Inheritance and Rupture: Writing Genealogies across French and Francophone Contexts (NeMLA 2026) (NeMLA 2026)
Pittsburgh, PA
Organization: NeMLA 2026
Event: NeMLA 2026
This panel explores how cultural genealogies—artistic, intellectual, political, and linguistic—are constructed, resisted, and reimagined across French and Francophone spaces. Far from being fixed or linear, inheritance often manifests through discontinuities, silences, and contested claims. Artists and thinkers engage with prior figures, movements, and traditions in ways that may reaffirm legacies, subvert them, or create entirely new configurations of belonging and dissent. Whether through homage, revision, irony, or deliberate omission, these acts of (dis)inheritance speak to larger dynamics of memory, power, and transformation.
We invite contributions that analyze how literature, film, performance, digital media, and visual art engage in acts of inheritance and rupture. How are feminist, colonial, or philosophical lineages claimed or rejected? What happens when cultural memory is mediated through diasporic, multilingual, or transgenerational frames? Case studies might include explicit intertextual dialogues, aesthetic reappropriations, or subtle rewritings of ideological and formal traditions.
This panel welcomes work across genres, periods, and regions, particularly projects that consider the entangled histories of France and the broader Francophone world. Diverse methodologies and transhistorical, transregional, or transmedial approaches are also appreciated. By foregrounding the creative and critical negotiations involved in transmitting—or refusing—cultural heritage, we aim to foster a conversation that spans disciplinary boundaries.
Subsequently, this panel seeks to question how authority, legacy, and affiliation are shaped in the act of creation and/or resistance. By foregrounding how genealogies are made and unmade, the panel opens a rich conversation about transmission, authority, and transformation within the Francophone world and beyond.
Please send an abstract of 250 words in French or English by September 30, 2025 through the NeMLA portal (https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21727).
For questions, please contact Dany Jacob (djacob@uwlax.edu).
https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21727
Dany Jacob
