In a press conference held on 16 January 2024, French President Emmanuel Macron declared a new set of policies which would ensure that ‘la France reste la France’. This nationalist stance, coupled with stricter controls on immigration, security, and religion, indicate a clear shift to the right in France’s political agenda, undermining the transnational and transcultural exchanges occurring between France and French-speaking countries. There is thus an urgent need in 2024 to interrogate how France and the other nations and regions of the French-speaking world are shaped, reshaped, and enriched by the movement of people, goods, ideas, and cultural production.
Charles Forsdick and Claire Launchbury remind us in their introduction to Transnational French Studies (2023) that ‘the borders of the nation state are porous’ (p. 3). This porosity is evident not only in French and francophone thought and cultural production, but also in scholarly movements. From debates about francophonie to discussion of the ‘Manifeste pour une littérature-monde en français’ in 2007, French Studies as a discipline has sought to place emphasis on the transnational, the transcultural, and the transdisciplinary. Scholars working across different time periods, from the medieval era to the twenty-first century, and across disciplines and media (literature, cinema, theatre, poetry, cultural studies, and translation, to name but a few) are interrogating how diverse communities and diasporas are creating new identities and meanings of ‘Frenchness’.
The aims of this conference are thus to explore these new identities and the ways in which they are constructed. How does migration and the local and global circulation of capital impact French and francophone culture and politics? What role do practices of domination and exploitation play in the formation of these identities? How do transnational, transcultural, and transdisciplinary methodologies and epistemologies shape the ways in which we conceive of French Studies today? Indeed, what exactly do we mean by ‘Global French Studies’?
