20th annual Graduate Student Conference Department of French and Francophone Studies University of California, Los Angeles October 1-2, 2015, Royce 314 ! 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, 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 [email protected]. Presentations should be no more than 20 minutes in length. Our deadline for submission is June 15th, 2015. !