Le but de ce colloque, qui se tiendra à Dijon les 23 et 24 octobre 2025, sera d’aborder la science-fiction (SF) à travers le prisme de ses mutations (sous-genres, mouvements et traditions) afin de passer au crible le foisonnement des productions artistiques et des discussions qui s’y rattachent, ainsi que leur exploitation en dehors de la sphère proprement artistique. Comme son titre l’indique, il s’agira d’explorer et de comprendre divers phénomènes de « friction » entre formes littéraires et artistiques, entre imaginaires, entre cultures, entre arts et sociétés.

Argument

This conference, to be held in Dijon on October 23 and 24, 2025, will seek to approach science fiction (SF) through the prism of its mutations (sub-genres, movements and traditions) in order both to sift through the abundance of artistic productions and related discussions, and to examine their exploitation outside the strictly artistic sphere. As the title suggests, the aim is to explore and understand various phenomena of “friction” between these literary and artistic forms, between imaginary worlds, between cultures, between the arts and society.

The question of literary and artistic filiations and the origins of genres, sub-genres and movements can thus be mobilized to either reaffirm a hierarchy between “legitimate” and more popular art forms (in the “pulp” tradition, or in works created online within “fandoms”,  Bould 2007), or on the contrary be the object of a rejection of the very notion of genre in keeping with postmodern theories, as in slipstream fiction (Kelly and Kessel 2006). Both the polymorphous nature of science fiction (at once genre, movement and mode) and its longevity and success make it conducive to a multitude of adaptations and re-appropriations that appropriate the codes, topoi and tropes of science fiction as a language for thinking about the world in all its complexity (Hollinger 2014; Kilgore 2003). Debates about science fiction itself (its contours, generic conventions and canon) are also the result of specific socio-historical contexts and legitimation strategies aimed at finding a space for SF within the literary and artistic world at large (Rieder 2010; Wolfe 2014).

Movements such as the American-born Afrofuturism movement (Dery 1993; Eshun 1998; Nelson 2002; Womack 2013), the rise of African science fiction and works related to it (Adejunmobi and Coetzee 2019; Hamza 2022; Mangeon 2022), as well as the reappropriation and rereading of SF by various movements and schools (notably feminism or ecocriticism) make it fertile ground for representing, thinking about and articulating feelings of belonging, as well as the intersection of individual and collective, national and transnational, local and global identities.

Thus for example the intellectual discourse surrounding Afrofuturism has led to a reappraisal (Mashigo 2018) or even a rejection of that terminology (Nnedi Okorafo 2019). The birth of a rich, diversified and distinctively African creation of SF produced in Africa under the aegis of terms such as “African futurism” (Phatsimo Sunstrum 2013) and “Africanfuturism” (Okorafor 2019; Talabi 2020; Wabuke 2020), has reinforced the affirmation of SF traditions that are specifically African (Hamza 2022) or South African (Muller 2022) and which often preexisted Afrofuturism. Similarly, other “recuperating” forms involving or exploring extended geographical and cultural areas, and testifying to both circulations and reappropriations, could be examined.

Another type of friction that could be fruitfully explored is that between cultures and between imaginaries, along the lines of what writer Michael Roch, drawing inspiration from Edouard Glissant’s poetics of “relation” (Glissant 1990; 1993), calls a “science fiction of relation”, which would renew a still predominantly Western SF by “looking to the margins of the West, precisely where new voices are emerging (…): towards Asian science fiction, led by Liu Cixin for example (The Three-Body Problem or The Wandering Earth), towards African American, African, and soon Caribbean, science fiction”. Another possible topic would be the emergence of “Afropolitan” and “Afrotopian” poetics (Arnold and Bertho 2023) on the African continent, and the way in which these imaginaries bring into play, in every sense of the word, a variety of forms, cultures and codes to evoke an “Africa of the future” (Mangeon 2022).

This conference is thus articulated around the expression “science friction” coined by Kim Hendrickx (Hendrickx 2019), because these “grey zones” between different genres, sub-genres, traditions and movements offer the ability to highlight the political dimension of science fiction through the identity negotiations that take place in these contact zones, as well as the aesthetic issues that underlie, enable and result from these negotiations. The conference is thus open to all languages, cultures and geographical areas, and to all media and artistic forms, in order to highlight the complexity and richness of these “frictions”. In this respect, the conference aims to study the “political uses” (Besson 2021) of SF, and the contours it gives itself, in diverse cultural and geographical areas, which would make it possible to contrast and compare the definitions that emerge, and thereby propose a reflection on the links between SF and identities.

Among the many avenues that the notion of “science fiction” could explore, we might mention the question of labels and reappropriations; historiography and the frictions between past, present and future; phenomena of rewriting and intertextual and transtextual frictions; the artistic practices resulting from these strategies of recycling, bricolage or hacking; movements, genres and subgenres and the various contacts and frictions they bring into play; the passage from one medium to another and transmedia frictions; the integration of SF codes into works of so-called “general” literature; collaborative writing; the transition from academic research to SF writing (e.g. Namwali Serpell, Sofia Samatar, Nnedi Okorafor); formats and their use, fandoms and fan fiction and, more broadly, the question of frictions and contacts between reception and creation; the use of SF in non-literary contexts (e.g. the “Red Team” set up by the French army to envisage future threats and devise measures to prevent or deal with them); production and distribution contexts. These suggestions are, of course, not exhaustive. All types of corpus are possible, as long as they raise the question of science fiction and its boundaries.

Submission guidelines

Proposals for papers, approximately 250-300 words long, in French or English, accompanied by a short bio-bibliography, should be sent  to:

• Mélanie Joseph-Vilain (Melanie.Joseph-Vilain@ube.fr),
• Indiana Lods (Indiana. Lods@ube.fr),
• Shannon Wells-Lassagne (Shannon.Wells-Lassagne@ube.fr)
• Guillaume Dupetit (guillaume.dupetit@univ-eiffel.fr),

by 15 April, 2025

Confirmed Keynote Speakers

• Irène Langlet (Université Gustave Eiffel)
• Florent Favard (Université de Lorraine)

Scientific Committee

• Mélanie Joseph-Vilain (organisation, UBE/TIL)
• Indiana Lods (organisation, UBE/TIL)
• Shannon Wells-Lassagne (organisation, UBE/TIL)
• Guillaume Dupetit (organisation, Université Gustave Eiffel/LISA CCAMAN)
• Florent Favard (Université de Lorraine)
• Hélène Machinal (Université Rennes 2/ACE)
• Anthony Mangeon (Université de Strasbourg/CERIEL)
• Alexandre Pierrepont (Université Paris 8/MUSIDANCE)
• Fanny Robles (Aix-Marseille Université/LERMA)

Bibliography

Adejunmobi, Moradewun, and Carli Coetzee, eds. 2019. Routledge Handbook of African Literature. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge.

“Africanfuturism Defined.” n.d. Accessed June 14, 2024. http://nnedi.blogspot.com/2019/10/africanfuturism-defined.html.

Arnold, Markus, & Elara Bertho. 2023. “Poétiques afropolitaines et afrotopiques : imaginer les possibles, recréer le monde”. French Studies in Southern Africa 53 : 1-22.

Atwood, Margaret. 2011. In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. London: Virago.

Besson, Anne. 2021. Les pouvoirs de l’enchantement. Usages politiques de la fantasy et de la science-fiction. Paris: Vendémiaire.

Bould, Mark. ‘Come Alive by Saying No: An Introduction to Black Power SF’. Science Fiction Studies 34, no. 2 (2007): 220–40.

Bould, Mark. ‘The Ships Landed Long Ago: Afrofuturism and Black SF’. Science Fiction Studies 34, no. 2 (2007): 177–86.

Dery, Mark. 1993. “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose.” South Atlantic Quarterly 92 (4): 735–78. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-92-4-735.

Eshun, Kodwo. 1998. More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. Anniversary edition. London: Quartet Books.

Glissant, Edouard. Poétique de la relation. Poétique III. Paris : Gallimard, 1990.

–. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. Trans. Betsy Wing.

Hamza, Abd El Khadr. 2022. “Afrique(s) et Science-fiction. Histoire(s) et représentations.” Thèse de doctorat, Université de la Sorbonne nouvelle – Paris III. https://theses.hal.science/tel-04237898.

Hendrickx, Kim. 2019. “Science Friction [Sic]: Le Présent Est-Il Transportable?” https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=724281162032728838&hl=en&oi=scholarr.

Hollinger, Veronica. 2014. “Genre vs Mode.” In The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction, edited by Rob Latham, 139–51. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.

Wabuke, Hope, 2020. “Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, and the Language of Black Speculative Literature”, L.A. Review of Books

Kelly, James P., and John Kessel, eds. 2006. Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology. 1st ed. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications.

Kilgore, DeWitt Douglas, 2003. Astrofuturism: Science, race, and visions of utopia in space. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Langlet, Irène. 2006. La science-fiction : Lecture et poétique d’un genre littéraire. Paris : Armand Colin.

Langlet, Irène. 2020. Le temps rapaillé : Science-fiction et présentisme. Limoges : Presses universitaires de Limoges.

Mangeon, Anthony. 2022. L’Afrique Au Futur: Le Renversement Des Mondes. Collection “Fictions Pensantes.” Paris: Hermann.

Mashigo, Mohale. 2018. “Afrofuturism: Ayashis’ Amateki.” In Intruders: Short Stories, vii–xv. Johannesburg: Picador Africa.

Muller, Alan. 2022. “Futures Forestalled … for Now: South African Science Fiction and Futurism.” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 34 (1): 75–87. https://doi.org/10.1080/1013929X.2022.2035076.

Nelson, Alondra. 2002. “Introduction: FUTURE TEXTS.” Social Text 20 (2 (71)): 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-20-2_71-1.

Okorafor, Nnedi. ‘Africanfuturism Defined’, 2019. http://nnedi.blogspot.com/2019/10/africanfuturism-defined.html.

Phatsimo Sunstrum, Pamela. 2013. “Afro-Mythology and African Futurism: The Politics of Imagining and Methodologies for Contemporary Creative Research Practices.” Edited by Mark Bould. Africa SF, Paradoxa, 25:113–30.

Rieder, John. 2010. “On Defining SF, or Not: Genre Theory, SF, and History.” Science Fiction Studies 37 (2): 191–209.

Wolfe, Gary K. 2014. “Literary Movements.” In The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction, edited by Rob Latham, 59–70. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.

Talabi, Wole, 2021. “Africanfuturism: An Anthology”. Vector-BSFA, https://vector-bsfa.com/2021/08/24/africanfuturism-an-anthology

Womack, Ytasha L., 2013. Afrofuturism: The world of black sci-fi and fantasy culture. Chicago Review Press.

Notes

[1] « Le book club », France Culture, 31/10/2024, https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/le-book-club/michael-roch-auteur-sf-et-nouvelle-voix-de-l-afro-futurisme-caribeen-4185832

[2] « Mardi SF: pour Michael Roch, il faut “une science-fiction de relation”», Libération, 31/05/2022.