ethnicity and national identity

Since Benedict Anderson’s 1983 theorization of imagined communities, the historical alliance between the novel and the nation has been a key problematic of literary studies. And yet, in the post–Cold War decades, the centrality of the nation and its ideological weight seemed to wane. The rise of neoliberalism produced an ideology of free circulation of capital and goods, which heralded a new era of weakening national borders and enhanced cultural exchanges. In literary studies, this period saw the rise of a new critical field, world literature (Moretti, Damrosch), and the theorization of a World Republic of Letters (Casanova), which held a similarly borderless aspiration.

Culture, Food, and Literature in the New Millennium (Hybrid)

March 25-26, 2026

School of Liberal Arts

University of Management and Technology, Lahore

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Latina/o/x Literature and Culture Society, ALA, Chicago, Illinois, May 20-23, 2026

This year, the Latina/o/x Literature & Culture Society welcomes submissions focusing on diverse topics, including literary genre, single authors, children’s literature, speculative fiction, comparative analyses, as well as cultural studies approaches. The society also encourages a variety of theoretical and interdisciplinary prisms, and a variety of panel types, including traditional paper sessions, roundtable discussions, and sessions dedicated to the teaching of Latina/o/x literature and culture.

The GITAM School of Humanities and Social Sciences, alongside collaborating institutions, Jadavpur University and Hansraj College, University of Delhi, invite scholars to the two-day national conference on “Embodied Justice: Memory, Violence, and Resilience in India”.

The Expatriate Archive Centre (EAC) invites master's students worldwide to submit theses that contribute to the scholarship of expatriation studies. 
 
The winner of the thesis award will receive €500, the executive summary of the thesis will be published online by the EAC and organisations involved in this initiative.
 
The submission deadline is 31 March 2026.
 
Candidates must ensure their thesis meets the following criteria:
 

In recent years, there has been a growing scholarly interest in Indigenous literatures
in English, including Native American, First Nations (Canadian), Australian
Aboriginal, Hawaiian, and other related literary traditions. More recently, the term
Oceanic Literatures has gained traction among critics to describe the literary
production of the Pacific Islands, encompassing regions such as New Zealand,
Hawai‘i, Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, and others. These literatures reflect the complex
processes through which “Oceanic” cultural identities are formed—shaped by
Indigenous worldviews and interwoven with the legacies of colonialism,
postcolonialism, migration, and global cultural flows - as present in the works of

Co-editors: Dr Debarshi Prasad Nath and Dr Swikrita Dowerah

It is with great pleasure that we announce the opening of applications for the 2026 Feminist Decolonial Politics Workshop.

The workshop will be held in a hybrid format, with both in-person and online participation options. We are especially excited to centre this year’s workshop on reading the work of Hortense Spillers, one of the most influential theorists of our time. Spillers is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor at Vanderbilt University, and her scholarship has been foundational to feminist, Black, and decolonial thought.

Participation in the workshop is by application only, and applicants must be accepted in order to attend.

In a provocative article titled Digging Wells While Houses Burn (2006), David Gordon White argues that certain studies of religion actively stoke supremacist ideologies and politics. The only way to avoid this unsavoury collaboration is to rethink the way we do our work — the stories we choose to tell, and the methods we use to tell them. According to White, academics of religion who fail to engage with this responsibility are “digging wells while houses burn”, ignoring devastating realities that urgently demand their attention. In this context, we invite scholars of all religions, across all disciplines, to reflect on the relationship between their academic work, on the one hand, and violence and supremacy, on the other.

In his delineation of the moral commitment of thinkers, Edward Said notes that “the proliferation of intellectuals has expanded into the very large number of fields in which intellectuals have become the object of study.” This self-reflexivity drives Said and other prominent scholars to grapple with the ever-changing global dynamics. The public role of the intellectual is therefore to critically engage in political life, rejecting moral detachment as ethical bankruptcy, emphasizing the responsibility of the intelligentsia, and cultivating anti-parochial modes of thought. They stand as a counterforce to the global corporate economic and political agendas that marginalize the human being and attempts to overwhelm human agency.

 *Imaginations - Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies (open access and peer-reviewed)*

 <https://imaginationsjournal.ca/index.php/imaginations>

Focusing on the past decade – particularly the summer of 2020 and its aftermath, which witnessed an unprecedented wave of iconoclastic acts against monuments and statues linked to colonialism, white supremacy, and slavery, alongside renewed calls for the decolonisation of museums and urban toponyms – much of the subsequent scholarly attention in English has centred on developments in the Anglophone world.

RMMLA 2026 – Call for Papers
Asian Drama and Performance Panel
 
REVOLUTIONARY BODIES
Staging Thought and Affect on the Asian Stage
How do bodies on Asian stages think, feel, and make worlds?
This panel explores the performing body as a site where concepts are articulated and affects are distributed. Inspired by Emily Wilcox’s Revolutionary Bodies and theoretical work by Bruno Latour, Rita Felski, Susan Leigh Foster, André Lepecki, among others, we consider the body not as a mute vehicle for meaning, but as an interface that negotiates power, history, and desire.

Call for Papers

Spark: HKCAL Postgraduate Lightning Talks

Theme: Emerging Voices – Testing Ideas in Research on Hong Kong

Date: 5-6 June 2026 (online)

The Hong Kong Cultures, Arts and Languages (HKCAL) Research Network invites submissions for Spark: HKCAL Postgraduate Lightning Talks, to be held on 12-13 June 2026.