Dear colleagues,
We are pleased to share the CfP for a special issue of European Comic Art on 'Francophone Graphic Narratives / Bande dessinée: Authority and Resistance,' co-edited by Liana Pshevorska and Valentina Denzel.
This issue will examine how francophone graphic narratives engage with, challenge, and reimagine authority in its many forms – political, cultural, institutional, and aesthetic – and how they forge practices of resistance and dissent.
The bande dessinée is a medium that subverts hierarchies and blurs boundaries. Long regarded as the lowly offspring of literature and the visual arts, comics have since been legitimised by scholars and artists demonstrating their capacity to engage with complex sociohistorical, political, and cultural topics. This ‘Ninth Art’ now occupies an increasingly important place in university classrooms, academic publications, and public discourse alike. Its multimodal features – panel layout, gutters, framing, braiding, and complex interplay between text and image – allow comics to stage and challenge authority in formally distinctive ways. This aesthetic vantage point makes comics a powerful medium through which to bring displaced, excluded, and silenced narratives into view. From Chantal Montellier’s impressive four-decade oeuvre of political cartoons and graphic novels contesting racism, misogyny and totalitarianism to Jessica Oublié’s Peyi an nou, which provides a counternarrative to state discourse on the BUMIDOM, the bande dessinée has often served to undercut official rhetoric.
This special issue of European Comic Art seeks articles that examine how Francophone bandes dessinées engage with dominant institutions and discourses from theoretical and pedagogical perspectives. How do comics represent power and powerlessness? How do they respond to hierarchies that exist in various settings and communities? How do they decentre and challenge ‘standard’ language practices? Finally, how might comics be used pedagogically to help foster students’ critical thinking skills and question institutional, political, and social discourses?
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Migration
- Ecocriticism
- Social justice and political activism
- Gender and sexuality
- Comics and memory studies
- Class, labour, and economic inequality
- Pedagogy and second language acquisition
- Nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and globalization
- Colonial legacies, decolonial resistance/critique
- Monolingualism, multilingualism, and language politics
- Official histories, counter archives, and silenced narratives
- Humour, parody, satire, and subversion
Submission Guidelines
Please submit a 500-word abstract with a short biographical note to Liana Pshevorska at lpshevorska@wesleyan.edu and Valentina Denzel at vdenzel@msu.edu by October 15, 2026. Informal inquiries are welcome. Decisions will be communicated in November 2026.
The deadline for submitting full manuscripts is February 28, 2027. Articles should be in English, approximately 8,000 words, including images, notes, and bibliography. Contributors may include up to four images, which will be factored into the overall length of the article. Each image will be counted as approximately three-quarters of a printed page, based on an estimated 400 words per page. Please note that authors are responsible for obtaining copyright permission for all included images. Documentation of permissions should be submitted alongside the manuscript.
Please feel free to circulate the CfP widely to colleagues that may be interested.
Valentina Denzel
Associate Chair of Graduate Studies
Associate Professor of French and Italian
(17th and 18th centuries)
Romance and Classical Studies
Michigan State University
co-creator of Legacies of the Enlightenment
https://legaciesoftheenlightenment.hcommons.org/cfps/
