postcolonial

Stories from ancient Greek myths dot the literary landscape of the early 21st century. To some extent, this has been the result of deliberate planning, as when Canongate began publishing a series of mythological retellings by well-known authors in 2005. But alongside and independent of such coordinated efforts to keep old tales alive for contemporary audiences, offerings from both established authors (David Malouf, Barry Unsworth, Colm Toibin, Pat Barker) and successful newcomers (Madeline Miller, Daisy Johnson) have likewise retold and reimagined mythical narratives in recent years.

This panel addresses epistemic inequality in literary studies: the categories, theories and methods through which we read and conceptualize literature are still determined at the center of global academic production, while peripheral epistemologies often do not circulate beyond national borders and therefore do not take part in the shaping of the discipline.

What sorts of specters haunt the postcolonial realm? How can we conceive of hauntologies that enable us to effectively listen to postcolonial specters? Derrida defines hauntology as a way in which we can learn to acknowledge those things about us or around us that we have forgotten how to notice. He emphasizes that by acknowledging specters, hauntology performs a gesture of “positive conjuration” in which specters are raised to be listened to and not in order to be exorcised. Acting as a disruption to western notions of space and time, specters function as transformative mediums of postcolonial recovery by making space for the co-existence of the past within the present and acknowledging the existence of alternative histories.

ACLA 2021 Panel

Co-organizer: Francisco Lopez, francisco.lopez@emory.edu

From early in its inception, the Pentecostal religious movement has been an integral part of Latinx spirituality. In the Latin American/Caribbean experience, religion has played a vital role, beginning with its indigenous roots, the Spanish colonial legacy, African-based religions brought to the New World, the introduction of U.S. Protestantism in the nineteenth century, and the arrival of Pentecostalism. Historically, Latinx Pentecostalism developed as a global phenomenon. Despite its wide and enduring impact on religious life in the Americas and beyond, the literature on Pentecostalism still has significant research gaps especially in the following areas: ethnographic studies, comparative approaches, and methodological considerations.

The graphic novel’s openness to auto/biographical and historical content and its explicit demotic allegiances enable it to perform a range of political-affective stances including subversion, resistance, solidarity, memorialization, loss, complicity, capitulation, defiant interiority, and cautious hope. Graphic novels are therefore emerging as a powerful tool for mapping the uncertain and liminal spaces that complicate the neat divisions and borders that map out national/sexual/ethnic/religious/caste/personal identities in South Asia. This seminar seeks to address how graphic novels negotiate these borders and boundaries as they imagine the histories--both private and public, personal and collective--of South Asia.

In parliamentary as in presidential regimes, whether based on formal texts or on customs and traditions, the work of representatives takes place in a specific framework whose legitimacy is accepted by the majority of politicians and the population. Establishing guidelines has been a long-standing concern, as illustrated by A Treatise upon the Law, Privileges, Proceedings and Usage of Parliament of Eskine May for Great Britain in 1844 or the Manual of parliamentary practice for the use of the Senate of the United States of Thomas Jefferson of 1801.

This seminar invites papers that interrogate the terms under which contemporary interactions between the 'Self' and the 'Other' take place on digital platforms. It deconstructs the binary of the ‘home’ and the ‘world’ and the 'First World' and 'Third World' by analyzing new cultural mobilities and power structures of globalized, outsourced, and work-from-home economies. Can technology produce reciprocal tolerance between different nations and cultures without the need for physical travel? Can it create de-territorialized spaces of desire, friendship, and xenophilia within the very borders of the ‘home’? Does it merely afford an illusion of cohesion and digital cosmopolitanism?

**DEADLINE EXTENDED **

This panel seeks presentations on Gloria Anzaldúa’s legacy in contemporary theory and literature. It welcomes discussions of displacement, duality, limit and boundary transgression, border culture as well as Chicanx and Latinx identity and experience today. The goal of the panel is not just to discuss the now but also to keep constructing a bridge of border consciousness and mestizaje.

American Comparative Literature Association Annual Conference 8-11 April 2021

Rabindranath Tagore was the first Nobel Laureate of Asia. He was a multi-talented genius. He experimented in several fields of creativity namely, song, dance, poetry, dramas, short stories, novels, novellas, essays, education, painting and social reformation to name a few. Even after 150 years of his birth, how or why does humankind across the globe still find Tagore universally relevant? This panel aims to explore these diverse facets of Rabindranath Tagore as perceived from a contemporary perspective. The panel welcomes papers which examines Tagore’s works in comparison to other practitioners, either his contemporaries or in contemporary society.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Stories from the Margins: Indigenous Connections to the Land

University of Northumbria 29-30 June 2021

Confirmed Keynote Speakers

• Prof. Lill Tove Fredriksen (UiT The Arctic University of Norway)
• Conversation between Prof. David Stirrup (University of Kent, U.K.) and Anishinaabe, Métis and settler-Irish artist Elizabeth LaPensee

CALL FOR PAPERS

OUR 30TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE WILL BE HELD VIRTUALLY, FROM FEBRUARY 15, 2021 to FEBRUARY 19, 2021.

The British Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies Conference, inaugurated in 1992 — the oldest and longest-running annual meeting of its kind in the United States — will hold its first virtual conference, and calls for presentations situated in colonial and postcolonial histories, literatures, creative and performing arts, politics, economics, and all other aspects of the countries formerly colonized by Britain and other European powers.

Recently we all must have noticed that there had been numerous memes doing rounds on social media platforms acknowledging, albeit in sarcastic ways, the role of the Covid-19 virus in teaching mankind some of the most-neglected values of life heretofore.  Such cultural texts with their nuanced sub-texts have been rapidly gaining access to our lives and activities as the subsidiary effects of this present pandemic situation. However, the pandemic is not something new to human civilization. There are references galore in various literary and non-literary texts of its sweeping destructive force before. But this present threat from Covid-19 seems to be a kind of a shock to the anthropocentric worldview.

Francophone Texts of the North and South: Geographical Imaginaries

Call for Papers - NeMLA 2021 - Online - March 11 - 14, 2021
Due October 11th