Our four panelists focus on the relationship between human upheavals—family collapse, revolution, war, nuclear testing—and the long-term social and ecological readings of such events. Recalling Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence,” each presentation discusses literary or filmic texts particularly suited to tackling “our inattention to calamities that are slow and long lasting, calamities that patiently dispense their devastation while remaining outside our flickering attention spans—and outside the purview of a spectacle-driven media” (2011, 6). Resisting the short-term thrall of “spectacle,” we collectively suggest, is a gesture theorized not only in past and present literatures of the French-speaking world, but also in its multilingual cinematic, digital, and visual productions.
Sara Wellman will begin our panel by examining paradigms of sustainability, stasis, and change in the canon through focus on the work of Rousseau. While ecocritical scholars have explored Rousseau’s impact on contemporary environmentalist thought, the fraught but productive relationship between his environmentalism and his gender politics has yet to be examined. Wellman will analyze this relationship and outline its connection to current debates on sustainability (see Alaimo, LeMenager, Foote and Mentz in “Theories and Methodologies,” PMLA, May 2012). Tracing Rousseau’s template for sustainable living from the Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité (1755), to the ecologically responsible families of Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), and Émile ou de l’éducation (1762), Wellman will demonstrate that, for Rousseau, sustaining a lasting balance between humans and nature depends on maintaining patriarchal systems. This flawed ecological ideal ultimately proves unsustainable, quickly breaking down in the face of upheavals that occur when female protagonists and natural environments change. As Wellman argues, Rousseau provides a lasting example of the ways in which sustainability has been co-opted for the purposes of maintaining oppressive systems.
A comparable twenty-first century example of this problem can be seen in the transitional democracy of Tunisia. Here, contemporary fiction and documentary films are revealing how certain trademarks of the previous regime—notably women’s rights and environmentalism—were, in fact, used to cover over the slow yet real violence of systematic human rights abuses and environmental degradation. In the second paper of the panel, Greta Bliss discusses a nascent ecological idiom in post-revolutionary Tunisian cinema. While Tunisian filmmakers have tended to elide ecological problems, a younger generation of directors is now abruptly free to treat myriad previously taboo questions, from the obvious to the less-seen. This shift is prompting spectators to search beyond the spectacle of revolution-as-event and uncover its broader human and ecological contexts. In films such as Bezness, Les Silences du palais, Bedwin Hacker, Halfaouine from before the revolution, and Hédi, Maudit soit le phosphate, C’était mieux demain and À peine j’ouvre les yeux from after it, a buried story, elliptical and lacunae-filled, emerges. Unearthing the ecological trope in Tunisian cinema closes a gap in the false temporal dichotomy that pits “urgent economic” against “long-term environmental” concerns and reflects filmmakers’ investment in engaged and sustainable praxis, beyond crisis mode.
While cataclysmic upheaval was experienced on both sides of the Mediterranean in the Algerian war of national liberation from the French (1954-62), its human and ecological impacts continue to be represented, especially in film, fifty years later. Putting ecological critique in dialogue with divergent memories of the conflict, Anne Donadey will explore how contemporary cinema continues to represent its long-term human consequences over time. The lasting outcomes of the war include ecological violence, such as the use of napalm by the French military and French nuclear testing in southern Algeria; ideological divisions; persistent colonial racism; and the related after-effects on people of Algerian descent living in France today. Drawing on a range of feature films and téléfilms produced in France such as La Baie d’Alger, Ce que le jour doit à la nuit, Le Choix de Myriam, Djinns, L’Ennemi intime, Je vous ai compris, and Nuit noire 17 octobre 1961, Donadey will argue that filmmakers are deploying particular narrative temporalities in an attempt to represent and bring together warring memories of devastating acts. Some films, as Donadey will theorize, present a narrative “double time,” in which filmmakers create coalescing and intertwined memories, with one narrative strand taking place during the war and another set in more recent periods.
In the final paper, Anaïs Maurer argues that ecological upheaval functions as a structuring poetic principle in francophone Pacific literary and visual culture. Examining works by key writers and artists who have been major actors in the resistance against nuclear weapons in the 20th century, and are spearheading the fight against climate change today, Maurer will demonstrate how the challenge of representing the slow violence of nuclear testing and rising sea levels has led to the emergence of a new poetic style. Analyzing literary, visual, and digital production by Tahitian writer Chantal Spitz, Wallisian singer Soane Vahai, and Kanak poet Déwé Görödé, Maurer’s inquiry unites francophone writers from Polynesia to Melanesia who map the slow violence of environmental racism onto gendered, racialized, and colonized bodies. While the Pacific women’s corpus remains marginalized, Maurer will demonstrate its pertinence well beyond the Pacific, as environmental collapse increasingly threatens the rest of the world. Maurer will conclude by discussing ways in which the environmental humanities, whose canon is still being theorized, can play a major role in highlighting the global relevance of marginalized works, concepts, histories, and time periods.
(Presentations will be limited to 15 minutes maximum to allow for at least 15 minutes of discussion.)