postcolonial

1 July 2017 marked the 20th anniversary of Hong Kong's handover to China. This year also happens to be the tenth anniversary of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. And so while we are immensely proud of the work from and about Asia we normally publish, we felt that to commemorate these two events it was time to take a closer look at the city we call home and love: Hong Kong.

Shyam Benegal is widely perceived as one of the most influential filmmakers from India. Yet his four-decade long career remains relatively under-studied in contemporary film scholarship. Thus far, only two authoritative book-length studies of him – namely Sangeeta Dutta’s Shyam Benegal (BFI, 2002) and Anuradha Dingwaney Needham’s New Indian Cinema in Post-Independence India: The Cultural Work of Shyam Benegal’s Films (Routledge, 2013) – have appeared. To help fill this critical lacuna, our edited volume aims to undertake a close look at the prolific oeuvre of Benegal, a trailblazing auteur who has successfully redefined the contours of non-commercial Hindi-language cinema.

Update: I am seeking one article and one book review to complete a forthcoming special issue of Papers on Language and Literature. 

The emphasis for the issue will be on examining self-reflexive (even self-theorizing) texts which may be considered "world literature", as described below:

James Joyce: The Joys of Exile

The X James Joyce Italian Foundation Conference in Rome

Conference Date: February 1-2-3, 2018
DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS: November 26, 2017

The James Joyce Italian Foundation invites proposals for the Eleventh Annual Conference in Rome. It will be hosted by the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the Università Roma Tre, to celebrate Joyce’s 136th birthday.

The convergence of queer studies with postcolonial theory aims, at its core, to interrogate discourses that created hegemonic and binary categories that in turn became eventual grounds for the historical racialization of sexuality and the sexualization of race. By seeking to destabilize conventions of normalcy, tradition, and power, postcolonial queer studies puts forward non-normative and non-Western conceptions of race, sexuality, and gender that negotiate the spectrum where universalizing neoliberal, White, and predominantly gay love exists on one end; and where the exoticizing, orientalist homogenization of the “Other” exists on the other.