Seminar at the Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA)
University of Houston, Houston, Texas
20–23 May 2027 — in person

Marginalised women in South Asia are read for what was done to them, far less often for what they made. This seminar asks what comparative literature can do about that.

Intersectionality has become the default grammar for writing about marginalised women in the region. It arrived from a particular genealogy — Black feminist jurisprudence in the United States — into a region that had theorised compounded subordination for a century under other names: Phule on caste and women's education; Ambedkar on endogamy as the mechanism reproducing caste through control of women; Pandita Ramabai; Uma Chakravarti's Brahmanical patriarchy; Gopal Guru's claim that Dalit women talk differently; Sharmila Rege's Dalit feminist standpoint. Whether the import clarifies or flattens that inheritance is contested. Nivedita Menon argues that intersectionality serves states and donor agencies better than feminist politics; Sunaina Arya and Anandita Pan reply that the fault is citational, not conceptual. That argument has run almost entirely in social science.

Our premise is that intersectionality is a diagram — a crossroads, a grid, a set of axes. Literary forms do not behave like diagrams. They work through voice, genre, meter, silence, obscenity, laughter, ritual and untranslatability. What does intersectionality look like as a reading practice rather than a taxonomy of identities? Where does form outrun the grid, and what should replace it — standpoint, assemblage, repertoire, abundance?

Three provocations frame the seminar.

First, the arithmetic of injury: criticism here tends to produce a tally of wounds, in which the Dalit, Adivasi, Muslim, trans, disabled or displaced woman is legible chiefly through what was done to her. Charu Gupta shows this figure has a history: in colonial Hindi reformist print the polluting "vamp" gave way to the deferential sufferer, Surpanakha displaced by Shabari, while the Dalit virangana of 1857 offered a rival image that never took. Following Gupta, Anjali Arondekar on archival abundance over loss, and Shailaja Paik on Tamasha performers who turn vulgarity into leverage, we welcome papers that read craft, expertise, pleasure and the ordinary.

Second, marginality is not virtue. Tanika Sarkar's work on the Hindu wife as ground of cultural nationalism, and on women's agency inside right-wing movements, refuses to assume that subordination guarantees a critical position. We want dominant-caste women's self-writing — Rashsundari Debi's Amar Jiban — read alongside rather than apart from Dalit testimonio, and the complicities an axis model hides.

Third, translation. Most of these texts do not exist in English. Bama's Karukku and Challapalli Swaroopa Rani's Telugu poems reach the Anglophone academy through an apparatus — glossary, preface, caste footnote, anthology — that turns literature into evidence. Swaroopa Rani's "Water" registers not only the village/wada line but the gradations within it, leather-worker and weaver. The grid has grids inside it, and translation is where they flatten.

Topics might include, but are in no way limited to: the genre problem in Dalit women's testimonio; Dalit feminist poetry read as theory; the manufacture of the suffering woman in colonial print and the counter-archives that failed; nineteenth-century women's self-writing and its caste unconscious; women as agents of majoritarian politics; sung and seasonal repertoires as authorial economies rather than folklore; Adivasi women's poetry and the politics of script; landays and Afghan women's oral forms; testimonial method in Kashmir; plantation labour and memory in Sri Lanka; Muslim women and the meme as a genre of gendered communal violence; trans and hijra life-writing at the caste intersection; devadasi, Tamasha and courtesan archives read for abundance; caste in North America and Gulf labour circuits; translation as method.

We invite papers on any South Asian language, region, period or diaspora. Researchers and Faculty Members at every career stage are welcome, including independent researchers and those working outside the Anglophone academy, and papers that argue against the seminar's premises are equally welcome.

To submit: proposals go through the ACLA portal, not to the organisers directly. Visit https://www.acla.org/seminar/6b731612-c856-4a5e-91e9-5dbdd113434e and use the "Propose a Paper" button. Current ACLA membership is required. Deadline 22 September 2026. Mention your preference - In Person or Virtual at the end of your abstract.

Enquiries: tamanna0602@gmail.com, nandinigayen006@gmail.com