postcolonial

Call for Papers Speculative Narratives Beyond Consensus Reality: Navigating the Senses from Wonder to Horror International Interdisciplinary Conference 29 th – 30th June and 1st July, 2026  https://speculativenarratives.com/ NEW Deadline for submission of abstracts: 10th May 2026Venue: Department of Languages and Cultures, University of Aveiro, Portugal Conference Organisers: Popular Culture Group  We invite scholars, researchers, and artists to submit abstracts for the upcoming academic conference, Speculative Narratives Beyond Consensus Reality: Navigating the Senses from Wonder to Horror.

Gender (In)Equity (SDG #5) and the Global South

In our current postdigital condition, digital technology is so deeply embedded in everyday life that the distinction between technical and natural is becoming increasingly blurred and images have become mere byproducts of our embodied co-existence with digital media. At the same time, we see that visual forms are continuously rendered obsolete by the rapidly evolving algorithmic processes. In new media, we are no longer even looking at “the image” any more, but rather always only at a version of an image that can be infinitely modified. Cameras are regularly used to connect the eye and the machine in a way that serves no aesthetic goal, creating purely “operational images” (Harun Farocki).

Guest Editors

Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay, University of Milan

Christina Banalopoulou, University of Milan

This edited volume emerges from a seminar panel that I proposed for the 2026 annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) earlier this year. 

Volume Rationale: 

The edited volume seeks to understand the interdisciplinary field of Death Studies through the lens of decolonisation. 

Death Studies is a field of study that not only draws from a host of disciplines like anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and psychology but also cuts across fields such as bereavement studies, trauma studies, and health humanities. 

This panel explores how Francophone and Hispanophone fantastic literatures engage structures of power, hierarchy, and authority across diverse historical and cultural contexts. 

From the nineteenth century to the present, Francophone and Hispanophone fantastic literatures have unsettled the boundaries between the real and the impossible. Emerging from interconnected histories shaped by imperial expansion, colonial violence, dictatorship, revolution, and migration, the fantastic operates not only as narrative hesitation, but as a subtle language of power. As theorists such as Tzvetan Todorov and David Roas have shown, ontological uncertainty is never merely aesthetic. It signals deeper crises of authority, perception, and legitimacy. 

44th Annual West Indian Literature Conference

Freedom, Creative Spirit, & the Poetic Imagination

Where: University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus

When: October 7-11, 2026

Abstracts: Proposals are to be submitted by June 1, 2026

How can you free people? . . . When every move you make is to get them to accept conditions of unfreedom, when you use power to twist and corrupt what it is to be human, when you ask people to accept shame as triumph and indignity as progress? —Earl Lovelace, Salt (1996)

CALL FOR PAPERS

Proposed Edited Volume 

Beyond the Mainstream: Dalit Narratives and Narratives of Social Exclusion from Eastern and North-Eastern India

Editors

Dr. Roshni Subba

Assistant Professor, Department of English

University of Calcutta

Injam Ahmed Molla

Independent Researcher(UGC NET Qualified)

About the Volume

How does the novel resist? Both as an action (movement, predicate) and as a form (structure, construction) how does the novel as a genre engage in resistance? Of what, too, is the novel resistant? Studies of the novel have long emphasized the genre’s capacity to control and coerce, as in the work of D. A. Miller and Nancy Armstrong, to name a couple. This panel instead invites papers that approach the novel as a resistant structure and a form of resistance. What might it mean to read the novel not as an instrument of control, but as a site of formal, aesthetic, or material resistance?

Editors: Elise Boxer (Dakota), University of South Dakota and Travis Franks, Utah State University, Department of English

What happens when cosmopolitanism no longer promises the world but reveals its limits?

Cosmopolitanism has long been associated with mobility, openness, translation, and coexistence across difference. In Asian literary and cinematic contexts, it has often been linked to port cities, diasporic networks, colonial encounters, and transregional circulation. Yet this cosmopolitan promise has never been equally available to all.

CFP: The Midwest Modern Language Association (MMLA)

2026 MMLA Convention—12-14 November 2026—Chicago, IL

Convention Dates: November 12-14, 2026
Convention Location: voco Chicago Downtown-Riverwalk (350 W. Wolf Point Plaza Building 1, Chicago, IL 60654)

2026 Convention Theme: “After the Archive.”

Convention Panel: Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies Permanent Section

Theme: After the Archive: Archival Recovery, BIPOC Pedagogical Labor, and Lived Resistance

Call for Papers
PAMLA 2026 Special Session: Seattle
Spanish and Portuguese (Peninsular)

This special session invites papers that explore the rich and multifaceted landscape of Spanish and Portuguese literature, film, and cultural studies within the Iberian Peninsula. We welcome presentations that engage with a broad spectrum of topics, particularly those that foreground the experiences of historically marginalized communities, including (but not limited to) Romani/Gypsy and Afro-Hispanic populations.

African writers such as Chris Abani, Teju Cole, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, NoViolet Bulawayo, Biyanvanga Wainaina, Dinaw Mengestu and many others are committed to reimagining the concept of “home” and “what it means to be African?” in the era of mass globalization and “new” diasporic belonging.