postcolonial

Poverty and precarity are among the most pressing social issues of our day. The last fifteen years have seen not only an ever widening gap between rich and poor across the globe as well as an exponential growth in the number of border subjects – refugees, asylum seekers and illegal migrants –, but also a steady growth of fictional and non-fictional representations of disenfranchised groups and individuals. This correlates with an intensification of research into the visual and narrative forms of these representations. For its 2017 conference, GAPS invites panels and individual papers addressing conceptualisations of poverty and precarity and investigating the ethics and aesthetics of representing poverty and precarity across the postcolonial world.

 ‘Walvis Baai, Luderitz, Lobito, Luanda, Douala, Port Limbe, Bonny, Port Harcourt, Onne, Lagos, Cotonou, Lome, Tema...’ This list comes from the newly established website 'Ports and Ships: Shipping and Harbour News out of Africa' which provides a useful reference point for thinking about port cities in Africa and the spider web of connections shipping routes establish with ports in the global south and beyond. Port cities manage the relation between sea and land and facilitate the movement of people, animals, commodities and ideas across continents, among countries, and between hemispheres.

CFP for panel at 2017 ASECS National Conference, March 30-April 2, Minneapolis

Issue 30: December 2016: Bollywood Nationalism [Last date for submission: 30 October, 2016; Date of publication: 1 December, 2016]

Guest-Editor: Roshni Sengupta. She is currently Lecturer, South Asian Studies at Leiden Institute for Area Studies, Leiden University, The Netherlands.

Africa and the World: Literature, Politics, and Global Geographies

The theme chosen for the 2017 conference at Yale seeks to engage with and interrogate recent shifts in critical and theoretical frameworks from regional, national, and “postcolonial” models towards “world literature” as a framework for understanding the literatures of the Global South. How useful is the category of world literature in our ongoing contestation of Eurocentrism in the interpretation of African literatures and cultures? What possibilities are offered by African literatures and cultures for (re)imagining the world, including the “world” posited by recent theorizations?