Poelitics of Resistance in Contemporary Francophone Literatures and Arts from Africa and the Caribbean

Call for contributions for a collective volume

Poelitics of Resistance in Contemporary Francophone Literatures and Arts from Africa and the Caribbean

Editors:

Jovensel Ngamaleu (CUNY)
Agathe Dubois (Université Sorbonne)
Jean Francky Guerrier (Université de Montréal)
Blaise Doré-Caillouette (Université de Montréal)

"T]here is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations." (Foucault, 1995: 27)

"It is not [...] fundamentally against power that struggles arise, but against certain effects of power, against certain states of domination, in a space that has paradoxically been opened up by power relations. Conversely, if there were no resistance, there would be no effects of power, but simply problems of obedience." (Revel, 2002: 54, our translation)

The contemporary world is increasingly violent, divisive, and in decline. Forms, mechanisms, strategies, and logics of resistance are multiplying on a daily basis in response to the many factors of alienation experienced in various areas. Politics, economics, techno-science, health, the environment, education, religion, spirituality, gender, sexuality, culture, art, history, cartography, epistemology, and the media, among others, are both the causes and consequences of the phenomena of power and resistance. 

The concepts of resistance and transgression are often linked and express the idea of "a certain exteriority,"of something beyond the existing.  "In both cases, it is a matter of describing how a singular individual, through a process that is generally [art], succeeds, either voluntarily or by chance, in thwarting the mechanisms of identification, classification, and normalization of discourse."(Revel, 2002: 53, our translation) Resisting means acting on individual or collective becoming through actions that deconstruct the dominant  "order of discourse‘‘ to produce acounter-discourse, another alternative discursive logic that is self-repairing or socially repairing. Resistance is therefore underpinned by a power relationship, or even "biopower", which highlights a constellation of demands, aspirations, and thus individual, collective, historical, geopolitical, ideological, and symbolic struggles.

Indeed, resistance phenomena play out in "power relations". According to Foucault, the subject is at the heart of these relations. Judith Revel emphasizes that "power is only exercised over subjects—individual or collective—who have before them a field of possibilities where several behaviors [...] can take place." As a result, it turns out that  "if [...] there is only power exercised by some over others [...], then a genealogy of power is inseparable from a history of subjectivity; if power exists only in action, [...] it is the question of "how" that must be used to analyze the ways in which it is exercised, i.e., both the historical emergence of its modes of application and the instruments it employs, the fields in which it intervenes, the network it creates, and the effects it has at a given time.‘‘ (Revel, 2002: 47, our translation) Furthermore, just as resistance implies the notion of power, power conjures up the notion of freedom. It is precisely by making them inseparable that Foucault can recognize power as having not only a repressive role but also a productive one (producing effects of truth, subjectivities, struggles), and that he can conversely root the phenomena of resistance within the very power they seek to challenge [...]."(Revel, 2002: 47, our translation) It goes without saying that freedom is a producer of power and a driver of resistance, and that there is no resistance without effects of power.

This call for contributions does not aim to cover all fields and forms of resistance. It focuses on the poetics and politics of resistance expressed through literature and the arts (theater, music, cinema, photography, drawing, painting, graffiti, etc.), particularly in French-speaking countries in Africa and the Caribbean. The collective work aims to answer the following main questions: How do literary and artistic works from these geocultural spaces address the notion of resistance? In other words, what modalities, techniques, practices, tactics, and strategies are chosen or deployed by African and Caribbean writers and artists engaged in resistance? What are the constraints, levers, and challenges in terms of the creation, reception, and circulation of these works of resistance?

Contributions may focus on the following non-exhaustive areas of reflection:

• Resisting with the body: nakedness, tattoos, dreadlocks, scarification, piercings, etc.
• Resistant identities/minorities: ethnicity, tribalism, race, sex, gender, class, etc.
• (Post-)exile, (im)migration, uprooting, and resistance
• Linguistic, cultural, educational, political, technoscientific, and ecological resistance
• Resisting with or against spirituality/religiosity: voodoo, Christianity, Islam, etc.
• History, memory, and trauma of resistant figures
• Cartorésistance, undoing/rethinking colonial spaces: recartography, decartography borders, extension, inclusion, fusion, etc.
• Resisting through onomastics, rectification, or cancellation: renaming/destroying sites, places, monuments, etc.
• Resistance and censorship
• Resistant theories and conceptual grammars: Afropolitanism, strategic essentialism, epistemological movement, world-literature, Global South, Africa-World, chaos-world, Tout-Monde, Relation, archipelization, creolization, intersectionality, diversity, globality, decoloniality, pluriversality, Ubuntu, etc.

Submission guidelines

Proposals (titles and abstracts of approximately 300 words, followed by a brief bio-bibliography) in French or English must be sent no later than February 23, 2026, to the following address: ouvrageresistances26@gmail.com

Provisional schedule

- Submission of proposals: February 23, 2026

- Notification of authors: March 16, 2026

- Submission of chapters: June 15, 2026

- Return of peer-reviewed chapters: September 28, 2026

- Submission of revised chapters: November 2, 2026

- Publication of the book: Spring 2027

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