Panel 1: Mutations of the Postcolonial Field: Psyche, Authorship, Space, and Race
On Thursday, February 12th, the Berkeley French Graduate Student Association commenced the 2026 Berkeley Graduate Student Conference, entitled “Mutations.” The conference began with Panel I, entitled “Mutations of the Postcolonial Field: Psyche, Authorship, Space, and Race.” The panel drew approximately forty attendees and featured four PhD student speakers from UC Berkeley’s French Department. The panel explored how postcolonial experiences can be understood through the idea of “mutation,” tracing transformations in psychological life, authorship, space, and racial representation during and after French colonialism.
Riley Lim, a second-year PhD student, examined Frantz Fanon’s work on psychosis and colonial violence in Algeria and Martinique. Lim argued that colonialism produces psychological mutations within both the colonized and the colonizer, forcing subjects to adapt to dehumanizing conditions. The talk emphasized how French colonial rule generated social and economic oppression that fractured subjectivity, while the French language itself functioned as an alienating force that separated colonized people from their indigenous cultures. Linguistic pressure to assimilate was framed as a form of violence that deepened psychological harm while recognition within French society remained conditional. Rhone Geha, also a second-year PhD student, analyzed authorship and orality in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magnifique through the lens of Michel Foucault’s What Is An Author? Geha argued that authorship mutates in postcolonial contexts, where literary authority is unsettled and reshaped by collective memory and oral traditions. In Chamoiseau’s work, authorship is not a stable individual position, but instead a shifting mediation between community voice and written narrative, challenging Western models of the author as a singular, authoritative figure.
Sam Bonadio, a first-year PhD student, discussed postcolonial space and colonial infrastructure in Pays Mêlé, a novel set in Guadeloupe. Bonadio showed how colonial-built environments continue to structure social life through spatial and gendered divisions, including segregated neighborhoods and the legacy of the asylum in Fort-Pilote. These spaces function as material traces of colonial power that produce long-term social and psychological effects, including generational trauma.Arianna Robertson, a second-year PhD student, examined the shifting public image of Josephine Baker as a series of racialized mutations shaped by French colonial expectations. Baker’s performances in La Revue Nègre and at the Folies-Bergère relied on colonial imagery that depicted her as exotic and “primitive,” while her later attempts at assimilation in French film never granted her full belonging. Her public image was repeatedly reshaped by colonial desire, moving between spectacle and conditional acceptance.
Panel 2: Bodily (Per)Mutations: Personhood, Social Relations, and the Politicized Body
On February 13th, 2026, the UC Berkeley French Graduate Student Association presented a conference entitled “Mutations.” Panel 2, “Bodily (Per)Mutations: Personhood, Social Relations, and the Politicized Body,” opened the second day of the two day conference. Before an audience of fifteen people, the presenters explored the reciprocal relationship between society and the body – how social structures produce forms of mutation, and how these mutations, in turn, reshape society.
The panel opened with Daisy Maslan, a PhD candidate in History at Harvard University. Her presentation focused on Les français peints par eux-mêmes, a 19th-century collective work, honing in further on the figure of La Laitière, written by Joseph Mainzer. Maslan traced the four “lives” of the depicted milkmaid, emphasizing her role as a vital link between rural and urban spaces. Each morning, she foremost brings milk into the city, but she also circulates news, earning the title “la gazette vivante du quartier.”The laitère predates the “gazette,” and functions as one of the earliest disseminators of information. Piotr Kazcka, a PhD student at the University of Katowice, also approached mutation through the lens of female figures in literature. His analysis compared Gabriel, a character created by George Sand, and Camille, created by Jane de la Vaudère. Gabriel, bearing a traditionally masculine name, destabilizes gender binaries and suggests that identity is shaped by education and social construction. In contrast, Camille undergoes a bodily mutation, undergoing surgery to escape what she perceives as the fatality of maternity. Yet, her eventual regret signals a restoration of social order, as if the mutation must ultimately be undone. Together, these narratives highlight both the desire to transgress fixed identities in the nineteenth century and the limits imposed on such transformations.
The discussion then moved to literature and illness, with Paolo Lasagni from the University of Paris VIII, who is currently in residence at the Venice Biennale. Lasagni examined the work of Hervé Guibert in light of his experience with AIDS. He argued that Guibert’s mutation extends beyond the physical deterioration of his body, permeating his writing. While Guibert’s work starts as provocative and sexually charged, his art slowly morphs towards autofiction marked by agony and a sense of martyrdom. The boundary between fiction and reality collapses, and the literary form mutates alongside the death of the author. To conclude the presentations of the panel, Alice Guillot-Lefeuvre, a PhD candidate at Université Lumière Lyon 2, turned to cinema through the films of Julia Ducournau. Her talk was organized around four materials: dead skin, blood, titanium, and marble.
In Ducournau’s work, bodies are malleable, shaped and reshaped through their relationships with others and with matter itself. Across the disciplines of history, literature, and cinema, the panel revealed mutation not merely as biological transformation, but as a social, narrative, and political process that constantly redefines the boundaries of identity. As Alice Guillot-Lefeuvre concluded, “if no mutation is possible anymore, it’s that we are all dead.”
Panel 3: Rethinking the Mutant Body: Between Cockroach, Pig, and AI
On February 13th, 2026, the UC Berkeley French Department hosted the second day of the 2026 Graduate Student Conference, organized by the Berkeley French Graduate Student Association, entitled “Mutations.” The third panel of the conference, “Rethinking the Mutant Body: Between Cockroach, Pig, and AI,” explored bodies that challenge human norms as a way to critique power structures in society. The hybrid panel, delivered to an audience of fifteen attendees, featured three speakers: Nam Nguyen, PhD candidate in the French Department at Yale University; Hervé Goerger, PhD candidate at Princeton University; and Sigy Ghosh, M.A. candidate in Comparative Indian Literature at the University of Delhi.
Nam Nguyen’s presentation, “Dissident Cells: Cockroaches in Antoine Volodine’s Post-exotic Macau,” examined the cockroach as a literary symbol in Volodine’s Le Post Intérieur, set against the backdrop of Macau's handover from Portuguese colonial rule. Nguyen, whose dissertation investigates conceptualizations of Asianness in French literature as a means of disrupting Eurocentric thought, situated Volodine within the post-exotic movement. Volodine’s depiction of the cockroach as a figure of radical humanism functions as a symbol of the marginalized “other,” carrying tones of resilience, ancestry, and egalitarianism, rather than its typical tone of abjection. Hervé Goerger’s presentation, “La Porcherie française: puanteurs et mutations,” examined how contemporary French literature represents mutation through olfactory and porcine poetics across texts Truismes, 180 Jours, and Le Règne animal. Goerger explored how these texts depict mutation operating simultaneously in bodies, social structures, and language, progressively blurring distinctions between human and animal through a generalized “becoming-pig.” Particular attention was given to the feminized body in Truismes, where a young woman’s transformation into a pig satirizes how consumerist systems reduce women to productive bodies. Mutation thus emerges as a literary framework for interrogating domination, labor, and social suffering within contemporary collective imaginaries. Sigy Ghosh’s presentation, “Fictitious Capital, Fictitious Bodies: Mutation and the Fiction of Self,” traced the commodification of the body from Balzac's Le Père Goriot through Darrieussecq's Truismes, and into contemporary AI culture through a Marxist framework. Ghosh argued that across these works, bodies circulate as commodities, and that AI extends this logic further by generating hyper-real bodies that circulate as commodities while remaining detached from any living subject. In doing so, she raises urgent questions about consent, surveillance capitalism, and sexual exploitation. The presentation concluded with the provocation: “The mutant body, once a literary metaphor, is now algorithmic infrastructure.”
Each presentation examined how French and Francophone literature deploys bodily mutation to interrogate power, through the cockroach as a figure of colonial marginalization, the feminine body transformed into an agricultural commodity, and the human form dissolved into algorithmic data.