Alexandre Cabanel : Cléopâtre  testant ses poisons sur des condamnés

French Orientalism: Culture, Politics, and the Imagined Other
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Saturday, 29 October 2005

The Ph.D. Program in French at the City University of New York invites paper proposals for its fall 2005 student conference “French Orientalism: Culture, Politics, and the Imagined Other.” Papers should be twenty minutes in length.

In Orientalism, Edward Said wrote of “the Orient as a locale requiring Western attention, reconstruction, even redemption. The Orient existed as a place isolated from the mainstream of European progress in the sciences, art, and commerce. Thus whatever good or bad values were imputed to the Orient appeared to be functions of some highly specialized Western interest in the Orient.”

Working from this standpoint and within the current global context, this conference will explore the French and Francophone construction of the Orient. Proposals for papers from all historical periods and disciplines are welcome. Papers may be either in French or in English.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Exploration, conquest, and the nation
• Literature: confrontation, appropriation, and resistance
• Religion, territory, and political relativism
• Flora and fauna: possession, domestication, classification
• Food and cultural consumption
• The French stage: Performing the Orient
• Harems, fetishism, and exotic sex
• The feminization of the Orient
• Women and agency
• Occidentalism: The returned gaze
• Orality and history
• Self-representation in literature
 

The deadline for submissions is 30 July 2005. Please send proposals by e-mail to dhosford@gc.cuny.edu or to cwojtkowski@gc.cuny.edu.