cfp.english.upenn.edu

The organisers of the 2013 Postcolonial Studies Association would like to invite proposals for papers on this year’s theme: ‘History, Postcolonialism and Tradition’. The theme is designed to facilitate the opportunity for interdisciplinary dialogue, particularly (but not exclusively) between the spheres of literature, cultural studies, anthropology, the visual arts, the performative arts, folklore, history, politics, and the social sciences.

Issues of history and tradition remain sites of significant contestation for postcolonial studies. Whilst postcolonial studies focuses increasingly on ‘future-thinking’ this is in tension with, and reliant upon, a continued need to negotiate the postcolonial cultures’ relationship to often violent histories and the marginalisation of indigenous traditions. Equally, global and diasporic cultures are the sites of complex interplays of productively competing traditions and forms of remembrance. Issues include but are not limited to:

- The difference between history and memory in postcolonial cultures
- Theoretical approaches to postcolonial history (new historicism, cultural materialism)
- Gendered histories and traditions
- Myth, folklore and oral tradition
- Postcolonial historiographies
- Negotiations of history and tradition in literature, creative writing and the visual arts
- History and/or tradition as source of/barrier to political and social change
- Transformations of history and tradition in the context of global and diasporic identities

Confirmed keynote speakers include Robert Irwin (author of The Arabian Nights: A Companion and For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies) and Sadhana Naithani (author of In Quest of Indian Tradition and The Story-Time of the British Empire: Colonial and Postcolonial Folkloristics).

The conference will be held at Kingston University (London) from 12-13 September 2013. Short abstracts (approx. 300 words) should be sent to the organisers, Sara Upstone and Andrew Teverson, at the following address: fass-conferences@kingston.ac.uk. The deadline for proposals is 15 April 2013.