an ideal of universal citizenship, undistinguished by gender, class, or race. Accordingly, French color-blind discourse rejects the category of race on the grounds that it is a social construct and that that its use in public discourse legitimizes racism. In recent years, however, activists and social scientists have argued that the official absence of race from public discourse obscures its political and social effects (Ndiaye 2008, Boittin 2010, Blanchard et al. 2011, Keaton et al. 2012, Thomas 2007, 2013). Historians, meanwhile, have emphasized that the current emphasis on color-blindness is a recent invention that does not reflect the complex history and genealogy of both French universalism and French conceptions of race. However, the contribution of aesthetic and literary criticism to French debates about race remains limited. By contrast, scholars working within critical race studies in the United States have harnessed the aesthetic to scrutinize the production of racial difference (English 2007, Fleetwood 2011, Raengo 2013, Thompson 2015). But this scholarship, which largely focuses on US culture, does not address French-speaking contexts and their specific histories of slavery, colonialism, and antisemitism. In addition to considering what the study of the aesthetic can contribute to emerging conversations about race in France, this special issue will introduce a more global context to critical race studies by bringing it into dialogue with French and francophone studies. 

Some of the key questions this issue will consider are: What does it mean to see race in a work of art or literature or to use it as an analytical tool? What makes a piece of art about race; is it biographical, thematic, representational? What are the effects of racialized interpretation on literary fields? Does the celebration of authors in terms of their political relevance marginalize their works’ aesthetic value? At the heart of these interrogations lies a broader methodological challenge: the necessity of arbitrating and navigating between interpretations of literary representations as ideological symptoms and approaches that endow the aesthetic with the capacity to question fixed meanings, including established racial codes. 

The special issue will thus reflect on the critic’s function, role, and ethical responsibilities in choosing race as an object of study. If conceiving of the aesthetic as autonomous from society and politics obscures racial domination, can the aesthetic be a space of resistance? Is criticism a political practice, and how should that shape our approach to race? Given the growing importance of debates around racial representation in France, the question about how critics situate themselves is paramount. Indeed, if literary criticism is to be more than the echo chamber of sociology and history, it needs a clear idea of what its specific modes of interpretation can contribute. Failure to do so may condemn us to either ignore or reify racialized frames of perception. By addressing these questions, this collection of essays seeks to chart new paths to imagine what contribution literary and visual studies can make to growing debates on race in France, but also to examine the limits and tensions between the practice of criticism and the urgencies of contemporary politics. 

Please send article proposals in English or French (300-400 words) together with a short biography to Cécile Bishop (cb196@nyu.edu) and Zoë Roth (zoe.roth@durham.ac.uk) by 10 January 2018. The deadline for completed articles (max. 6,000 words) is June 1st 2018.