From Biopolitics to Ecoaesthetics: Legacies of Encroachment(s) (French and Francophone Studies (NeMLA 2024, Boston)
“Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins,” is a popular ( Zechariah Chafee, 1919) is a popular aphorism in legal imaginaries that theoretically synthesizes the scope of concepts such as freedom, power, and sovereignty. The reality of globalization, and its inherent movements and interactions of bodies, challenges the radical frame and geographies of the aforementioned concepts. The inevitability of the relation, in its materialisations as contact, conflict, and integration, highlights the thin lines between acknowledging, understanding, and trespassing boundaries in human relations to each other and to the systems that govern their lives. Boundaries being perceived either as divine or man-made laws, their existence and legacies are sustained by internalized knowledge of codes and conventions, values and principles, traditions and modus operandi. The idea of encroachment in thinking of the experiences of boundaries in human relations captures the inevitable obsession for trespassing. Regarldess of its motivation, trespassing has an impact on the body that is transformative. Therefore, the effects of encroachment pervade the body in its relation to itself and its environment(s). In thinking about legacies of encroachments in French and Francophone literatures, we think of the legacies of this concept in literary practices, in thematical choices across geographies, and its transmedial expressions within and beyond the literary canon(s).
Keywords
Bio/power/ethics/aesthetics
Slavery
Neo/post/de/colonialism
Migration/Migritude
Globalism
Trans/national/feminism
Race
Gender
Capitalism
Care
Violence
Rape
War
Crime/Punishment
Borders
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Tiako Djomatchoua Murielle Sandra