The Activist Author: Contemporary Forms and Historical Precedents of Activist Literature (Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium)

The Activist Author: Contemporary Forms and Historical Precedents of Activist Literature

Dates and Location:

November 9th & 10th, 2026.

UCLouvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium).

Confirmed Keynote speakers:

Sara Dimick: Northwestern University; author of Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literatures.

Juan Meneses: UNC Charlotte; author of Resisting Dialogue: Modern Fiction and the Future of Dissent and editor of Postpolitics and the Aesthetic Imagination.

Conference Description:

This conference aims to generate a dialog surrounding the intersection of activism and literature. Not restricted to any specific time period, national context, or genre of writing, we welcome submissions that engage with the rhetoric, narrative strategies, and textual forms employed by writer-activists. 

The 21st century has already witnessed a multitude of activist movements targeting various systematic injustices, from the wealth inequality of Occupy Wall Street, anti-democratic regimes ousted during the Arab Spring, systematic racism criticized by Black Lives Matter, gender discrimination and sexual violence exposed by #MeToo, and most recently the 2025 Gen Z protests in Morocco, Nepal, and Madagascar. This proliferation of protest has old roots, of course. Many contemporary movements draw inspiration from historical precedents of non-violent activism such as the U.S. civil rights movement, the suffragettes, and India’s anti-imperial independence movement to name a few. Even more examples of violent revolutions can be found throughout world history, particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries.  Some stories, like those of Pablo Neruda, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, and Antonio Gramsci, show the possible backlash of governments who punish outspoken writer-activists, raising alarms about the power imbalances between citizens and governments, and ethical questions concerning forms of violence enacted by states against protestors.  While many of these examples target particular manifestations of injustices, they often bring to light the latent entanglements of race, class, and gender in sites of oppression.

What interests this conference are the narratives and works of literature produced alongside these activist movements and revolutions; works that either incite or remember such moments in history in ways that reveal the complex interaction between political goals and textual strategies. We hope to find examples in a multitude of literary forms that illustrate various ways in which politics and narrative intersect, from activism represented in literature (novels such as Zola’s Germinal or Powers’s The Overstory), to literature used in activism (such as Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner poetry reading to the UN), and activism that takes the form of literature (such as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle or the polemical essays of Arundhati Roy). 

By examining the parallel development of political sentiment and literary expression, the conference seeks to address questions about activist tactics, protest memories, and the making and unmaking of democratic consensus through the circulation of texts. We encourage analyses that are sensitive to the historical contexts and material conditions of the writers’ activism, as well as the genres they employ to disseminate stories of injustice and mobilize action in the real world. We hope to engage in a nuanced appreciation of the rhetorical strategies employed, the affordances of different genres, and the typical features of activist literature that offer models for future writers and community organizers. 

We invite proposals that address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

·        Activism in Literature

·        Literature as activism

·        Politics and aesthetics

·        Public figures as writer-activists

·        State responses to activism 

·        Civil disobedience and other forms of resistance

·        Activist rhetoric 

·        Post-politics

·        Slow violence and the visibility of injustice

·        Exile literature and prison notebooks

·        Reception of activist narratives

·        Environmental and social justice

·        Human rights advocacy

·        Committed literature / Littérature engagée

·        Affect and activism

The conference will take place in English, although we hope to include scholars from a variety of national and linguistic backgrounds. We welcome individual papers in the traditional conference presentation format and encourage alternative formats that fit within a 20-minute timeframe per person, such as presenting creative works, panel discussions, collaborative activities, and beyond. If you would like to contribute, please send an abstract of around 300 words and a brief biography to James.Hastings@UClouvain.be by February 1st, 2026. A notification of acceptance will be sent to participants no later than February 27th, 2026.