The panel presents new work on mobilities in French and Francophone Studies in response to the mobility turn in the humanities and social sciences. Literature specialists and other scholars engaged in interdisciplinary scholarship have increasingly defined modernity in terms of movement, motion, circulation and flow. Scholars in the social sciences such as Tim Creswell and John Urry have moved the discussion in the humanities in these new directions; as a result, pioneering scholarship in French on the aesthetics of the everyday and on urban flânerie by Roland Barthes, Michel de Certeau, Priscilla Ferguson, Christopher Prendergast, and Hazel Hahn has expanded to encompass broader perspectives on movement considered in relation to material culture, technologies, transportation studies, affects, the senses, and decolonizing the everyday.
The special session will engage with different meanings of the term mobilities understood both literally as locomotion, and figuratively as imaginative movement and social mobility. Mobilities may also lead in multiple directions or move at different speeds, and may not always feed into a forward-driven discourse on progress. Indeed, the panelists demonstrate that the concrete and the metaphorical, or the move forward and backward, or upward and downward, are inextricably intertwined.
The two first speakers draw attention to the importance of the world fairs that were designed to showcase France’s spectacular technological achievements of the final years of the nineteenth century. Hosted approximately every eleven years in the second half of the nineteenth century (1855, 1867, 1878, 1889, 1900) these events brought products, industry, arts, architecture, culture and, especially, millions of people from around the world to the capital city. They also fostered exchanges and debates about such developments. The literature and media circulated around these events provide a rich trove of primary sources to analyze how their authors imagined energy production and technological innovation, especially the railway.
We will begin with Anne O’Neil-Henry’s paper on the speculative fiction of Jules Verne and Albert Robida, two known visitors to and participants in the Paris Universal Expositions. She surveys how different forms of transportation and infrastructure were imagined in relation to discourses on progress. Similarly, Masha Belenky focuses on works by the bibliophile and journalist Octave Uzanne that appeared in anticipation of the 1900 World’s Fair. Uzanne’s La Locomotion à travers le temps, les moeurs et l'espace engages with the past, present, and future of locomotion all at once, in such a way as to reflect on the passage of time and contingencies of modern life. In contrast to O’Neil-Henry’s paper’s emphasis on the possibilities of future worlds, Belenky argues that the reactionary Uzanne expresses an ambivalence toward modernity and its changing forms of urban transport.
These different debates highlight that mobilities may go forward or backward in direction, and these differentiated mobilities are addressed by Aimée Boutin. She will introduce another variable into the discussion by adopting a gendered lens through which to view the gender gap in men’s and women’s narratives about railway mobility in nineteenth-century France. In the works of George Sand and Daniel Lesueur the train was not always a vehicle of liberation but instead served to keep women on track.
The formal part of the session ends with a paper by Morgane Cadieu, who underscores the relationship between the railway and social mobility. Marcel Proust is an important junction in the history of the train as a social metaphor. Connecting Proust to contemporary French writers Christine Angot and Abdellah Taïa, Cadieu demonstrates how the train spatialized class tensions and became a symbol of socially mobile characters tugged between stations as between classes.
Examining comparable issues from different vantage points, these four papers stimulate productive exchanges about the different meanings of mobilities and their importance in the field of French and Francophone Studies. To promote discussion, the four panelists will be strictly limited to less than 15-minute per paper in order to allow ample time for unstructured discussion.
As all four panelists are members of LLC executive forums, we kindly request that the scheduling of this special session, if accepted, not conflict with the days/times of panels organized by the LLC 19th-century French or the LLC 20th-21st-century French committees.