"Writing Asia, Writing Asianness: French and Francophone Perspectives" seeks papers that examine how “Asia” and “Asianness” are imagined, represented, contested, translated, and reworked in writing in French across metropolitan, colonial, postcolonial, and diasporic contexts. The session is deliberately broader than a focus on authors of Asian origin alone. It also welcomes analyses of French and Francophone texts that construct Asia as an object of desire, fear, memory, fantasy, archive, geopolitical horizon, or aesthetic resource. In this sense, the panel approaches Asianness as a critical category of reading—produced through discourse, form, circulation, and power—rather than as a fixed identity.
This field of inquiry is significant because it helps reframe French and Francophone studies beyond their more established Atlantic and Mediterranean orientations, while also challenging the limits of area studies, national literary histories, and monolingual criticism. It invites us to ask how Orientalist legacies persist, mutate, or are strategically reused; how Asian presences and absences shape French literary modernity; how colonial histories and Cold War imaginaries continue to structure representation; and how contemporary writers, artists, and performers inherit, resist, or transform these formations. It is equally valuable for understanding translation, multilingual poetics, migration, exile, adoption, war memory, and racialized embodiment across France, Québec, the Indian Ocean, Southeast Asia, East Asia, and global diasporas.
The session welcomes work engaging major critical frameworks including Orientalism and its revisions, postcolonial and decolonial critique in Francophone studies, transnational and “French global” approaches, Sinophone studies, diaspora and minor transnationalism, translingualism and exophony, memory and postmemory, race and representation, and intermedial or performance-based methodologies.
Possible corpora include, but are not limited to, works by Asian and Asian diasporic authors writing in French, such as Shan Sa, Dai Sijie, Ying Chen, François Cheng, Linda Lê, Anna Moï, Kim Thúy, and Elisa Shua Dusapin, as well as French and broader Francophone authors who write about Asia and construct Asian or Asiatic imaginaries, particularly in contemporary literature, including Nicolas Bouvier, J.-M. G. Le Clézio, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Éric Faye, Jean-Luc Coatalem, and others engaging Asia through travel, memory, history, geopolitics, or transcultural fiction. Travel writing, colonial archives, graphic narratives, film, theater, dance, and visual culture are also welcome. Comparative, cross-period, and cross-media papers are especially encouraged.
By bringing together scholarship on both Asian and Asian diasporic authors and broader writings of Asianness, this session aims to map an emerging and urgently needed conversation in French and Francophone literary and cultural studies.
PAMLA 2026 — 123rd Annual Conference
Thursday, November 12 – Sunday, November 15, 2026
Hyatt Regency Seattle, Seattle, Washington
PAMLA welcomes paper proposals both related and unrelated to the 2026 conference theme, “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict.” This special session especially welcomes papers that consider how literary and cultural representations of Asia engage structures of power, hierarchy, memory, and resistance, while proposals beyond the conference theme are equally encouraged.
Paper proposal deadline: May 25, 2026
Acceptance notifications: June 1, 2026
Please submit your abstract through PAMLA’s conference website: PAMLA submission portal. For any questions about the session, you are also very welcome to contact me by email.