world literatures and indigenous studies

This is a CFP seeking panelists for the 2027 Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies. We invite papers that examine racialization and ethnicization across Sinophone and Asian contexts in which local projects of improvement and rule are entangled with colonial and imperial systems and epistemologies, both Western and non-Western, external and internal, often sustained by local elites and intermediaries. We understand these contexts in broad terms, including transnational, diasporic, and colonial aspects. Processes of racialization and ethnicization, as well as resistance to and negotiation of such processes, could involve, but are not limited to, discussions of care, gender, and sexuality.

In Africa and the African diaspora, knowledge is often produced, circulated, and critiqued in “minor forms”—small-scale oral, visual, material, and digital ephemera such as proverbs, folktales, rites, images, social media, and other non-canonical modes of expression that structure everyday cultural life but are frequently marginalized within dominant academic and cultural hierarchies. While “major forms” such as the literary canon, the national archive, and peer-reviewed scholarship obscure the complexity and vitality of African cultural production, minor forms interact with, resist, coexist alongside, and reshape those dominant modes.

This panel explores how Latin American and Latine writers, filmmakers, and artists engage environmental elements as dynamic forces shaping human experience, identity, and social life. Grounded in the environmental humanities, the panel examines how cultural production renders visible the entanglements between ecological conditions and forms of movement, including migration, displacement, circulation, and transformation across human and more-than-human worlds.

"What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career."

— T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

About the Book

Indian Cultural Heritage: Perspectives is an edited volume that invites interdisciplinary scholarship on the diverse and dynamic dimensions of India's cultural heritage. The volume welcomes original contributions exploring tangible and intangible heritage, indigenous knowledge systems, languages, literature, folklore, performing arts, architecture, material culture, cultural memory, museums, heritage conservation, digital heritage, and contemporary issues of identity, sustainability, and cultural preservation. By bringing together diverse academic perspectives, the volume seeks to advance critical understanding of India's rich cultural traditions and their continuing significance in a rapidly changing world.

Beecroft argues in The Cambridge Companion to the Novel that, if we understand the novel as storytelling in any narrative form indigenous to a particular culture or people, then we must acknowledge the existence of multiple novels, each with distinct temporal and spatial origins. He maintains that storytelling traditions are embedded in every society, and that many of these traditions have complemented, intersected with, or diverged from Western narrative forms (46–48). However, the narrative form canonized as the “novel” in the Western literary tradition has a specific historical and aesthetic origin in ancient Greece.

NeMLA 2027 annual convention - Newport, RI (March 6-9 2027)

Call For Papers for Italian Ecofeminism and Literature

Deadline for Submissions: September 1, 2026

Notification date: October 1, 2026

Full name / Name of organization: Nicole C. (Civitano) Dittmer, PhD

Contact email: ncdittmer@gmail.com

Call for Chapters

CFP: 3rd International Interdisciplinary Conference of the Department of English, University of Zululand

28-30 September 2026

Re-imagining Language, Writing, and Literature in English in a Fast-Changing World   

CFP: Smell Studies Journal

General Editors: Will Tullett, University of York and Manon Raffard, University of Manchester.

Editorial board: Andrew Kettler, Chanelle Dupuis, Jayanthan Sriram, Ally Louks, Hsuan Hsu, Sandra Barré.

This panel at the SAMLA 97 conference (Nov. 5-7, 2026) examines hospitality as a critical framework within postcolonial studies, attending to the ways literary and cultural texts negotiate welcome, refusal, obligation, and exposure in the aftermath of empire. Within empire studies, hospitality emerges as a fraught ethical and aesthetic relation shaped by colonial histories, uneven mobility, and asymmetrical power. We consider how such texts register these dynamics across postcolonial contexts. Readings across genres and media—including novels, graphic novels, life writing, film, poetry, and theory—deploy hospitality as a vital lens for understanding postcolonial subjectivity, relationality, and the ongoing legacies of colonial governance.

Transnational Feminisms have emerged out of the need for women’s groups to address oppression that crosses national borders and to build solidarities rooted in an exploration of the articulation between the local and the global. These forms of feminisms examine the ways in which women’s groups transcend location beyond national boundaries to address their political and ideological struggles, exploring the interrelationships between discrete factors such as caste, class, ethnicity, sexuality, ability, age, and multiple other positionalities and contexts of inequalities as they overlap and are shaped by neoliberal economic and political forces, patriarchies and various other systems of stratification.

Call for Abstracts for a Panel at SAMLA 98 

Narratives of Displacement in Global South Literature