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

This seminar seeks to underscore periodicals and their engagement of world literature as foundationally constitutive in shaping the public sphere of colonial South Asia. We are interested in articulating the grounds in which periodicals—in nineteenth and twentieth centuries—functioned both as an intervening instrument of colonial modernity leading to the institution of the category of world literature and also as an agential medium allowing for self-articulations and newer literary imaginations of identity related to class, caste, religion, gender. The papers will attempt to focus on the epistemic repurposing in understanding of the notion of literature but which now spoke from within a bordered national space and with a historical consciousness. Our focus, therefore, will be, for example, on questioning how European literary texts were translated, published and propagated in a colonised context such as that of the Indian subcontinent? In a world of global print, what forms of modernisms were encouraged, what survived and what not? How were the ideas of solidarity, belonging and coalition being forged within the nation and on what lines were they based on? In what ways did the imagination of national spaces in these periodicals correspond to or diverged from the multiplicity of the past, of languages, of traditions and of people? How were the secular notions of science and religion being approached, interpreted, twisted and critiqued as they were translated and disseminated via periodicals? As our tying question, we will problematise the position of the periodical as it inflected with coloniality and the infinite imaginations of the world it shaped.

Panel Organiser: Shaiq Ali, PhD Student, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Minnesota Deadline: April 4th, 2026