postcolonial

Call for Papers: Democracy and the Nature of Familial and Unaccompanied Mobilities in the 21st Century

Location: University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA)
Dates: April 24–26, 2026
Submission Deadline: March 5, 2026 (accepted on rolling basis too after deadline)
Format: In-person (travel support available; honoraria provided)
Keynote: Dr. Lauren Heidbrink, author of Migranthood: Youth in a New Era of Deportation (Stanford University Press, 2020) and Migrant Youth, Transnational Families, and the State: Care and Contested Interests (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014)

Overview

In the last fifteen years, a new generation of African female and nonbinary authors have made major interventions in the field of African Literatures, from Akwaeke Emezi to NoViolet Bulawayo, Djaïli Amadou Amal to Kopano Matlwa. In parallel, women writers from earlier generations, such as Tsitsi Dangarembga (winner of a Windham-Campbell Literature Prize in 2021), Paulina Chiziane or Ana Paula Tavares (who were both awarded with the Camões Prize in 2021 and 2025 respectively) have received major literary distinctions, celebrating their contributions to African postcolonial literatures in particular, and literature in general.

CALL FOR BOOK CHAPTERS
Criminologies, Borders, and Humanities in North Africa
An Edited Volume for the Emerald Borders, Criminalisation and Society Series
Editor: Dr. Rachid Benharrousse*

*Tilburg Law School, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands

Email: rachid.benharrousse@proton.me

About the Series

This volume is proposed for the Emerald Borders, Criminalisation and Society Series: an interdisciplinary and inclusive space that examines how laws, policies, and practices shape, regulate, and contest borders and the people affected by them. 

Special Session Title: Anglophone Ottoman/Turkish Writers from the Ottoman Empire to Contemporary Turkey (Online Session)

Scholarly discussions on environmental concerns have long been Euro-American-centric. In his 2005 essay, Rob Nixon critiques literary representations of environmentalism as an “offshoot of American Studies,” which has excluded non-American and non-Western perspectives on environmental degradation from critical inquiry. Nixon highlights Nigeria’s Abacha regime’s execution of Saro-Wiwa, a writer, activist and poet, who died fighting for his Ogoni people’s farmlands and the encroachment of their fishing waters by American and European conglomerates, supported by the local despotic regime. Nixon observes that Saro-Wiwa’s writings have received little attention from ecocriticism scholars (2005).

Narratives of Resistance and African Literature: Articulating Dissent, Disobedience and Pluriversal Futures

Special issue of English Academy Review (Taylor and Francis)

Link: https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issues/narratives-of-resistan...

Special Issue Editor(s)

Goutam Karmakar, University of Hyderabad, India
goutamkarmakar@uohyd.ac.in

War leaves lasting marks not only on people and communities, but also on the natural world that witnesses, and endures, its violence. Long after the fighting has stopped, landscapes shaped by destruction remain living archives, bearing the aftereffects of conflict: damaged forests, polluted rivers and seas, and disrupted ecosystems that continue to hold its traces. These ‘trauma ecologies’ pass on the legacy of war from one generation to the next, forming what we call ‘environmental postmemory.’

We invite papers on the literature of the Arctic. Especially welcome are proposals on texts and authors that connect the Arctic to contemporary issues of extractivism, securitization, and imperialism. Please send a 250-word abstract and short bio.

Global Music History and Northern Europe in the 18th and 19th Centuries

University of Copenhagen, 15–16 May 2026

Deadline for proposals: 15 Feb. 2026

We invite proposals for papers exploring global music histories connected to Northern Europe in the long 18th and 19thcenturies.

Venues:

INHA – Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art
Académie du Climat
Université Paris 8 | Vincennes – Saint-Denis

Proposals should be sent to: extractivisms2@gmail.com before 30/03/2026

Organising Committee: LAE Network (Literatures, Arts, Extractivisms):

Christian Alonso, University of Lleida
David Castañer, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Fortunata Calabro, University of Barcelona
Christian Galdón, École Polytechnique, Paris 8
Alessia Gervasone, University of Barcelona
Benoît Turquety, Université Paris 8

We invite papers on automobility and/or transportation infrastructure in any aspect of literary and cultural studies. We are particularly interested in exploring how representations of vehicles address questions of social and environmental justice.

This is a proposed special session for the 2027 MLA convention in Los Angeles, 7-10 January. We plan to hold the session in person.

Please email abstract (250 words) and author bio (100 words) by March 3 to both organizers:

Govind Narayan Ponnuchamy, Northwestern University (gnarayan@u.northwestern.edu )Ben Jamieson Stanley, University of Delaware (bstanley@udel.edu )

We are looking for contributions to a working group at the 2027 MLA Annual Convention in Los Angeles. The panel will discuss the evolution of magical realism in the 21st century, formally, medially, and geographically. Besides the fundamental elements of magical realism scholarship covering literature and film in South-American and European contexts, the scope of the presentations will extend to geocultural locations such as Africa, the Middle East, East- and South-East Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, and to theoretical approaches including literary trauma theory, postcolonial studies, ecocriticism, and virtual reality theory.

Postcolonial Interventions invites scholarly articles for an OPEN ISSUE to be published in June 2026. As the journal enters its eleventh year, we are hoping to continue critical exploration of emerging voices and recent literary creations while remaining mindful of the various threats associated with older imperial aggressions, re-appearing across the globe, fissures within nation states, multiple forms of exclusionary violence and widening inequality and precarity. The next issue of Postcolonial Interventions seeks to explore such issues and more based on postcolonial experiences across the world.

Submission Guidelines:

The Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies publishes interdisciplinary and cross-cultural articles and interviews on literature, history, politics, and art whose focus, settings, or subjects involve colonialism and its aftermath, with an emphasis on the former British Empire.