Introduction: From Margins to Mainstream: Narrativizing Power on Screen

Abstract

This issue is the outcome of a one-day conference organized by the Centre Interdisciplinaire de Recherche sur les Langues et la Pensée at Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne on 13 June 2025. The conference revolved around a central concern in media studies and the history of representation: the ways in which power is staged, negotiated, and contested on screen. By examining the movement of marginalized voices, identities, and narratives from the cultural margins to the mainstream, we sought to explore the processes through which certain narratives become visible, legible, and culturally authorized, while others remain at the edges of representation. Indeed, far from designating a neutral cultural center, the mainstream must be understood as a shifting and deeply ambivalent space, structured by institutional power, commercial imperatives, ideological norms and historical struggles over representation. If mainstream visibility can offer recognition to marginalized subjects, it can also neutralize dissent and reproduce dominant hierarchies under the guise of inclusion.