postcolonial

Children’s accounts of violence occupy a paradoxical space in public discourse: they are framed as both essential, unquestionable evidence, and, sometimes at the same time, as unreliable and prone to outside influence. Both framings rely on cultural constructions of the child’s “innocence.” This panel invites papers examining narratives of violence told by children, with a particular interest in experiences of institutional or state violence. How do these narratives complicate familiar tropes of children as voiceless victims in need of saving, or of certain topics as exclusively “adult” or “childish”?  How do child narrators themselves exploit, resist, and play with or into these tropes?

Special note for the contributors:

1. Please focus on the text that represents migration from the Global South to the Global North.

2. The text under consideration should be published after 2000, though it can focus on migration that happened at any time in history.

3. Please take a minimum of one and a maximum of two migration/refugee narratives for analysis.

4. Please mention within the abstract the theoretical background clearly that one wants to apply.

5. The text under consideration should be either written in English or translated into  English.

This is a guaranteed panel for the MLA's Teaching of Literature Forum.  This roundtable discusses experiences and pedagogical approaches to teaching literature under authoritarianism and state violence widely conceived. Panelists discuss whitewashing and erasing literary histories, global efforts at repressing liberatory literacy, heightened classroom surveillance, teaching anti-fascist literature, and more.

Deadline for submissions: Friday, March 27, 2026

Please send 250-500-word abstracts and CVs to Danica Savonick (danicasavonick@gmail.com ) and Brandi Locke (blocke@udel.edu). 

Neo-Victorian Crime: A Companion – extended cfp

We are seeking 3 additional chapters for an edited collection, Neo-Victorian Crime: A Companion, which is currently under contract with Peter Lang publishers.

Hi all,

See the below CFP for a panel on Pacific early American literature for next year’s MLA. Please circulate to anyone you think might be interested!

If literature has long played a central role in defining what it means to be human, posthumanist thought urges us to reconsider that definition in the face of unprecedented technological, ecological, and cultural transformations. Rather than announcing the ‘end’ of the human, posthumanism interrogates the category itself, foregrounding humanity’s entanglements with other species, material environments, and technological systems. In doing so, it challenges human exceptionalism and exposes the historical contingency and political implications of the ‘human’ as a normative construct.

Theme: Intimate Empires

Call for Contributions - New Voices in Postcolonial Studies Magazine

One Hundred Years of Gabriel García Márquez

Proposed Dates: 1-2 May 2026

Proposed Venue: SRM University, Sikkim

Organized by: MELOW (The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the World)

Gabriel García Márquez, born in Columbia in the year 1927, is acknowledged as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. As we head towards his birth centenary, it is time to look back at this literary giant, reassess his contribution and its impact on literary history.

Title: Unsettled Englishes: Migration, Displacement, and the Anzaldúan Borderland

Sponsoring Entity: MLA LSL Global English Forum

Description: In alignment with the 2027 Presidential Theme, "Emancipatory Narratives," this session interrogates the linguistic borders that define the migrant experience. Grounded in Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of the "linguistic borderland," we explore the space where identity, displacement, and Global English collide.

Deadline for proposals: 30 April 2026
Conference date: 19 and 20 November 2026
Location: University of Cologne, Germany

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)