Forthcoming Issues
Winter 2021
Disability’s Worldmaking: Pasts and Futures
Guest Editors, Tammy Berberi and Jennifer Row
Worlds are made through time and space, and disabled writers, thinkers, and artists have challenged the “givenness” of the world as-is to show that there can be alternative, vibrantly crip modes of existing. How do we leverage this moment of flux – and francophone disabled re-imaginings of the past or future – in order to reconfigure the temporalities and spaces of our impoverished present? Engaging minor aesthetics, notions of presence and affordance (from the ephemeral to the sustained), interrelation and uniqueness, action, affect, and storytelling, this issue takes up these threads to recraft the exigencies and possibilities of francophone disabled worldmaking.
In press
Spring 2022
Poetic Practice and the Public
Guest Editors, Jeff Barda and Eric Lynch
From the 1990s to today, poetic practices in France engage with the forms and languages of public life. These works focus on representations and discourses circulating within the public sphere. Poetic practices turn to public problems; issues that seem to surpass available theoretical tools and demand new conceptual and artistic approaches.
In press
Summer 2022
The Early Modern Francophone World in Twenty-First Century Theater and Performance
Guest Editors, Michael Meere and Annelle Curulla
If the past has never really passed, then how is this contemporary moment remaking our understanding of the early modern francophone world (1500-1800)? This issue uses the concept of the “replay” as a way to examine the reframing, redescription, and reimagining of the past through performance (broadly conceived as performing arts, commemorative practices, reenactments, games, and so forth). Adopting a global perspective, this issue includes contributions from scholars and practitioners often separated by disciplinary, historical or geographic boundaries, and whose work explicitly engages with theater history, theatricality, and current theoretical discussions concerning theater and performance studies.
In press
Fall 2022
Proust to Other Ends
Guest Editors, François Proulx and Hannah Freed-Thall
On the centenary of Marcel Proust’s death, this special issue proposes counter-readings of À la recherche du temps perdu and its manuscripts, in minor or unexpected modes, toward surprising points of comparison or theoretical reflection. Rather than study its sources or its reception, articles consider how the Proustian text continually unfurls to other ends, including against its own monumentalization.
In press
Libertine Botany
Winter 2022
Guest Editors, Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari
Plant sexual life becomes the subject of intense discussions in early modern botany. How does France, with its legacy of materialist libertine thought, become a hub for botanically-informed critique of human sexual norms and practices? How is early modern botany enmeshed with desire? “Libertine Botany” charts premodern explorations of the nonbinary sexuality of plants and investigates their effects on the gendering of the human polis. In conversation with contemporary discussions of sexuality, this special issue studies how-- through a body of work anticipating queer politics, art, and ecology – the alien pleasures of plants give new contours to human experience.
Proposals of 300-500 words, in French or English, to Natania Meeker (nmeeker@usc.edu) and Antónia Szabari (szabari@usc.edu) by January 15, 2022, with final submissions due June 1, 2022.
Spring 2023
Poétiques de l'émeute / The Poetics of Riot
Guest Editors, Justine Huppe and Julien Jeusette
Along with the recent increase in riots observed by sociologists, anthropologists, and historians in France and in the world, there is a fascination for this kind of protest in contemporary literature (David Dufresnes, Lola Lafon, Wilfried N’Sondé, Eric Vuillard…). How do authors deal with this elusive reality that the media often reduce to an irrational and violent crowd movement? To map contemporary riot poetics, this issue examines the riot as a literary phenomenon and describes its specific forms, its political stakes, and its models in the history of literature.
Send proposals in English or French (250-300 words) together with a short biography to Justine Huppe (justine.huppe@uliege.be) and Julien Jeusette (julienjeusette@hotmail.com) by January 15, 2022. The deadline for completed articles (no more than 6,000 words, including notes) is July 15, 2022.