The CfP for the hybrid panel "Indigenous and Creole Transcultural Encounters" (NeMLA 2026 convention) is now open (please see abstract and description below). 

 The convention will take place in Pittsburgh, PA on March 5-8, 2026.

 The web address for the CFP is: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22018 The CfP will be open until September 30, 2025.  Please do not hesitate to reach at to me if you need additional information or have any questions.karine.germoni@sorbonne.ae 

A comparative panel examining how Indigenous and Creole Francophone authors such as Shenaz Patel and Michel Jean use translingual, oral, and archival strategies to rethink belonging, challenge hierarchical language regimes, and imagine ecological and cosmopolitan futures.

From Innu Nitassinan to the Indian Ocean archipelago, contemporary Francophone writing turns the space between languages and cultures into a zone of encounter where meaning is constantly negotiated and reshaped. Building on Welsch’s (1999) notion of ‘transcultural networks,’ sites of dynamic encounters woven with different threads and in different manner, and on Khatibi’s ethics of a ‘hospitality of languages’ that recognizes the foreign within the self (Khatibi 1981), this panel asks how linguistic, generic, and media practices generate new forms amid long-standing asymmetries. By studying practices such as Shenaz Patel’s Creole translingualism and eco-feminist poetics alongside Michel Jean’s Innu historiographic storytelling, we trace ways in which code-mixing, orality, and archival fragments unsettle former hierarchies and binary dichotomies. Here, the ‘hand-to-hand combat’ with (and not necessarily against) the French language (Sellin 2013), deliberately desacralizes inherited norms, and aligns with Mbembe’s (2006) Afropolitan call for relational belonging that resists nativist discourse.

What affiliations emerge when literature functions less as a mirror of community than as a provisional technology for cross-cultural commoning? How do translingual and multimodal strategies recast transculturality as a politics of shared vulnerability, attentive to both cosmopolitan citizenship? By placing Indigenous and Creole a voices in conversation, the panel advances a comparative methodology that treats Francophone literature as a dialogic mesh of situated yet transformative practices—sites where language, land, and memory converge to imagine futures beyond both monolingual and multicultural frames.

Works Cited:

Abdelkébir Khatibi, “Incipits,” in Jalil Bennani et al., Du bilinguisme (Paris: Denoël, 1985).

Mbembe, A., Interviewed by Mongin, O., Lempereur, N., Schlegel, J.-L., Translated by Fletcher, J. (2006). What is postcolonial thinking? An interview with Achille Mbembe. Esprit, December(12), 117-133.

Sellin, Eric. “Translingual and Transcultural Patterns in Francophone Literature of the Maghreb.” In Transcultural Identities in Contemporary Literature, 2013.

Welsch, Wolfgang. “Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today.” In Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, 1999.