20th Annual French Graduate Student Conference – L’Empire du voyage: Travels of Mind, Body, Soul

What is the human fascination with voyage? How is it linked to creative endeavor? To aesthetic and cultural transformation? To political and economic gain? To shifts in knowledge systems? To periods and movements in literary and artistic history? From early relations de voyage to colonial novels and films, contemporary personal narratives, and musical performances, we have ample evidence of the allure and hazards of movement across seascapes and landmasses in search of fortune or freedom. The innovations of twentieth-century French theory are, arguably, linked to the moment of decolonization, but theory’s travel has also produced controversial engagements with local knowledge and global epistemes. This conference will focus on travel, its many forms, and multiple consequences: voyages of the mind, body and soul, in a variety of genres, from the oral to the written, the visual, and the philosophical.