postcolonial

Narratives of Resistance and African Literature: Articulating Dissent, Disobedience and Pluriversal Futures

Special issue of English Academy Review (Taylor and Francis)

Link: https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issues/narratives-of-resistan...

Special Issue Editor(s)

Goutam Karmakar, University of Hyderabad, India
goutamkarmakar@uohyd.ac.in

Under capitalism, we live separated from life. Capital’s extractive colonizing domination keeps us separated from nature, from each other, and from our own bodies, denying us a symbiotic and regenerative relationship with the natural world and with each other. Yet, certain types of bindings are integral to capitalism: capitalism depends on the combination of labour and nature for the production of value; the “emergence of capitalist accumulation and the reproduction of capitalist production” depends on “acts of violent dispossession”, on “tearing Indigenous societies, peasants, and other small-scale, self-sufficient agricultural producers from the source of their livelihood––the land” (Coulthard 2014).

The Dance and Movement Analysis Section of the American Folklore Society is looking for papers, panels, workshops, and lec/dems for the 138th AFS Annual Meeting, to be held at the Renaissance Asheville Downtown Hotel in Asheville, North Carolina from October 27–31, 2026. Deadline is April 6, 2026 for emailing us with ideas and questions, at dance.section@afsnet.org.

In a world increasingly marked by geopolitical strife, cultural polarization, and digital fragmentation, literature continues to stand as one of humanity’s most profound instruments for fostering peace, empathy, and human solidarity. From ancient oral traditions to contemporary narratives, literary expression has served as a repository of shared human experience—preserving collective memory, resisting violence, and envisioning alternative futures grounded in compassion and coexistence. The pursuit and preservation of peace have remained among the fundamental purposes and aesthetic aspirations of literature since antiquity.

Afrofuturism in African Literature
Edited Volume — Call for Contributions

How do playwrights imagine and stage ways of being, hoping, and memorializing against censorship and erasure? We invite papers that explore alternative historiographies in post-war Sri Lankan theater and performance. Please share a 300-word abstract and bio.

Children’s accounts of violence occupy a paradoxical space in public discourse: they are framed as both essential, unquestionable evidence, and, sometimes at the same time, as unreliable and prone to outside influence. Both framings rely on cultural constructions of the child’s “innocence.” This panel invites papers examining narratives of violence told by children, with a particular interest in experiences of institutional or state violence. How do these narratives complicate familiar tropes of children as voiceless victims in need of saving, or of certain topics as exclusively “adult” or “childish”?  How do child narrators themselves exploit, resist, and play with or into these tropes?

Special note for the contributors:

1. Please focus on the text that represents migration from the Global South to the Global North.

2. The text under consideration should be published after 2000, though it can focus on migration that happened at any time in history.

3. Please take a minimum of one and a maximum of two migration/refugee narratives for analysis.

4. Please mention within the abstract the theoretical background clearly that one wants to apply.

5. The text under consideration should be either written in English or translated into  English.

This is a guaranteed panel for the MLA's Teaching of Literature Forum.  This roundtable discusses experiences and pedagogical approaches to teaching literature under authoritarianism and state violence widely conceived. Panelists discuss whitewashing and erasing literary histories, global efforts at repressing liberatory literacy, heightened classroom surveillance, teaching anti-fascist literature, and more.

Deadline for submissions: Friday, March 27, 2026

Please send 250-500-word abstracts and CVs to Danica Savonick (danicasavonick@gmail.com ) and Brandi Locke (blocke@udel.edu). 

Inviting 250-300 words abstracts focusing on intersections between Critical AI and literary/cultural texts to explore how AI driven surveillance and security systems reinforce or counter racism against the South Asian communities in the US.

 This panel invites 250-word abstracts on creative and aesthetic expressions of emancipation emerging from refugee, diasporic, and forcibly dispossessed contexts across the Global South, examining resistance, agency, and world‑making within displacement and humanitarian regimes.

AICED-27

THE 27th ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT,

UNIVERSITY OF BUCHAREST

5-6 June 2026

CALL FOR PAPERS

Representations of

Crime in Literature and the Arts

University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures

7-13 Pitar Moș Street, Bucharest, Romania

If literature has long played a central role in defining what it means to be human, posthumanist thought urges us to reconsider that definition in the face of unprecedented technological, ecological, and cultural transformations. Rather than announcing the ‘end’ of the human, posthumanism interrogates the category itself, foregrounding humanity’s entanglements with other species, material environments, and technological systems. In doing so, it challenges human exceptionalism and exposes the historical contingency and political implications of the ‘human’ as a normative construct.

At its third edition, in 2026 the Entanglements summer school is centered on Postcolonial Horrors and aims to explore horror as an aesthetic, political, and epistemological symbol through which postcolonial literatures stage the traumatic memories of colonization, identity tensions, diasporic movements, and the re-emergence of the spectral within global modernities. The goal is to interpret horror not only as a genre, but as a critical and deconstructive tool capable of destabilizing ethnocentric categories of subjectivity, body, sovereignty, and knowledge.