Erin Shevaugn Schlumpf’s book, Remnants of Refusal: Feminist Affect, National Trauma (SUNY UP 2025), pushes the burgeoning field of Sino-French studies. In the book, she analyzes cases of what she terms "feminist refusal" in literary and cinematic texts that were produced after the 1940-1944 German Occupation of France and, forty-five years later, after the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre in China. This talk will introduce the ideas in Remnants of Refusal by offering a case study from the book’s third chapter which argues that writing by Nathalie Sarraute and Chen Ran employ affective exhaustion in response to the ideological “energetics” of capitalist expansion in France and China. The talk will explore how the practice of anti-portraiture in Sarraute’s Le Planétarium (1959) and Chen’s A Private Life (1996) offer forms of feminist refusal to historical erasure in post-traumatic periods.
Erin Shevaugn Schlumpf is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Ohio University. She is the author of Remnants of Refusal: Feminist Affect, National Trauma (SUNY Press, 2025). Her work has also appeared in differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies, French Studies, SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism, among other venues.
This event is sponsored by the Department of French and Italian’s French Center of Excellence, which receives funding from French Cultural Services in the US and the Consulate General of France in Chicago. This series is also supported by the following Departments and Centers at Ohio State: Spanish and Portuguese, Slavic and Eastern European Languages and Literatures, Near Eastern and South Asian Languages, Germanic Languages and Literatures, History, Design, and the Humanities Institute.
