This panel explores archives beyond the traditional frame and instead as embodied spaces of cultural memory and histories inscribed on skin. Building upon Hortense Spillers’ important essay Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe (1987), we seek papers from humanities scholars in the French and Francophone worlds that reframe the body not as a passive victim but as a living text, a site of memory, and an alternative space that rescripts official records. By retracing histories through the reading of the body, we can activate affect, unleash unexpected memories, and create generative spaces for art that centres on cultural knowledge to empower communities. This focus allows us to discuss how communities reconfigure memory keeping to recount local histories on their own terms.

Topics may include, but are by no means limited to, commemorative art pieces, gendered and queered storytelling, histories of trauma, indigenous tattoo practices, intergenerational memory transmission, postcolonial hauntings, and communal world-making. Guided by the following questions, this panel is interested in new possibilities unavailable to more conventional forms of archival practices.

How do artists envision the body as a space in which official colonial archives can be reimagined? How do marginalised bodies write decolonial archives through embodied forms of narration, such as performance, dance, tattoo practices, and so forth? How does this (re-)reading of the body challenge spatial surveillance of the (de-)colonised body within French and Francophone contexts? When confronted with historical erasure, how do gestures, scars, bodily inscriptions, and oral traditions surface as memories of resistance?

This panel encourages interdisciplinary conversations across artistic traditions and geographies, with a particular interest in abstracts that investigate bodily forms of remembrance as an empowering methodology in literatures, film, and digital media.

Please send an abstract of 250 words in French or English and indicate if you are planning to present remotely or in person.

Abstract submission link: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22357