http://www.cfplist.com/CFP.aspx?CID=4624
L'empire du voyage: Travels of Mind, Body, Soul
Event: 10/01/2015 - 10/02/2015
Abstract: 06/15/2015
Categories:
Location: University of California, Los Angeles
Organization: Department of French and Francophone Studies
20th annual Graduate Student Conference
Department of French and Francophone Studies
University of California, Los Angeles
October 1-2, 2015, Royce 316
L'EMPIRE DU VOYAGE: TRAVELS OF MIND, BODY, SOUL
What is the human fascination with voyage? How is it linked to
creative endeavor? To aesthetic and cultural transformation? To
political and economic gain? To shifts in knowledge systems? To periods
and movements in literary and artistic history? From early relations de
voyage to colonial novels and films, contemporary personal narratives,
and musical performances, we have ample evidence of the allure and
hazards of movement across seascapes and landmasses in search of fortune
or freedom. The innovations of twentieth-century French theory are,
arguably, linked to the moment of decolonization, but theory’s travel
has also produced controversial engagements with local knowledge and
global epistemes. This conference will focus on travel, its many forms,
and multiple consequences: voyages of the mind, body and soul, in a
variety of genres, from the oral to the written, the visual, and the
philosophical.
For the 20th Annual Graduate Student Conference of the UCLA
Department of French and Francophone Studies, we understand travel to
include empirical and conceptual engagements with the notions of
movement, migration, displacement, and change. Proposals might address
these issues in terms of the voyage within or possible forms of lyrical
or autobiographical introspection, and, conversely, the search for a
concrete or spiritual ailleurs, for escape, transcendence and their
pitfalls. We are also interested in the rhetorical notions of digression
and detour, in the social and cultural meanings of exile and return,
and in broad interdisciplinary approaches. Our aim is to address
concerns of importance to scholars in literature, history, film and
media studies, art history, and philosophy.
Possible topics include:
Reasons for Travel-madness, fugue, folie, La Nef des fous
-deportation, exile, slavery, displacement, emigration
-agrarianism, domestication, utopia, paradise
- military adventurism, crusade
- aventure, knight-errantry, quest
-to gain knowledge, savoir, to document/record, to write history
-to understand history, nostalgia
-(religious) conversion, pilgrimage, missionary work
-xenophilia, xenophobia, tourism, antitourism, escapism, errance, dépaysement
Types of Travelers-slaves, coolies, migrant workers, apatrides,
-knights, troubadours,
-saints, spiritual laypeople
-refugees
-bohemian, vagabonds
-merchants, slave traders, commercial agents
Types of travel-conquest, colonization, imperialism
-metaphysical, cogito, journey of mind, memory
-religious, spiritual, the occult
-literary, novelesque, romanesque, romanz
-journeys of the imagination
Results of travel-cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, universalism
-creolization, créolité, métissage, cosmopolitan creole, diversity, multiplicity
-genocide, extermination, extirpation, trauma, holocaust
-irredentism
-alterity, exoticism, orientalism
-nonalignment, disenchantment, dystopia
-self-discovery, enlightenment
-conceptions of time and space
-palimpsest
Please email a 300-word abstract in English or French along with your
paper title, affiliation and contact information to
uclafrenchgradconf2015@gmail.com. Presentations should be no more than
20 minutes in length. Our deadline for submission is June 15, 2015.
