What Do You Mean?
The "Cri" and the Caribbean: Language in Decolonial Francophone Literature
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nasanin Rosado De Rodes
Interminably anchored in the wakes of the Middle Passage, Francophone Caribbean literature constructs language simultaneously as a side of destitution and agency: language as the condition of possibility for relation, as a principal instrument of destitution and as a medium of resistance itself in the Black Atlantic archive, language as inaccessible and out of reach while simultaneously an inherent, biological imperative. Decolonial Francophone writers interrupt the record of History by inserting narratives that wouldn’t otherwise be told and imagining what could occupy those voids and silences of History— a version of what Hartman has elsewhere called critical fabulation. The authors in question, Maryse Condé, Marie-Célie Agnant, and Edwidge Danticat, counter these silences in two ways—with their literary projects themselves and within their novels thematically. They do not, however, (re)discover a mother tongue or create a new literary richesse in that mother tongue. Their works witness an imagining otherwise and testify to strategies of sensing, believing and knowing that survived the utter destitution of coloniality not through return or restoration, but through a kind of transmutation of the colonizer’s language. This paper traces and delves into the ways that Afro-Caribbean authors manipulate, experiment on, and intrinsically alchemize the colonizer’s language to create their own idiom that restores their own relationships to matrilineage, inheritance, and language with the tools at their disposal.
Corporate Humans versus Earth Machines: Privatization of Nature, Ecological Distress, and Posthuman Identity in J.L. Morin’s "Nature’s Confession" View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Barnali Sarkar
Ecological distress and climate anxiety can transform an integrated anthropocentric identity into a decentered fragmented sense of self by calling into question the dualist model of hegemony grounded in human (agentic subject)/ and nature (non-agentic object) paradigm. Moreover, in the age of technoscientific development, the boundary between the material agency of humans and that of the nonhumans (robots, artificial intelligence) becomes blurred through human-nonhuman hybrid configurations, which include human bodily/material and cognitive enmeshments in the nonhumans. In this context, this research analyses the implications of hybrid formations of humans and machines, resulting in human complete dependence on robots/machines, as represented in J.L. Morin’s science fiction "Nature’s Confession" (2015). Drawing upon posthuman material ecocritical perception of human-nonhuman bodily entanglement, as proposed by Oppermann, Alaimo, and Herbrechter, the research emphasizes the way the posthuman materiality, shaped by the spontaneity of nonhuman elements such as intelligent machines and robots that can exhibit agency and have a similar appearance to humans, problematizes the conceptualization of humans as a distinct species as expressed in human-humanoid interrelations in Morin’s narrative. Such reimagining of a human-machine hybrid enmeshment in the age of privatization of nature, as the study will further argue, can alleviate climate anxiety by registering an eco-consciousness expressed through ethical climate actions. Also, it is this understanding of human corporeality as occurring through human-nonhuman interactions that can decenter anthropocentric dualist paradigm in reconfiguring a posthuman porous identity.
The Final Word is Female: The Value of Remembering Simone de Beauvoir as her own Entity in the Face of Jean Paul Sartre View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Alexandra Ramsland
As the nineteenth-century intellectual "power couple," Alfred de Musset's career rose to soaring heights due to his turbulent and passionate relationship with his muse, George Sand. The nature of their relationship thrived off of intellectual stimulation, infidelity, and convoluted emotional and physical ties. During the twentieth century, two new thinkers emerged as the "new" Musset and Sand- Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. The two lived as writers, philosophers, and lovers- much like their 19th-century counterparts. However, unlike Sand, Beauvoir resolved to set her course employing her femininity to her advantage without taking the backseat to men in her field. In the wake of Musset's relationship with Sand and seen through the lens of second-wave feminism, this paper delves into the overshadowing of Simone de Beauvoir by her on-and-off lover, Jean-Paul Sartre as an example of how women scholars in the early 20th century often found their ideas and writings accredited to or in the shadow of men. However, in reality, women brought innovative, lasting perspectives to the scholarly dialogues of their time. While much of the research into Beauvoir concentrates on her writings in reaction to Jean-Paul Sartre, Beauvoir pioneered the modern feminist movement with an enduring mark beyond that of Sartre. By inspecting Beauvoir's writings as unique, radical, and unremitting pieces, this argument sheds light on the ingenuity of Beauvoir found in her ability to remain distinctive, modern, and pertinent in an ever-changing society almost four decades after her death in a way that Sartre cannot.
