This session explores engagements with aesthetics and politics of resistance in modern and contemporary French-language contexts. As we witness the global resurgence of authoritarianism and in light of the 2027 Presidential Theme, “Emancipatory Narratives,” this panel investigates how conditions of control, surveillance, and repression are negotiated in artworks from the 1940s to the present. From fascism and antifascism to flights of fugitivity and emancipation, the panel examines past, present and future modes of aesthetic and political resistance. Rather than imagining “aesthetic resistance” as a de-actualized site of refuge from concrete political struggles, each speaker probes the intersection of aesthetic form and politics through the lens of the sensory. The artworks examined here theorize different conjunctions of embodiment and political subjectivation, tracing both legacies and ruptures within the history of French-language meditations on aesthetics and politics.

In French Studies, past scholarship on resistance has largely centered on WWII, post-1945 decolonization, and May 1968. Generations of scholars have produced a significant body of work dealing with collaboration and resistance in the Nazi Occupation (e.g. Atack 1989; Morris 1992; Watts, 1998; Golsan 2000), while another wave of scholarship has investigated the convergence of aesthetic questions related to the end of empire and French postwar culture (e.g. Ross 1995; Feldman, 2014; Brozgal, 2020). Moreover, an extensive body of scholarship has dealt with the revolutionary politics of the “May ’68 generation,” though much of this important work intervenes in intellectual and cultural history rather than studies of aesthetic form. This session brings new perspectives to these areas of inquiry while (re)posing urgent questions about form and politics, aesthetics and resistance from the vantage of the 21^st century.

Vanessa Brutsche begins with the work of Jean Cayrol, the résistant and Mauthausen survivor who theorized “concentrationary aesthetics” as a form of art capable of registering the altered nature of existence in the wake of Nazi atrocities. His 1947 novel, Je vivrai l’amour des autres, produces an embodied aesthetic of resistance, manifesting the camp’s reshaping of both the human psyche and the sensorium. Cayrol stages a residual form of subjectivity in his depiction of the camp survivor in post-Liberation France, advancing an early critique consumer society with the “concentrationary” subject as its avatar. By re-evaluating Cayrol’s neglected work, this paper establishes the intersection of resistance as political act and aesthetic form that panelists pursue across different contexts.

Zoë Roth considers the dual contexts of French fascism and French colonialism, proposing the anaesthetic as a heuristic to evaluate fascism’s deadening perceptual regime. Roth brings together two strands of thought on the anaesthetic, tracking how colonialism provided a crucible for fascist ideologies, politics, and methods. Beginning with an alternative history of fascist aesthetics (Bataille, Foucault, and Adorno), she turns to the theorizations of colonialism by Césaire, Arendt, and Fanon. Reading Fanon’s writing through the lens of psychoanalysis, Roth demonstrates how its aesthetic form produces a sense of freedom that combats both fascist and colonial anaesthesia.

Next, Isabella Williams interrogates the aesthetics of infrared thermography, a surveillance and tracking technology usually deployed in militarized contexts. Yet Williams proposes a regime of “counter-visuality,” analyzing infrared imagery in two recent artworks: Richard Mosse’s Incoming (2017), about the dismantling of Calais’s refugee camp, and Antoine d’Agata’s Virus (2020), which documents abandoned streets and overwhelmed hospitals during COVID-19 lockdown. The repurposing of infrared technology punctures its militarized anaesthesia, revealing its capacity to document common life processes: the emission, sharing, and circulation of heat. These works resist instrumental readings of thermal data, contesting the visual apparatus’s enforcement of surveillance, tracking, and separation.

Finally, Éric Tsimi investigates Laura Nsafou’s afrofuturist trilogy, Nos jours brûlés (2021–2023), a saga that traverses Francophone Africa and its diasporas, haunted by a lost cosmology. Tsimi isolates the trilogy’s nocturnal regime as material infrastructure rather than metaphor, arguing that Nsafou constructs a “night commons” in which artificial light, fire, and nocturnal ecologies operate as scarce resources, producing political subjectivation at the level of the sensorium. The narrative’s formal choices turn cosmology into practical knowledge, a set of operational instructions for resistance: moving, hiding, and acting together when ordinary horizons collapse.

This session incorporates a diversity of voices at different ranks, geographic locations, and positionalities, putting the fields of Black Studies and postcolonial studies in dialogue with perspectives on metropolitan France. Including four panelists allows us to maximize this diversity of voices on the timely subject of resistance. Each panelist will therefore be limited to a 12-15 minute presentation, allowing for 15-25 minutes of unstructured discussion, prioritizing open exchange amongst participants and audience.