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Recent literature (such as Le Combat Adama and the Ligue des droits de l’homme’s reportage on “Contrôles d’identités”) have investigated “youth” in relation to joy and innocence. That is to say; to what degree are youth truly innocent, and in which ways have they been subjected to corruption, social alienation, or pain (largely configured by race, gender, queerness, or class status)? Nevertheless, youth-based narratives continue to insist on an ecstatic experience of joy; in the face of violence, where do youth carve out sites of ecstasy, and why? This panel topic finds itself at the center of a few longstanding debates across literary cultures: what exactly is youth, and to what degree can youth be understood as a life stage so caught up in bliss that it seeks to exist outside of the pains of “adult” life? What makes youth a prime site of ecstatic experience, and what are the contours or limitations of this ecstasy? Further, we cannot ignore the fact that ‘ecstasy’ as a term is difficult to define, given its situation between theories of emotion via psychologists such as Leuda (1925); theological definitions (Laski 1961); and philosophical narratives from Heidegger (1927) or Lévinas (1991).

Nevertheless, French and Francophone studies offer points of departure that contribute to our two-pronged investigation into what ecstasy is and what youth has to do with it. We may consider early treatises, such Rousseau’s configuration of youth as an ontological stage outside of corruption, and concerned with extra-human valences of joy and innocence (1762); depictions of ecstasy and youth in (post)colonial literature via the child’s sacralization in the works of Mokkedem, Pineau or Bugul (see Sweat on Sadoun 2022); or filmic depictions of youthful rapture in the works of Campillo (2017), Doucouré (2020), or Sciamma (2014).

This session’s panelists contribute to this discussion from diverse perspectives in film and literature across Franco-Tunisian, Québecois, and Rwandan narratives. I will begin with comments on the historicization of both ecstasy and youth in French and Francophone literature, as well as the ways in which each panelist’s engagement calls for a (re)consideration of both in tandem with increased violence towards children; the use of children as expository figures for societal ill; and the ways in which youth populations still find ways of maintaining bliss in a world that continues to seem bent towards their non-future.

Miranda Hoegberg begins by laying the groundwork for our panel’s exploration of ecstasy, using Abdellatif Kechiche’s 2007 La Graine et le Mulet as a media whose formal elements interrogate sexual ekstasis for youth characters on screen, as well as the viewer’s own sentiments of pleasure in tandem with the precarities of voyeurism. This, thus, tethers both ecstasy and youth to a common sense of vulnerability in concurrently pleasurable and perverse dimensions.

Hugo Bujon will continue with a question on the limitations of ecstasy in the Rwandan work Igifou, wherein ecstasy is a mark in the narrator’s childhood memory wherein she is pulled into a near-death “paix bienheureuse”after prolonged states of hunger. Bujon considers how the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the texts’ backdrop, crafts a sort of ecstatic ambiguity. Since the moment of ecstasy takes place death, is it truly bliss or instead a reminder of youth’s tangle with mortality? To quite Bujon, “Is this pure light the truth of an ultimate rescue against obliteration, or another one of its disguises working for the genocide?”

Following on Hoeberg’s filmic expertise and Bujon’s tethering of fictional written narratives to history, Professor Miléna Santoro will conclude the panel with a discussion of her novel book project, wherein she will explore ecstasy in the form of displacement (ex-stasis), delight and self-formation praxis in Morin’s Trois histoires d’Indiens (2014), Leriche’s Avant les rues (2016), and Verrault’s Kuessipan (2020) in conversation with over 1300 indigenous-made short films that focus on adolescent transitional experiences. Using ecstasy as axis, Santoro traces the ways in which Indigenous Québécois youth learn to navigate the pain of colonization and generational suffering whilst still seeking the potential for joy.