postcolonial

The idea of world literature has seen an unparalleled resurgence in the last two decades or so. Through large-scale research grants, publishing programmes, and curricula development it is threatening to become the new critical common sense across the humanities, and particularly in literature departments. However, both in the nineteenth-century idea of Weltliteratur (Goethe, Marx-Engels) and in its more recent revival as the new comparative literature, world literature has many and important genealogical entanglements with colonial/postcolonial histories, and only in recent years have we begun to explore these links critically. Unlike the paradigm of comparative literature, for instance, world literature relies on ‘a translatability assumption’.

Over the past decade, film studies has increasingly taken up the question of the environment and climate change (Rust, Monani, Cubit; Narine; Pick and Narraway). However, the question of “nature” has yet to be comprehensively theorized from the perspective of Latin American cinema. This edited volume proposes to begin to fill this gap by bringing together scholarship that explores Latin American films (from any time period) that foreground the nonhuman. We are specifically interested in thinking about why the past decade has generated an unprecedented boom in ecologically oriented films (both documentaries and fiction) throughout Latin America. How do these films dialogue with or push back against broader theories in ecocriticism?

Call for Papers: Native American Narratives in a Global Context

Special Issue to Appear in Transmotion

Deadline for Abstracts: 1st October 2017

HISTORICIZING VIOLENCE: THE CONTESTED HISTORIES OF PRESENT DAY CONFLICT

ROME Ÿ, 22-24 NOVEMBER 2017

Convened by the Centre for the History of Violence, University of Newcastle (Australia)

Preoccupation with theories and practices of representation and othering, across the breadth of various genres and disciplines, has moved forward debates about positioning in research and modes of constructing and producing knowledge. In Meatless Days (1989), a vivid memoir of her girlhood in postcolonial Pakistan, Sara Suleri Goodyear deplores being regarded as an “otherness machine”—a concern Kwame Anthony Appiah (1991) shares in his famous critique of postcolonial literature, culture and critical studies. A host of scholars who tend to conflate the post-isms as such contend that postcolonial theory and praxis are embedded in Western institutions that shape the field.