Penser le care contemporain

This course will explore the concept of care in its many manifestations and ambivalences through the prism of contemporary literature, film and visual arts from the French-speaking world. We will trace the origins of the concept in the North American and European context, engaging with critical analyses of its deep-seated feminization starting in the 1980s in conversation with scholars such as Joan Tronto, Carol Gilligan, Sandra Laugier, and Fabienne Brugère. Building on these perspectives, we will examine the racialized and class-based distribution of care work and the historically asymmetrical demands that structure it (Federici; Vergès). For, as this course posits, if care is about concern, responsibility and attention to the human and non-human world, it has also been rendered invisible, undervalued, and relegated to women, minorities, and economically vulnerable populations more generally within a capitalist, colonialist and extractivist global economy. As such, who gets to receive care, and who bears its burden disproportionately? How have gender, class, race, and colonial power shaped the ethics and economies of care? How might persistent forms of neglect be understood through the lens of care? Finally, how might literature, film and the visual arts help remediate alternative caring imaginaries?

To address these questions, we will trace the multiple dynamics of care across gendered, racial, class-based and geographic disparities, but we will also interrogate alternative caring imaginaries in light of past forms of neglect and present challenges. Our corpus will include works from across the French-speaking world that situate us in hexagonal France (Leïla Slimani’s Chanson douce; Catherine Corsini’s film La fracture; Wendy Delorme’s Le parlement de l’eau), Ivory Coast (Japhet Miagotar’s graphic narrative Cargaison mortelle), Guadeloupe (Gisèle Pineau’s Morne Câpresse), Haiti (Kettly Mars’s Je suis vivant), and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Denis Mukwege’s La force des femmes), examining how literature, cinema, and the visual arts represent, contest, and reimagine the politics and ethics of care.