“The Flâneuse as Ragpicker: Urban Recollection in Sophie Calle and Régine Robin”
About the Event
French conceptual artist Sophie Calle and Franco-Canadian writer and sociologist Régine Robin (1939–2021) reimagine and perform the marginalized figure of the ragpicker. By redefining their roles as flâneuses and navigating the layered temporalities of modern cities, they not only testify to the ever-changing rhythms of urban life; they also uncover ghosts, remnants of the repressed past, and traces of the disappeared. Their textual and visual cityscapes will be explored as a cultural space where the mental, corporeal, and material intersect, hence through theories and aesthetics that shape agencies and art out of the tangible realities of megapolises.
Catherine Nesci, University of California at Santa Barbara
A professor of comparative literature and French studies at UC Santa Barbara with courtesy appointments in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies and the Department of Feminist Studies, Catherine Nesci works on gender and literary urban studies in modern and contemporary French and Western literatures. She co-directs the “Culture and Conflict” series for de Gruyter Brill. Her current book-manuscript, entitled "Street Hauntings: French Women Writers and the Work of Memory," deals with narratives and cities as repositories of memory and ghosts in works crafted by contemporary French-speaking women writers, artists and filmmakers. Her main research interests include urban genres such as flânerie, detection, Noir, the underworld, the popular novel, literary cartographies; gendered cityscapes and gendered embodiments; literature and the ethics of care; Holocaust and genocide studies; and disability studies.
Coffee Break | 4:20-5 p.m. | Diffenbaugh Building, fourth floor
Talk and Q&A | 5-6:30 p.m. | Diffenbaugh Building, room 009