JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND AESTHETICS
Vol. 48, No. 4, Winter 2025
Special Issue | Call For Papers

Reimagining the Ocean: The Blue Humanities in French and Francophone Studies

Guest Editors: Keith Moser (Mississippi State University, USA) and Isaac Joslin (Arizona State University, USA)

Abstract submission deadline: February 1, 2025
(150-250 words, send to both kam131@msstate.edu and ijoslin@asu.edu)
Final paper submission deadline: July 15, 2025
(Manuscripts in 5,000–10,000 words adhering to the MLA 9th edition)

This volume reexamines the rich tradition of maritime literature in French and Francophone Studies through the lens of the emerging interdiscipline of the Blue Humanities. Compared to the growing body of diverse academic studies devoted to the Blue Humanities throughout the Anglophone world, there is a dearth of research in this innovative and transdisciplinary field within French and Francophone circles. This project represents a point of departure for filling this research gap by reevaluating sea stories and nautical fiction written in French from the vantage point of the theoretical approaches that undergird the Blue Humanities.

For instance, canonical writers such as Albert Camus, Jules Verne, and J.M.G. Le Clézio probe the veritable complexity of the relationships between the nautical and the terrestrial on an interconnected planet in their respective works of fiction. Many French-Francophone authors also remind us of the cosmogonic origins of life that bind Homo sapiens and all other sentient beings to the ocean. Moreover, the French philosophers Gaston Bachelard and Michel Serres suggest that reestablishing a primordial, sensorial connection with water itself is part of an existential, epistemological, and spiritual quest. It is in this sense in which Serres provocatively declares in his essay Biogée, “Don’t ever stop making love to Garonne and being born from it, emerging from it, flowing from my maternal abode […] conjugal bedroom, conjugal bed, beloved woman, birth canal […] belly from which I was driven out when I became a solitary nomad on this Earth. But my flesh has retained these motherly waters.”

Whether in V. Y. Mudimbe’s novel, Entre les eaux, or more recently in Fatou Diome’s Le Ventre de l’Atlantique, waters have consistently held a prominent position in francophone literature, whether as the embodiment of the gulf between the continent and its diasporas, or an impediment or obstacle to be overcome in the endless quests for emigration. One might also consider the role of water spirits in traditional African folktales and mythologies, as well as the opportunities afforded by water for human mobility and its necessity for the flourishing of human civilizations throughout history. Regardless, waters mark a significant trope in francophone literature.

In an era defined by an anthropogenic, ecological crisis of epic proportions, this collection of essays also investigates how widespread maritime pollution, biodiversity loss, and rising sea levels threaten the continued existence of all species. We also welcome contributions from researchers who directly link this unsustainable oceanic destruction to a capitalist economic paradigm that is predicated upon the notion of unfettered growth and expansion. In other words, how do French and Francophone authors undermine this destructive neoliberal ideology that has been exported to all corners of the globe by asking the same fundamental questions as prosperous degrowth theorists like André Gorz, Serge Latouche, and Ivan Illich in their sea narratives? In this same context of how late-stage capitalism appears destined to continue to erode the very foundation of life itself, articles that demonstrate how French and Francophone authors decry the privatization of the commons are especially encouraged.

Some potential topics to consider include:

• Eco-spirituality and water
• Material ecocriticism
• Biosemiotic insights into maritime life
• Deconstructing the nautical-terrestrial binary
• Evolutionary perspectives in cosmogonic narratives
• Coming-of-age maritime fiction or the bildungsroman
• Maritime travel narratives
• Mediterranean Studies
• Maritime fiction and sensory studies
• Ocean pollution
• Loss of oceanic biodiversity in the Capitalocene
• Degrowth maritime narratives
• The symbolism of water in diasporic communities