UCLA 20th annual French Graduate Student Conference

20th annual Graduate Student Conference
Department of French and Francophone Studies
University of California, Los Angeles
October 1-2, 2015, Royce 314
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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.
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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.
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Possible topics include:
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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
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Types of Travelers
-slaves, coolies, migrant workers, apatrides,
-knights, troubadours,
-saints, spiritual laypeople
-refugees
-bohemian, vagabonds
-merchants, slave traders, commercial agents
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Types of travel
-conquest, colonization, imperialism
-metaphysical, cogito, journey of mind, memory
-religious, spiritual, the occult
-literary, romanesque, romanz
-journeys of the imagination
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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
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Please email a 300-word abstract in English or French along with your paper title, affiliation and
contact information to [email protected]. Presentations should be no more
than 20 minutes in length. Our deadline for submission is June 15th, 2015.
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