CONF: « F(r)ictions of Peace: Anglophone Aesthetics, Narratives and Imaginaries » – Université Gustave Eiffel – Jan. 28-29, 2027.

This conference proposes to explore the “frictions of peace,” understood as zones of interaction, tension and transformation where the very conditions of coexistence are negotiated. The title highlights the proximity between frictions and fictions, in order to underscore the role played by imaginaries, narratives and artistic forms in the ways peace may be conceived, represented or contested. Literatures, arts and cultures of the Anglophone world thus enable us to question both the concrete possibility of imagining more just forms of coexistence and the limits of peace when it remains a fragile horizon, sometimes perceived as a naïve, overtly optimistic ideal or a political fiction.

Thinking about peace in contexts marked by colonial legacies requires confronting the violence of the past: colonisation, slavery, indenture, partitions, exiles and collective traumas. These fractured memories resonate with polymorphous contemporary conflicts: open wars, persistent colonial occupations, nuclear threats, trade tensions, forced displacements, ecological violence and climate inequalities that disproportionately affect already precarious populations.

These dynamics unfold today within a context marked by the global circulation of fake news and by the erosion of a shared reality – all such phenomena that complicate the possibility of collective action and weaken the shared narratives necessary for the elaboration of projects of peace.

Several observers have evoked a profound crisis of the international order inherited from the aftermath of the Second World War. During a speech delivered at the 2025 edition of the event “Université de la paix,” organised at the Cité internationale universitaire de Paris, human rights lawyer and activist Oleksandra Matviïtchouk, Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 2022, recalled that, according to many historians, “the world order is collapsing before our eyes”, calling into question the possibility for international legal instruments to protect civilian populations and guarantee justice on a global scale – an interrogation that is also echoed by many contemporary literary and artistic works confronted with violent events.

Under these conditions, peace appears less as a stable state or a consensual horizon than as a precarious process, shaped by relations of power and by asymmetries inherited from empire. From this perspective, the conference seeks to mobilise the notion of “friction,” developed by Anna Tsing (2005), to designate the unequal and often conflictual encounters between worlds, narratives and systems of power that structure global connections. As Tsing writes:

“Friction makes global connection powerful and effective. Meanwhile, without even trying, friction gets in the way of the smooth operation of global power. Difference can disrupt, causing everyday malfunctions as well as unexpected cataclysms […] Furthermore, difference sometimes inspires insurrection. Friction can be the fly in the elephant’s nose” (2005).

This notion makes it possible to conceive peace as a space of resistance, creative tensions and dissonant narratives rather than as a harmonious resolution of conflicts.

The conference invites us to interrogate, through the literatures, arts and cultures of the Anglophone world, notions such as empathy, solidarity, repair, care or “reparative narratives” (Boym, 2001), in order to analyse how contemporary narratives and cultural practices contest, defer or reinvent imaginaries of peace.

While many recent conferences have focused on conflicts, migrations and colonial violence, this project aims to position peace at the centre of our reflection, as a space of friction as well as the object of aesthetic and political creation. It explores the ways in which peace is deferred, refused, reformulated or tested within contexts marked by traumatic memory and the persistence of inequalities. Contributions may analyse the political uses of solidarity, sometimes mobilised to legitimise military interventions or imperial logics, as well as the tensions between universalist discourses and persistent inequalities throughout the world.

This theoretical framework draws on the works of critics such as Jacques Rancière (and his concept of “dissensus”), Leela Gandhi (“affective communities”) and Saidiya Hartman (and her critique of empathy), which provide tools for interrogating forms of conflictual coexistence. Particular attention will be paid to diasporas, archipelagic spaces and marginal voices, considered as privileged sites for elaborating imaginaries of coexistence, reinventing memories and imagining new forms of solidarities. These diasporic spaces may also be seen as laboratories for the exploration of transnational solidarities, allowing peace to be envisaged beyond national frameworks and geopolitical state logics.

THEMATIC AXES

• Narratives of peace in friction: postcolonial histories and imaginaries of truce, deferral, refusal, suspension or fragile coexistence in Anglophone literatures, arts and cultures.

• Aesthetic forms of friction: how literatures, visual arts and performances represent and imagine contested peace. Proposals may also examine artistic practices that stage dialogue, the confrontation of perspectives or the complexity of moral positions in contexts of conflict.

• Memory, trauma and unfinished peace: legacies of partitions, slavery, indenture, displacements and their unresolved traces.

• Empathy, care and contested solidarities: how postcolonial aesthetics question or reconfigure relations and the relation to the Other (Saidiya Hartman, Leela Gandhi, Svetlana Boym), while extending these questions to relations between humans and non-humans. Proposals may thus explore how literary, artistic or cultural narratives foreground the environmental, ecological and climatic stakes of contemporary conflicts, and study forms of responsibility, vulnerability and coexistence as well as phenomena of “selective empathy” when certain forms of suffering are recognised while others remain invisibilised.

• Diasporic and archipelagic imaginaries: thinking peace through oceanic flows and exchanges, islands and transnational circulations in Anglophone cultures and literatures.

• Institutions, justice and postcolonial critiques of peace: cultural and literary analyses of institutional models of conflict resolution (“Truth and Reconciliation,” international diplomacy, humanitarian law).

• Polarisation, disinformation and narratives of conflict: how contemporary cultures and literatures stage the difficulties of dialogue and coexistence.

• “Negative peace” and “positive peace”: how Anglophone literatures, arts and cultures question peace not only as the absence of war but as an active process of social justice.

SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Blanc, Guillaume. L’Invention du capitalisme vert: Pour en finir avec le mythe de l’Eden africain. Flammarion, 2020.
• Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books, 2001.
• Burighel, Giuseppe, and Sunga Kim. Un art de la réparation : Réparer (par) les arts vivants. ArTeC, 2025.

• Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26.2 (2012).
• Daiya, Kavita. Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender, and National Culture in Postcolonial India. Temple University Press, 2008.

• Dean, Jodi. Solidarity of Strangers: Feminism after Identity Politics. University of California Press, 1996.
• Ferdinand, Malcolm. Une écologie décoloniale. Penser l’écologie depuis le monde caribéen. Seuil, 2019.
• Galtung, Johan. Peace by Peaceful Means: Peace and Conflict, Development and Civilization. Sage, 1996.
• Gandhi, Leela. Affective Communities. Duke University Press, 2006.
• Ghosh. Amitav. The Nutmeg’s Curse. University of Chicago Press, 2021.
• Gould, Carol C. “Transnational Solidarities.” Journal of Social Philosophy 38.2:
148–164 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9833.2007.00371.x.
• Guignery, Vanessa, and Héloïse Lecomte. (In)consolation in Contemporary British and Postcolonial Literatures. e-Rea 22.1, 2024.
• Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection. Oxford University Press, 1997.
• Kulnazarova, Aigul, and Vesselin Popovski. The Palgrave Handbook of Global Approaches to Peace. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
• Makaremi, Chowra. Résistances affectives. La Découverte, 2025.
• Malreddy, Pavan K., Frank Schulze-Engler, and Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell. Contested Solidarities: Agency and Victimhood in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures. Heidelberg University Publishing, 2025.
• Minow, Martha. Between Vengeance and Forgiveness. Beacon Press, 1998.
• Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011.

• Pedwell, Carolyn. Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
• Raja, Masood A., and Nick T. C. Liu. The Routledge Companion to Literature and Social Justice. Routledge, 2023.
• Rancière, Jacques. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Continuum, 2010.
• Richmond, Oliver P. A Post-Liberal Peace. Routledge, 2011.
• Shults, Lee Michael. “Avoiding Parasitical Uses of Global Solidarity.” Frontiers in Human Dynamics 6: 1305952, 1–9 (2024). https://doi.org/10.3389/fhumd.2024.1305952.
• Tsing, Anna. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton University Press, 2005.
•___. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press, 2021.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

We welcome contributions engaging with the conference themes from literary, visual, cultural or historical perspectives. Proposals may take the form of academic papers or artistic / creative contributions.

Prospective participants are invited to send a provisional title by 12 April 2026.

Full proposals should include an abstract of no more than 300 words in English, together with a short biographical note (max. 150 words), and should be sent to the conference conveners, Jaine Chemmachery (Sorbonne Université, jaine.chemmachery@sorbonne-universite.fr) and Sandrine Soukaï (Université Gustave Eiffel, sandrine.soukai@univ-eiffel.fr) by July 15, 2026.

The conference will take place on January 28-29, 2027 at Université Gustave Eiffel.

11 avril 2026

La journée d’étude « Dans les coulisses du livre » a rassemblé chercheurs, professionnels de l’édition, traducteurs et passionnés de littérature pour examiner les différents processus, acteurs et défis qui façonnent la création, la production et la diffusion des livres. L’équipe d’accueil IDEA a eu la chance d’accueillir l’écrivaine et cinéaste zimbabwéenne Tsitsi Dangarembga, dont la discussion avec Raphaël Thierry a constitué le moment phare de la journée d’étude. Tsitsi Dangarembga a évoqué ses multiples rôles et expériences en tant qu’artiste et cinéaste, son processus d’écriture, son exploration de la tradition orale dans son travail ainsi que ses projets futurs, notamment un récit dystopique sur la situation au Zimbabwe.

Lien vers l’événement: https://idea.univ-lorraine.fr/activit%C3%A9s-recherche/dans-les-coulisses-du-livre

Programme: : https://idea.univ-lorraine.fr/sites/default/files/2024-04/Programme-JE-DansLesCoulissesDuLivre.pdf

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Click here for the program.

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 “Abdulrazak Gurnah: A Reappraisal”
Venue: Université de Lille, France
Dates: 9-10 October, 2025
Description:

The international symposium “Abdulrazak Gurnah: A Reappraisal” brings together scholars to explore the Nobel laureate’s work, with a particular focus on Paradise (1994), part of the Agrégation syllabus for the 2026 and 2027 sessions. Across two days, the participants will examine Gurnah’s fiction through multiple lenses: historical and colonial contexts, questions of place and identity, affective registers such as laughter and shame, and the re-telling of colonial encounters. Other sessions highlight materiality, ecology, and temporality in Paradise, as well as the challenges and insights of translating Gurnah into Swahili. Finally, the panel on “Worldly Gurnah” situates his writing within global literary and historical frameworks, underscoring the transnational reach of his narratives. The event reaffirms Gurnah’s central place in postcolonial/decolonial literature while opening new avenues for critical engagement.

Zoom registration link.

Contact person(s):

Cédric Courtois (Université de Lille): cedric.courtois@univ-lille.fr

Mélanie Joseph-Vilain (Université Bourgogne Europe): melanie.joseph-vilain@ube.fr 

Programme:

Thursday October 9, 2025

8h30: Welcome & coffee

9h: Opening: Cédric Courtois ( Université de Lille) & Mélanie Joseph-Vilain (Université Bourgogne-Europe )

9h15-10h15: Keynote Lecture: Tina Steiner (Stellenbosch University) [Chair: Mélanie Joseph-Vilain ]

“Capacious Worlds: Situating Paradise in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Life & Œuvre”

10h15-10h30: Coffee break

10h30-12h15: Panel 1: “Paradise in Context” (Chair: Ida Hadjivayanis )

– Delphine Froment (Université de Lorraine): “‘East Africa on the Brink of the 20 th Century: Political, Socio-Economic, and Cultural Shifts under Colonial Rule”

– Christine Lorre (Université de Caen): “Webs of Empire in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise (1994)”

– Maëlle Jeanniard Du Dot (Université de Rennes 2): “The Implac(e)ability of Place in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea (2001) and Paradise(1994)”

12h15-13h15: Lunch break

13h15-15h: Panel 2: “Affects in Gurnah’s Œuvre” (Chair: Élodie Raimbault-Luizard )

– Emmanuel Kilatu (University of Dodoma): “Examining the Panoramic View of Gurnah’s Paradise : A Focus on Individual Characters’ Aspired and Achieved ‘Paradises’” [Zoom]

– Vanessa Guignery (ENS Lyon): “‘Laugh[ing] now before life knots you up’: The Poetics of Laughter in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise ”

– Cédric Courtois (Université de Lille): “‘Yusuf sighed heavily, shamed by his failure and dishonour’: Poetics and Politics of Shame in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise (1994) and Theft (2025)”

15h-15h15: Coffee break

15h15-17h30: Panel 3: “Re-reading and Re-Telling (Colonialism) in Gurnah’s work” (Chair: Christine Lorre )

– Mélanie Joseph-Vilain (Université Bourgogne-Europe): “Performing and Interpreting Identities in Paradise ”

– Sandeep Bakshi (Université Paris Cité): “‘Swear loyalty to the German sultan’: De-authorising the Precolonial/Colonial Divide in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise ”

– Nina Berman (Arizona State University) and Rachel Muchira (Universität Leipzig): “The Other Stories: East African Voices on German colonialism in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise and Afterlives ” [Zoom]


Friday October 10, 2025

9h-10h: Keynote Lecture: Maria Olaussen (University of Gothenburg) [Chair: Vanessa Guignery]

“‘There was something I needed to say’: Moments of Learning in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Fiction”

10h00-10h15: Coffee break

10h15-12h: Panel 4: “Materiality in Paradise ” (Chair: Guillaume Cingal )

– Élodie Raimbault-Luizard (Université Grenoble Alpes): “Goods, Dogs and Men in Paradise. Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Postcolonial Poetics of Materiality”

– Kerry-Jane Wallart (Université d’Orléans): “Slavery, Exploitation and Extractivism: Reading Paradise through the Prism of Decolonial Ecology”

– Jaine Chemmachery (Sorbonne Université): “ ‘Time cheats all of us like that’: Time as Writing Matter in A. Gurnah’s Paradise (1994)”

12h-13h30: Lunch break (CROUS)

13h30-15h15: Panel 6: “Gurnah in Translation”(Chair: Jaine Chemmachery )

– Ida Hadjivayanis (SOAS, University of London): “‘Why do wa have so many uncles?’ Navigating Choice in Translating Abdulrazak Gurnah”

– Nathalie Carré (INALCO): “‘Kurudi nyumbani’: Reflections on a Return to the Native Land. The Swahili Translation of Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah”

– Guillaume Cingal (Université de Tours): “Translation, Plurilingualism and German(y) as Everywhere Ghost in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise ”

15h15-15h30: Coffee break

15h30-16h45: Panel 6: “Worldly Gurnah” (Chair: Kerry-Jane Wallart )

– Charne Lavery (University of Pretoria): “Worldly Africa: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise Rewrites African Histories as Global Histories” [Zoom]

– Erik Falk (Uppsala University): “The Global Dissemination of Abdulrazak Gurnah” [Zoom]

16h45-17h00: Closing words.