News Winter 2021

Abstract

To celebrate the 75th anniversary of the journal, French Studies is delighted to announce an essay competition, on the theme of ‘The Future of French Studies’. We invite submissions in French or English, of no more than 3,000 words; the winning submission, as selected by the journal’s editors, will be published in the journal and made freely available on the journal’s website, and will form the subject of a round-table discussion at the 2022 conference of the Society of French Studies. Across the 75 years of its existence, French Studies has seen the discipline it serves become an increasingly plural field: in addition to the linguistics and literature, in the broad sense of lettres humaines, that formed its initial core, the discipline now embraces such different areas as film and visual culture, politics, translation studies and cultural history, among many others. Crucially, and precisely during the lifetime of the journal, this multiplication of objects of study has proceeded in parallel with increased attention to a plurality of voices, notably in terms of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, and geopolitical context. In celebrating this anniversary, the journal is seeking both to affirm this history of disciplinary plurality, and to recognize that its current context is posing extreme challenges and sharp questions to the discipline as such. With Arts and Humanities degree programmes under considerable political and institutional pressure, in various locations the existence of the discipline itself has come under threat, at times fatally. More positively, but no less urgently, the growing importance of decoloniality and decolonial thinking has opened the question of the national-colonial roots of the discipline as originally defined, inviting its reconceptualization along global and transnational lines. There can be no doubt that the 75th year of French Studies comes at a critical moment.