University of Cambridge 21st French Graduate Conference
23–24 April 2020, Newnham College, Cambridge
Call for papers: RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE
Confirmed keynote speakers:
Assa Traoré (activist and author), Dr Elliot Evans (University of Birmingham)
The past decade has been characterised by revolt: at its beginning, young Senegalese people decided they had had enough (Y’en a Marre), ousting President Abdoulaye Wade; at its end, the new French precariat gathered at roads and roundabouts, wearing gilets jaunes. Increasingly it seems everyone wants to rage against the machine, to change the established order. The affect of resistance has gone viral, glittering across hard drives and social networks. But it also has a long and illustrious history: it is part of the story that France tells about itself and the story retold by its former colonies. It is felt in literary experimentation, in the visual arts and in philosophical thought across French studies. Sometimes the machine is literal (as when workers rage against the threat of automation), sometimes it is figurative (as when subjects resist the intractable colonisation of Neoliberal machinery), but too often it is suppressed or dismissed as reactive, primal, populist. This conference will lift the gagging order to let rage speak.
Bring us revolutions: sexual, textual, actual. Bring us sabotage, strikes, those who throw spanners in the works. Bring us deconstruction, resistance writing, lexical explosion. Bring us filmic rage, the female gaze, the mise en scène of struggle. Bring us dissidence, unruliness, the outrageous. Bring us whistleblowers, the underground, the out and proud. Bring us Nature’s fury, storms on the horizon, extinction rebels. Bring us heads on platters, hell hath no fury, the politics of emotion. Bring us bodies: (re)productive, barren, non-binary. Bring us paranoid androids, cyborgs, Testo Junkies. Bring us hackers, hashtags, keyboard warriors. Bring us libertinage, reformation, la Boétie. Bring us machine-men, machine-minds, machine-hearts. Bring us discipline and punishment, panopticons, prisons of souls. Bring us schizophrenics, war-machines, bodies without organs. Bring us la plage sous les pavés, la structure pourrie, les réalistes qui demandent l’impossible. Bring us 343 salopes, Silence=Mort, Justice pour Adama. Bring us Négritude, Créolité, Antillanité. Bring us Antigone, Jeanne d’Arc, Simone de Beauvoir. Bring us Amandine Gay, Mati Diop, Touissant L’Ouverture. Bring us le MODEFEN, Les sans-culottes, Les Guérillères. Bring us the Black Jacobins, Les Métis, Les Enragés. Bring us those who cast the first stone, who dodged bullets, who smashed the glass ceiling. Bring us those who won’t go quietly, those disturbing the peace, those who fucked the police. Bring us live wires, power outages, blown fuses. Bring us punk, bring us No Future, bring us sticking it to the man. Bring us hellfire, bring us fury, bring us pure, unadulterated rage.
Please send abstracts for papers (250 words maximum) plus a short academic bionote to ragecambridge2020@gmail.com by 30 November 2019. Papers can be in English or French, and a small number will be selected for a later publication.
