postcolonial

The session “Women in Literature” includes papers dealing with any aspect of women in literature or literature by women. The session may contain essays on a wide variety of topics related to literature by and about women, including essays engaging with a wide variety of critical or theoretical approaches. Presentations might include consideration of women/women writers in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and geographical region. Papers may engage with the conference theme, “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict," but doing so is not required. Additional topics might include:

54th Annual Conference on South Asia, October 28-31, 2026

The Comparative American Ethnic Literature session at the 2026 PAMLA Conference in Seattle, WA seeks proposals for papers (about 15-20 minutes in length) related to a wide variety of topics regarding multi-ethnic texts, relationships between multi-ethnic writers, and/or connections among ethnic and religious communities. While proposals may engage with this year's conference theme of “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict," the session is open to broad interpretations and explorations of the field, including considerations of historical period, geographic area, genre (including film and music), gender and sexuality, bi- and multi-lingual texts, and so on.

Prospero Rivista di Letterature e Culture Straniere
A Journal of Foreign Literatures and Cultures
Call for Papers: Volume XXXI (2026):
NARRATIVES OF CRISIS IN ENGLISH AND GERMAN-LANGUAGE LITERATURES

We are inviting select chapters at this stage as majority of the entries for the volume have been finalised. Apart from the topics mentioned below, prospective contributors are free to propose other topics, but if we have already finalised paper/s on said area, we may have to decline such proposals. For details regarding the concept and theme of the volume, please visit the-handbook-of-bengali-cinema, the original CFP for the volume. Priority will be given to quality proposals in the below areas:

Thematic:

Nandan and the Politics of State Support for Culture

Bengal-isms in Cinema in Bengali

Genres/Movements:

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.

This panel invites scholarship exploring South-Asian diasporic poetics, transnational feminist perspectives, negotiations of identities, and practices of resistance. Please submit a 250-word abstract and a brief bio to subrata-chandra.mozumder1@louisiana.edu.

Deadline for submissions: Monday, March 23, 2026

Subrata Chandra Mozumder, U of Louisiana, Lafayette (subrata-chandra.mozumder1@louisiana.edu )

Special Session Proposal for the 2027 MLA Convention (Los Angeles, 7–10 January 2027).

This MLA 2027 special session, “Unfinished Histories: Literary and Cultural Acts of Hope,” explores radical hope as an emancipatory and dynamic framework for examining how literature, film, and art cultivate creative and relational modes of remembrance. Rather than approaching the past solely through paradigms of loss, grievance, or melancholia, the panel asks how cultural narratives open generative spaces for imagining unfinished futures.

While Indigenous literary studies has grown substantially over the past several decades, comparative approaches that place Indigenous texts, traditions, and intellectual frameworks in conversation with one another remain relatively rare. Too often, Indigenous texts are incorporated into comparative, world, or global literary frameworks without meaningful engagement with Indigenous studies scholarship, or are read primarily through the organizing categories of nation, region, empire, or postcoloniality. This seminar seeks to create a space for comparative Indigenous literary inquiry that centers Indigenous texts, epistemologies, and methods on their own terms.

This seminar opens up discussions on past and ongoing debates around indigeneity and indigenous lives. In America, the aboriginals assumed the title “First Nations” to distinguish their identity from that of the non-indigenous people. Historically, the European colonizers have classified the tribes for the sake of academic interest, colonial justification and administrative purposes. The British in India developed criminal ethnography archives and aspired to have systematic anthropometric methods to identify so-called ‘criminal tribes’.

Buddhadev Bose, the Bengali poet, critic, and academic, set out to write his ideas behind introducing comparative literature in India. He posits comparative literature as a discipline of non-specialization, “an eclectic study.” It is a “corrective to the excess of esoterism which now prevails in academic circles.” Although Comparative Literature “needs the knowledge of languages,” it is “not a language school.” Bose’s idea of comparatism as a method was centred on translation. Although the initial impulse was to study Indian classical and native languages alongside other literatures, one of the most important outcomes of the comparative method was the conceptualization of the idea of Indian literature.

This seminar examines performance as a multilayered concept that is continually reshaped through travel and other mobilities. Performance, in this context, can be understood in its broadest sense as a dynamic practice through which identities, relationships, meanings, and experiences are negotiated and transformed. By bringing performance and mobilities into conversation as mutually illuminating frameworks, the seminar seeks to explore how their intersection creates new critical possibilities. 

This session explores how women's bodies function as contested archives of trauma, sites of testimony that dominant social, legal and political structures have often silenced or delegitimised. Drawing on feminist trauma theory, postcolonial critique and affect studies, it examines bodily memory as a form of somatic knowledge that exceeds conventional language and probes the tension between trauma's structural unspeakability and the ethical urgency of testimony and witnessing.