postcolonial

The long twentieth century offers multiple examples of dramatic progress brought to a halt or even seemingly thrown into reverse: Freud writes about the first World War as foreclosing faith in human progress; the late '60s and early '70s brought complications to the Civil Rights movement and student movements; and the destruction of the Twin Towers on 9/11/2001 undermined the narrative of American capitalist triumph that had held sway since the end of the Cold War.

RETHINKING THE HUMANITIES IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY AFRICA

Concentrate! A Symposium on Attention and Distraction in Medicine and Culture
30th October 2015
Birkbeck, University of London

"Though it is in the first place a faculty of individual minds, it is clear that attention has also become an acute collective problem of modern life—a cultural problem." -- Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (2015)

This session will present new work from scholars in an emerging line of inquiry: post-medieval outlaw narratives and the textual and cultural relevance of feasting and eating. This session purposefully reaches beyond the Middle Ages to demonstrate that outlawry is a global phenomenon, one that is not only present in a variety of literatures, languages, and cultures, but also one that is inherently intertwined with food and feast. While outlawry has its formal origins in the Middle Ages, the outlaw is a figure and trope present in many post-medieval texts: several Renaissance dramas, and especially American, Native American, African American, and Australian outlaw narratives.

The Department of English, Gauhati University, in its series International Seminars on Contemporary South Asian Fictions in English is happy to announce the second conference of the series. This time the focus is on Pakistan: an attempt at mapping its culture, literature, people, politics and conflicts—in short, ensuring comprehensibility from our varied locations and positions. One of the many themes in this seminar will be to consider the issues that concern writers of/from Pakistan and writers from North-Eastern parts of India.