French Cultural Issues, Midwest MLA 2026
Chicago, IL
Organization: Midwest MLA
The French III: Cultural Issues Permanent Section invites abstracts for the 2026 MMLA in Chicago. In accordance with this year’s theme, the French III panel is accepting proposals related to “French and Francophone Culture After the Archive.” We welcome submissions describing projects that employ archival practices and/or engage critically with archival impulses.
The conference organizers suggest a wide range of possible topics, which include:
- Counter-archives and archival refusal, including strategies of restitution, reconstruction, and the ethics of remembering
- Literary, cinematographic, and visual engagements with archival silence and loss
- Digital archives, metadata, and the politics of social visibility
- Indigenous, decolonial, and diasporic archival practices across linguistic, literary, and cultural traditions, as well as archival afterlives in literature, film, music, and hybrid media
- Archives under threat, whether from political censorship and oppression, climate change, or environmental degradation
- The role of artificial intelligence in reshaping memory and documentation.
And we add:
- The anarchive
- Oral histories
- Historical fiction
- Collective memory, consciousness, experience, attitude
- Psychoanalytic approaches to memory
- Conspiracy and outsider theories.
Please submit your abstract to curtisi@kenyon.edu by April 15.
https://www.midwest-mla.org/permanent-sections#faq-298586Collapse
Ian Williams Curtis