March 23-26, 2017
Baltimore, Maryland
Northeast Modern Language Association
Please submit a 300-word abstract and bio through the NeMLA panel site by September 30, 2016: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/16550. Notification will be sent by October 15, 2016.
Please note that you do not need to be a current NeMLA member to submit an abstract.
The Shadow of Ethnography
Vincent Debaene’s 2010 book L’Adieu au voyage documented the way in which the French intellectual milieu of the first decades of the twentieth century produced an intertwined discourse between the human sciences and literature through the ideas and practice of ethnography. But it wasn’t with Michel Leiris’ L’Afrique fantôme (1934) that this intersection appeared, and ethnography didn’t stop shadowing French literature with Claude Lévi-Strauss’ Tristes tropiques (1955). From Eugène Fromentin’s discussions of ethnographic description and art in his two travel narratives to French Algeria (1857/1859) to a contemporary novel such as Michel Houllebecq’s Plateforme (2001), we see ways in which an ethnographic trace inheres in French literary production, whether through the hinges of cultural and racial difference, exoticism, or through other fundamental aspects of an ethnographic worldview.
This panel seeks to explore the ways in which ethnography—which Foucault cited in Les mots et les choses (1966) along with psychoanalysis as the two fundamental human sciences of the modern era—has from the advent of modernity cast a figurative shadow over French literature. It seeks to find answers to the question of how an ethnographic episteme constructs an ethics of cultural encounter, and how French language writers of different cultural backgrounds and stylistic persuasions have sought to counter the ethnographic worldview or write visions of the world that divide, describe, and classify people in ways that don’t coincide with the limits of ethnography.