Call for Book Chapters

‘Mother(hood)’ in Anglophone Asian Literature: Representations, Interventions, and Critical Reframing

‘Mother(hood)’ has long served as a central, if ideologically fraught, site in the cultural and literary imagination of Asia. Within Anglophone literary traditions across South, Southeast, and East Asia, maternal figures have been portrayed as both cultural icons and contested subjects—revered as moral anchors, but often denied interiority, complexity, and political agency. This edited book aims to critically examine how Anglophone literary texts from Asia imagine, construct, and interrogate ‘mother(hood)’ in ways that reflect, disrupt, or reconfigure dominant discourses on the term as a patriarchal construct representing ‘mother’ as an emblem of sacrifice, in/visibility and selflessness.

Moving beyond the patriarchal construct of ‘mother(hood),’ this volume seeks to center the term not as a static cultural emblem but as a dynamic perspective deconstructing history by contributing to herstory of individuation and agency. We aim to challenge romanticized, essentialist, or normative understandings of mother(hood) and instead offer nuanced readings that foreground maternal individuality, resistance and agency by challenging discourses that silence the mother as individual and human in Asian Anglophone literary texts.

We invite scholarly essays that engage with the literary representations of ‘mother(hood)’ in Anglophone Asian literature, with a particular emphasis on postcolonial, feminist, queer, and intersectional frameworks. Contributors may consider questions such as: How is mother(hood) mobilized to reinforce or subvert colonial legacies, patriarchal structures, or capitalist modernities? In what ways do Anglophone narratives render voice to maternal ambivalence, refusal, rage, or emancipation? And how do authors navigate the linguistic, cultural, and political tensions inherent in the representation of the mother figure within postcolonial and diasporic contexts? We welcome essays that explore ‘mother(hood)’ in a broad range of Asian contexts—historical and contemporary, rural and urban, canonical and marginal—across genres such as fiction, poetry, drama, memoir, as well as oral and media narratives.

Areas of inquiry include, but are not limited to:

• ‘Mother’ and herstory of self, identity and narrative agency
• The maternal as trope vs. character in classical to contemporary Asian literatures
• Motherhood vs mothering: postcolonial, feminist, queer and psychoanalytic readings of ‘mother’
• Comparative analyses of silences, erasures, and ambivalences in maternal representation across Asia
• Non-normative mothering: queer, adoptive, single, or surrogate motherhood
• Intersections of caste, class, religion, and ethnicity in maternal narratives
• History, state, nation, and the policing of maternal bodies
• ‘Mother(hood)’ and literary depictions of war, migration, or partition
• Eco-literature and the metaphor of the ‘motherland’ or ‘Mother Nature’
• ‘Mother(hood)’ as gendered, domestic, emotional, and reproductive labor
• ‘Mother(hood)’ in oral, indigenous and media narratives
• ‘Mother(hood),’ degendering and critical theory reconfigurations
• ‘Mother(hood),’ posthuman narratives and regendering care
• ‘Mother(hood),’ witches and Gothic narratives

While grounded in literary analysis, contributions may draw upon interdisciplinary/intersectional critical theories and methods, including but not limited to feminist theory, psychoanalysis, postcolonial and cultural studies. Essays focusing on lesser-known authors, regional texts, and comparative Anglophone traditions within Asia are strongly encouraged.

Submission Guidelines:

• Please submit an abstract of 200–300 words outlining your proposed essay to: aperveenwriter@gmail.com; moussa.pouryaAsl@gmail.com.

• Use the following subject line when you send your abstracts:
  Subject line: Edited Book CFP – Motherhood in Asia

• Include a short author bio (up to 150 words) with institutional affiliation.
• Abstracts and bios should be submitted in Word format.

Deadline for Abstracts: Dec 15, 2025
Notification of Acceptance: Dec 31, 2025
Full Paper Submission: April 1, 2026
Expected Length of Final Essays: 6,000–8,000 words (including references and notes)

Send abstracts and queries to: aperveenwriter@gmail.com

Editors:

Dr. Ayesha Perveen, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Virtual University of Pakistan

Dr. Moussa Pourya Asl, Department of English, Azarbaijan Shahid Madni University