Sitting in a park in Paris France […]
But I wouldn’t want to stay here
It’s too old and settled in its ways here
Oh but California

“California” by Joni Mitchell

1The one-day symposium ‘Voies et voix californiennes : résonances d’un imaginaire régional (des années 1960 à nos jours)’ was organized by a team of three doctoral candidates : Victoria Robert (ILCEA4 — Université Grenoble-Alpes), Adélaïde Malval (ICD — Université de Tours), and Alwena Queillé (PRISMES — Université Sorbonne Nouvelle). The event took place on March 26^th 2026 at Université Grenoble-Alpes, bringing a bit of California sun to the late-winter mountains.

2Rather than merely retrace the history of The Golden State and the development of its particular ethos, the symposium sought to explore the apparent paradoxes of the collective myth that is California. What was unveiled over the course of the day’s presentations resembled less a glossy, pastel postcard of Long Beach or Rodeo Drive, and more what native Californian author Emma Cline describes as the “menace adjacent to California sunshine” (Love). The symposium brought together a colorful spectrum of multidisciplinary interventions that crossed the sociological and political, the literary and artistic, as well the theoretical and historical in order to paint a portrait of California as much utterly kaleidoscopic as caught up in its own extremes. From its origin as the westernmost wilds of the American frontier, hills streaked with as much fool’s gold as the real thing, to the dizzying dreams and dark disappointments emblematic of the Old Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’ in the 1930s; from the vibrancy of its consciousness-expanding counter cultural movements of the 1960s to the brilliantly apocalyptic visions brought on by its contemporary wildfires, the Californian mythos has always been characterized by a treacherous interplay of light and darkness, hope and horror. As Joan Didion, an emblematic voice of the state, writes: “California—the California we are talking about—resembles Eden: it is assumed that those who absent themselves from its blessings have been banished, exiled by some perversity of heart. Did not the Donner-Reed Party, after all, eat its own dead to reach Sacramento?” (1968 176).

Voies californiennes / Californian Ways

3The morning’s first panel, moderated by Cyril Besson (ILCEA4 — Université Grenoble-Alpes), was opened by Marie Melody Vidal (École des hautes études en sciences sociales), doctor in cultural anthropology. Her presentation, entitled “Ruptures in the California Dream: Imageries of the Dream House in a College Town (Davis, Northern California),” drew upon her PhD field work with affluent Californian white women and sought to examine how their conceptualization of the ‘dream house’ might serve to reveal yet-inarticulable social reconfigurations of the ‘California dream.’ Vidal’s work grows out of the presupposition that the Californian mythos is the result of a complex alchemy of a regionally-distinct physical reality, perceptions, and collective imaginaries. She argues that the ‘domestic landscapes’ of the dream house are influenced by the Californian imagination, just as this collective imaginary is synchronously influenced by the material realities of their ‘place.’ Vidal’s field work in the homes of two women of disparate ages who, in their own ways, both came dream-seeking to California, reveals a delicate interplay of elements representing both the ‘old’ Californian dream (such as the blurring of boundaries between in- and outside, suggesting an idealized harmony with nature) and ‘new’ elements (such as grey interiors, suggesting modernity and future mobility/sales) that imply a cracking of traditional Californian narratives, evidence of a generational and economic divide.

4Doctoral candidate David Poyol (CREW — Université Sorbonne Nouvelle) continued this exploration of emplaced imagination with his paper, “Vendre la Californie aux Californiens : Du réalisme ironique à l’auto-exotisme sécurisant à Disney California Adventure.” However bountiful California’s diverse landscape, history, and culture may be for the arts, Poyol contends that the variegated nature of the Californian ethos has proven nearly unmanageable in the hands of the amusement industry, as is evidenced by the initial failure of the DCA project, launched in 2001 and extolled as a sort of West Coast Epcot. However, as Poyol demonstrates, the original aesthetics of the park attempted a critical simulation of the state’s oft-traumatic history, thus denying the public’s expectations of a Disneyfied ‘architecture of reassurance’ and rendering null the implicit affective and evasive contracts characteristic of the heterotopic theme park. When such realism proved economically disastrous, Disney moved to correct their failure by putting in place an auto-exotification of the adventure that is California. Through his detailed analysis of this ‘Distory,’ Poyol teases out three essential components of DCA’s remediation: 1) the installation of a restorative nostalgia, effectively smoothing the reality of California’s history into pure myth; 2) a spatial and cultural compression that promotes fluid consumption above all else; and 3) the rewriting of Californian history as a ‘narrative palimpsest’ in which ‘fiction replaces friction’ (E.g. ‘San Fransokyo’ replaces brutal reality of Asian laborers). These corrective measures gave way to a newly and wholly controllable world that, as Poyol concludes, transforms the Californian myth from challenging to pleasantly palatable and secures the state control of its own soft-power.

5The final presentation of the opening panel was given by doctoral candidate Joséphine Grébaut (CREA — Université Paris-Nanterre) who, by her own admission, took the prompt ‘voies californiennes’ quite literally; her intervention, entitled “‘Out here it is all about our hustle’ : Mobilités hollywoodiennes à l’écran dans les années 2010” offered a critical analysis the Los Angeles roadway system as depicted in cinema. Grébaut demonstrates that while LA streets are typically emblematic of the star system’s promise of social mobility, several recent films overtly interested in the Hollywood phantasmagoria have toyed with the symbol of the city’s avenues in ways that suggest the entertainment industry has entered a period of meta-reflexive reassessment. She identifies the figure of the ‘driver’ as embodying the imbalanced, dominative power dynamics of the star system while simultaneously challenging ideas of who, traditionally, is allowed incorporation into the Hollywoodian myth. Finally, Grébaut turns toward depictions of alternative and disenfranchised forms of mobility (cycling, walking, impenetrable traffic) which make possible a horizontality and an access to the margins of society that challenge classic associations of Hollywood with social verticality.

Voix californiennes / Californian Voices

6Symposium attendees came back together after a brief coffee break to enjoy a second panel, moderated by Marie Thévenon (ILCEA4 — Université Grenoble-Alpes), on the polyphony that gives both voice to and criticism of California. Associate Professor Amélie Macaud (ELLIADD — Université Marie & Louis Pasteur) opened the discussion with her communication on “California readers’ voices in Esquire’s ‘The Sound and the Fury’ (1960-1990).” Working from a corpus of seventy yet-understudied letters-to-the-editor, Macaud is interested in the readerly reception of New Journalism writings whose depictions of California depended largely upon stereotype and collective imaginaries which cast the state as a receptacle of oddities. According to Macaud, Esquire’s characterizations of the Golden State across the decades in question fall into three categories: 1) the debunking of the California Dream; 2) the construction of the ‘Californian Nightmare’ in response to cultural shifts at the end of the 1960s, epitomized by the Manson Family murders; and 3) the integration of the ‘Californian Norm’ into wider American culture by the 1980s. Vocal Californian readers—chosen through a selective publication process that necessarily framed discourse and curated a certain institutionally-validated performance of wit, irony, and cultural capital—occasionally sought to correct these blanket depictions with the specificity of their experience; in other moments, they reacted with approval. In either case, as Macaud demonstrates, these readerly contributions readily shift between realistic and idealized visions of their home state, sometimes underscoring and at other times discarding the irony latent in the title of Ray Bradbury’s 1972 Esquire contribution: “Los Angeles is the Best Place in the World.”

7The second voice of the mid-morning panel was that of Associate Professor Françoise Buisson (ALTER — Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour). Her talk, entitled “Les Californie(s) de T.C. Boyle : rien de joyeux sous le soleil,” focused on a singular Californian voice albeit Californian-by-adoption. It is precisely his status as insider-outsider, literalized by his habitation outside urban limits in unincorporated Montecito, that allows Boyle to sardonically undermine ideals of Californian exceptionalism. As Buisson notes, ten out of the satirist’s nineteen novels center on California in one way or another, attesting to the enigmatic localization’s siren call. These works are often tinged with a distinctly erotic dimension, revealing California to be a receptacle of projected desire, and characterized by ironic reversals. Of particular interest to Buisson are Boyle’s eco-poetics and his contribution to the genre of climate fiction; his works are often shaded by apocalypse, consistent with a ‘worst-case logic’ (logique du pire), and cast California as offering only artificial solutions to very real problems. For Boyle, the world is not saved and California offers but a temporary paradise as well as the seeds of its own destruction.

8Doctoral candidate Capucine Rullière (SACRe — École normale supérieure PSL) closed out the second panel with a disruptive departure into voicelessness; her paper, “‘Missing Voices’ and the ‘Voice that Misses’: Listening to California in Echoes from the Borderlands” offered a critical analysis of Valeria Luiselli, Rico Giraldo, and Leo Heibum’s collaborative sound-based, multimedia documentation of the historical violence that traces US-Mexican frontier. The project explores Luiselli’s ‘poetics of the echo,’ which she likens to ‘gun reverberations,’ a presence and an absence in simultaneity. In this way, Luiselli’s work asks an unanswerable question: how do we hear California’s silences? Rullière conceives of Borderlands’ West-to-East narrative structure as intertextually challenging the Kerouacian ideal of The West as the ultimate destination, thus refusing the common myth of California as a site of renewal and regeneration. Further, the intermedial, juxtapositional, and archival nature of Luiselli’s documentation project produces a necessarily fragmented vision of history, a gesture Rullière envisions as decolonial in its refusal of Western narrative expectations of wholeness. Finally, Rullière highlights the way in which Borderlands’ ‘four-voice’ structuration, in addition to the inclusion of multitudinous other voices across the audiotrack, results in a polyphony of intratextual echoes, giving near-audible shape to the spaces between sound. As such, Luiselli’s Borderlands both asks and attempts to answer the question: “How do you listen to what is not there? Maybe you just make space” (37).

Presentations

9By the afternoon, the Zoom windows of the symposium’s dedicated transatlantic attendees let us know that the sun had risen over the East Coast of the United States and was well on its way westward. Meanwhile, in-person attendees reconvened to hear Associate Professor of American civilization Frédéric Robert (IETT — Université Jean-Moulin Lyon 3), speak about “L’imaginaire de la contre-culture américaine des années 60.” Robert’s presentation proposed a tripartite conception of the Sixties countercultural movement: first, in terms of its theoretical framework; then, as a series of materiel manifestations; and, finally, in the light of its imaginative legacy (and commercial recuperation). Theoretically speaking, for Robert, the Californian counterculture can be thought of as a collision of revolutionary aesthetics with experimental practices of new ways of living, and it was California’s peripherality, both geographical and ideological, which made it an ideal breeding ground for such a quasi-metaphysical project. Drawing heavily upon two foundational works—Theordore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture (1969) and Charles Reich’s The Greening of America (1970)—Robert understands the countercultural movement as the manifestation of a ‘crisis of subjectivity’ in response to the normative ‘regime of truth’ imposed by post-WW2 technocratic logics. As such, the Californian counterculture served as a kind of laboratory for a new, liberatory collective consciousness. The enduring imaginaries of this youth-led movement—its Beat literature; its psychedelic drugs; its hippie music—all attest to a collective desire to move beyond mere representation and into direct, lived experience, giving way to new ontologies and subjectivities. California’s counterculture reconceived of life itself as a spiritual and aesthetic experience, interrogating the possible relationship between ‘utopia’ and the ‘everyday,’ yet this intellectual legacy now exists in tension with contemporary commercial repackaging (E.g. coopting of ‘hippie fashion), decontextualizing the movement and pruning its revolutionary roots. In sum, Robert’s envisioning of 1960s Californian counterculture transcends nostalgia in order to locate the true power of its collective imaginaries in their capacity to reconfigure possibility itself; the Flower Children offered cultural revolution in the form of an imaginative plasticity birthed out of the Californian margins, forever altering our conceptions of the ‘real.’

10Associate Professor of American studies, Carolin Görgen (HDEA — IUF and Sorbonne Université) continued the afternoon’s momentum with a presentation of her new book, The California Camera Club: Collective Visions in the Making of the American West (University of Oklahoma Press, 2025). Photography and the American West, Görgen tells us, came of age together, the novel visual art form being widely used as a promotional tool for frontier expansion. Görgen’s investigation into the Club’s history and practices revolves around three central questions: what did membership in the California Camera Club signify as cameras became increasingly accessible? How did the work produced by the CCC shape collective visions of California? And what influence did the Club have on wider photographic practice? The CCC was founded in San Francisco in 1890, and, by 1900, had achieved a membership of approximately 400. As Görgen demonstrates, the Club’s collective, amateur practices effectively challenged the established master narrative of photography as a solitary endeavor whose legitimacy as a fine art was attributable to the success of a small number of venerated ‘master photographers’ (e.g. Former member Ansel Adams later refuses Club photography in his expositions). Much of Görgen’s work aims to reveal the California Camera Club’s indelible impact on visions of their home state following the mass destruction of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire—an event which coincided with the mass popularization of the Kodak camera, resulting in its infamy as the ‘most photographed event of the early twentieth century.’ Club photos of the disaster, perhaps most notably those by Arnold Genthe, refuse the smooth nostalgia desired by investors at the time who wished for more utopic depictions of the reconstruction of their ‘ideal city.’ Instead, the California Camera Club’s vernacular photography portrays a more diverse, grounded, and necessarily ‘messy’ image of San Franciscan life and identity during a time of immense upheaval, all the while challenging notions of individual authorship and institutional legitimacy.

11The final keynote presentation of the day was delivered by New York Times movie critic Alissa Wilkinson, whose book We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine was published in 2025. Wilkinson’s presentation took for its starting point what Didion refers to as ‘the blinkering effect:’ the experience of myopically losing oneself in the collective dream that is California. Wilkinson is principally interested in Didion’s ability to reexamine her personal mythologies over time and with distance, carving out her own kind of westward journey. As such, Wilkinson’s presentation took on a three-movement structure, beginning with the construction of Didion’s personal California mythos, followed by a depiction of that myth in breakdown, before finally re-envisioning the California Dream as turning back on its maker. In her “Notes from a Native Daughter” (1965) Didion crafts an image of a nostalgically-tinged ‘Old California,’ in which the territory’s—and Didion’s own—pioneer inheritance serves as a moral landscape, with its insularity and particularity of character offered as a tentative microcosm of the American spirit. Didion discloses the roots of her patriotic conservativism in her likening of California to both Eden and the Promised Land; intrinsic to the Californian ethos is an enduring belief in Manifest Destiny, that through enduring hardship and trial, one will surely be rewarded with abundance. Still, even Didion’s most adulatory meditation on California is touched with a desperate pessimism: “… things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent” (1968 172). In her “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” (1966), Wilkinson locates a ‘New California’ emerging in Didion’s writing, now uprooted historically and overrun with imported aspirations. As Wilkinson sees it, Didion understands the ‘California Dream’ and its ‘California Dreamers’ as mutually constructed. The Hollywood myth has become aesthetically prescriptive and, as real life and stories fuse, the spectacular slips into banality. Finally, Wilkinson turns to Didion’s retrospective work, Where I Was From (2003), in which the author seems to come to the conclusion that the Californian mythology of her childhood no longer adds up. Didion self-critically exposes the self-reliance mythos she had once ‘blinkeringly’ revered, asking “[F]or what exactly, and at what cost, had one been redeemed?” (2003 37). The ‘California crossing,’ once imagined as the ultimate redemption, is now but an abortive fantasy. Wilkinson concludes upon a new understanding of Joan Didion as trapped inside of her own Californian mythology, but fully aware of that entrapment. The California Dream is but another story that we tell ourselves in order to live.

12The symposium ‘Voies et voix californiennes : résonances d’un imaginaire régional (des années 1960 à nos jours)’ offered a rich panorama of mulidisciplinary perspectives on the formation of collective imaginaries, how they survive and change over time. Each speaker proposed their own path westward, all arriving at different places across the kaleidoscopic Californian landscape and yet all coming to a similar conclusion: that California is a space tethered between projection and the real, between dream and nightmare, between sunshine and darkness. We, collectively, are constantly creating and recreating California. And so, if one should come away from this thoughtful exploration of the sundry ‘ways’ and ‘voices’ of the Golden State with a singular idea in mind, let it be the day’s powerful reminder of our collective capacity to construct new worlds, ever reaching for Arcadia.

13Symposium organizers should take pride in having brought together a thoughtful and welcoming community of researchers at various stages of their professional careers, all offering their unique insight into a subject with so much relevance for contemporary researchers.