postcolonial

(CFP: NAMLA 2026) (Un)Belonging and Becoming: (Re)generating Identity and Cultural Reinvention

updated: 
Monday, September 8, 2025 - 1:42pm
Wenyuan Wang / Northeast Modern Language Association
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 30, 2025

This panel explores how immigrant and multiethnic writers in the U.S. (re)generate identity and cultural belonging through literature, language, and storytelling, focusing on experiences of (un)belonging, displacement, and fractured selfhood.

Decolonial Ecologies

updated: 
Monday, September 8, 2025 - 12:00pm
Northeast Modern Language Association
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 30, 2025

“For a colonized people, the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land,” writes Frantz Fanon in 1961. Postcolonial land inscripts imperial violence, anticolonial movements, and new extractivist regimes as it enmeshes human and nonhuman systems. Land, forests, oceans, rivers, and bush enter decolonial discourse as lush metaphors as their material counterparts shift and change in response to new economic and political realities. 19th-century imperial infrastructures regress to ruins as environments regenerate. Bush reclaims plantation, colonial bungalows shelter wildlife, decay and overgrowth mark the limits of empire.

Transimperial Encounters: Networks of Cultural and Literary Exchange Between India and Europe, 1870-1947

updated: 
Monday, September 8, 2025 - 11:59am
LEA-Journal
deadline for submissions: 
Monday, June 8, 2026

Call for Papers
Transimperial Encounters: Networks of Cultural and Literary Exchange Between India and Europe, 1870-1947

LEA special issue - https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/bsfm-lea/about

Edited by Prof. Ujjwal Jana (University of Delhi, India) and Dr. Greta Perletti (University of Trento, Italy)

ACLA2026: W[h]ither Identity?: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Unselving

updated: 
Friday, September 5, 2025 - 9:21am
Suchismito Khatua (Stanford University) & Jenny Andrine Madsen Evang (Utrecht University)
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, October 2, 2025

In Poetics of Dislocation, Meena Alexander recalls her childhood migration as an experience of “unselving.” The ocean that makes her an immigrant also dissolves inherited identities. Yet this loss, for Alexander, is generative: a crucible of poetic vision, where the self, fluid as tidewater, reshapes itself from poem to poem, contouring itself to each new shore that it meets. 

DEADLINE EXTENDED- SAMLA 2025 (Atlanta, GA; Nov 6-Nov 8): "Reimagining Realities, Reclaiming Knowledge in Francophone Literature and Art."

updated: 
Thursday, September 4, 2025 - 5:53pm
South Atlantic Modern Language Association
deadline for submissions: 
Monday, September 8, 2025

This panel invites submissions that explore how Francophone African and Caribbean writers, filmmakers, and artists use their creative works, personal experiences, spiritual beliefs, and the power of imagination to offer new or alternative ways of seeing/saying, knowing, and experiencing the world. In what way(s) do their works seek to disrupt, challenge, or reimagine old power structures and commonly accepted Eurocentric knowledge systems within a postcolonial framework? Whether in terms of identity, culture, or history, how do these writers, filmmakers, and artists provoke us to rethink our individual or collective existence? What alternative realities or new ways of being-in-the-world do they envision as Africans or Caribbeans?

Blue, Green, and In-between: Critical Ecologies in South Asia

updated: 
Thursday, September 4, 2025 - 9:56am
Nisarga Bhattacharjee
deadline for submissions: 
Wednesday, September 10, 2025

Concept Note

The rapidly escalating planetary crisis has precipitated a profound epistemic rupture, compelling the humanities to reconfigure their disciplinary coordinates in dialogue with the ecological. The evolving domain of ecological humanities has taken on the task of interrogating not only the material devastation wrought by extractive capitalism, militarised modernities, and petrochemical globalisation, but also the conceptual frameworks—ontological, epistemological, and ethical—that have historically sustained such devastation.

The Global Political Novel - ACLA 2026 Montreal

updated: 
Wednesday, September 3, 2025 - 2:43pm
Aleksandar Stevic
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, October 2, 2025

Back in the mid-twentieth century, the political novel used to be a respectable field of study, commanding the attention of influential critics like Irwing Howe. These days, not so much. In fact, most scholarly books with the phrase ‘political novel’ in the title published over the past three decades or so were not written by professional critics, but rather by historians and political scientists (including Christopher Harvie, John Uhr, and Stuart A. Scheingold).

SAMLA 97: Adventures in Ecocriticism

updated: 
Wednesday, September 3, 2025 - 1:03pm
SAMLA 97 - South Atlantic Modern Language Association
deadline for submissions: 
Monday, September 8, 2025

 

Note on Publishing Opportunity:

We have been encouraged by the general editor of the Bloomsbury Ecocritical Theory and Practice series, Douglas Vakoch, to submit a proposal for an edited collection based upon this CFP. If you're interested in submitting your conference presentation as a proposed book chapter, please let us know in your submission. Bloomsbury requests chapters of at least 6000 words with at least one author with a PhD. More information on the series may be found here: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/series/ecocritical-theory-and-practice/ 

Panel CFP

Death, Dying, and Decolonisation: Legacies and Politics of Commemoration (ACLA 2026)

updated: 
Wednesday, September 3, 2025 - 3:35am
Dr Devaleena Kundu, UPES, Dehradun
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, October 2, 2025

See ACLA (American Comparative Literature Association) listing for submission portal: https://www.acla.org/seminar/10bd9b61-e065-472a-8698-c8949a85f069 


Paper proposals cannot be accepted via email.


Death Studies is a field of study that not only draws from a host of disciplines like anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and psychology but also cuts across fields such as bereavement studies, trauma studies, and health humanities. 

"Thinking Dickens" (2026 Dickens Society Symposium)

updated: 
Tuesday, September 2, 2025 - 10:14pm
The Dickens Society
deadline for submissions: 
Sunday, January 4, 2026

We invite papers on the cerebral Dickens, but also on “the mind of the heart” (David Copperfield): on how Charles Dickens thought, but also how and what we think about him. Suitable topics might include:

  • Dickens and philosophy, psychology, statistics, or the natural sciences

  • Dickens and his intellectual friends and contemporaries, such as Thomas Carlyle and George Eliot

  • How Dickens and his readers develop ideas through and by means of language

  • Plotting, planning, and making connections

Call for Chapters: Religion, Conversion and Cultural Memory in Indian Diasporic Women’s Writing

updated: 
Tuesday, September 2, 2025 - 10:14pm
University of Delhi
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 30, 2025

We invite chapter proposals for an edited scholarly collection that critically examines the religious dimensions of Indian diasporic women’s literature, with a specific focus on conversion, resistance, and cultural memory. This volume will explore how women writers from the Caribbean, South Africa, Fiji, Mauritius, and other sites of indenture engage with Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam, addressing the gendered and ideological tensions of community rupture, religious fidelity, and transgenerational transmission in diasporic settings.

Mapping the Black Digital and Public Humanities - Call for Projects

updated: 
Tuesday, September 2, 2025 - 10:14pm
Mapping the Black Digital and Public Humanities
deadline for submissions: 
Friday, May 1, 2026

Mapping the Black Digital and Public Humanities formally invites Black Digital/Public Humanities project directors to submit their projects to our interactive map and searchable database of 650+ international Black Digital/Public Humanities projects.

Mapping BDPH is an interactive and searchable map of digital and public humanities projects related to Black history & culture. The goals of this project are threefold: 

  • to help people find digital and public projects about Black history and culture by topic, type, location, contributors, and more.

Queer Phenomenology at 20 (ACLA 2026)

updated: 
Tuesday, September 2, 2025 - 10:13pm
Tia Glista
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, October 2, 2025

In her 2006 book Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others, Sara Ahmed asks how we are oriented and how we come to find our way. Ahmed thus thinks across queer feminist theories of sexuality and traditional phenomenology, evaluating the latter’s efforts to bring what is commonplace or taken-for-granted into focus, and doing so through matrices of gender, race, and sexuality.

The World of World Literatures: Practices, Pedagogies, and Possibilities (ACLA 2026)

updated: 
Tuesday, September 2, 2025 - 2:58am
American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Annual Convention 2026
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, October 2, 2025


Seminar title: The World of World Literatures: Practices, Pedagogies, and Possibilities

Organizers: Dr. Mir Islam, Nalanda University, India. Arunav Das, University of South Carolina, USA

American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Annual Convention 2026, Montreal, Canada


Abstract Submission Deadline: October 2, 2025. Must be submitted through the ACLA portal. 

ACLA annual convention: February 26 - March 1, 2026. Montreal, Canada (In-person) 

More info: https://www.acla.org/annual-meeting 

Gendered Modalities of Remembering in South Asian Literatures

updated: 
Tuesday, September 2, 2025 - 2:21am
Department of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology Bhilai
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 30, 2025

Department of Liberal Arts
Indian Institute of Technology Bhilai

presents

Gendered Modalities of Remembering in South Asian literatures

A National Conference
15–16 January 2026

Call for Papers

Concept Note:

On A (Not-So) Global Scale: Dissecting the Spatio-Temporal Complexities of Slow Violence

updated: 
Monday, September 1, 2025 - 3:10pm
American Comparative Literature Association
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, October 2, 2025

Rob Nixon describes, ‘slow violence’, as “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space”, one “that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales” (2). This seminal work raised the critical question of the strategic difficulties of representing the impact of such violence, especially as it crossed national, ethnic, cultural, linguistic and even gendered borders.  

Edited Volume: Tastes of Text: Food and Indian Literature

updated: 
Monday, September 1, 2025 - 3:07pm
Editors: Auritra Munshi & Surabhi Jha
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 30, 2025

Call for Abstracts for an Edited Volume

 

                                       Tastes of Text: Food and Indian Literature

                                                                  Editors

                         Dr.Auritra Munshi, Assistant Professor, Raiganj University

                   Dr. Surabhi Jha, ICSSR Postdoctoral Researcher, Aliah University

 

 

Concept Note

LASA 2026 (Paris) - Extreme Geographies in Latin American Cultural Imaginaries

updated: 
Thursday, August 28, 2025 - 4:45pm
Lu Han/Cornell University; Salvador Alanis/University of Toronto
deadline for submissions: 
Wednesday, September 3, 2025

This panel invites presentations that explore “extreme geographies”—sites at the limits of habitability and at the horizon of speculation—in literary, visual, and cinematic archives of Latin America. Drawing from David J. Nemeth’s working definition (entry in Encyclopedia of Geography, 2010), we consider both material environments beyond human thresholds, such as polar zones, tropical belts, deserts, volcanic craters, deep-sea trenches, and outer space, and imagined loci including utopias/dystopias, lost islands, fantastic and counterfactual frontiers.

Making Space: Locating (Re)Generation in Asian American Literature, Film, and Television

updated: 
Thursday, August 28, 2025 - 8:04am
Northeast Modern Language Association
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 30, 2025

This panel explores how Asian American literature, film, and television depict the diasporic struggle to assimilate, resist, and reconstruct identity within spaces and places in the United States. Spaces and places here refer to the urban/suburban/rural, the home, institutions, transitory spaces like highways, but also the lack of space, moments of displacement, and the absence of place. Where do we as readers and audiences find the Asian American physically? What are the affordances of such spaces and places in their construction of the Asian American individual? We welcome submissions that consider when and where Asian Americans can or cannot exist within the diasporic canon.

TWO-DAY NATIONAL CONFERENCE on Precarity and Resistance: Bengali Muslim Experience and Contemporary India on 15-16 November 2025

updated: 
Thursday, August 28, 2025 - 8:00am
Organised by Bengali Academia for Social Empowerment (BASE), Kolkata, West Bengal in collaboration with Department of English, Nagar College, Nagar, Murshidabad, West Bengal & Department of English, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar College, Betai, Nadia, West Bengal
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 30, 2025

TWO-DAY NATIONAL CONFERENCE

 on

Precarity and Resistance:  Bengali Muslim Experience and Contemporary India

on

15-16 November 2025

(Tentative Dates)

 

Organised by

Bengali Academia for Social Empowerment (BASE), Kolkata, West Bengal

in collaboration with

Department of English, Nagar College, Nagar, Murshidabad, West Bengal &

Heteronormativity, Resistance and Censorship: Queer Gothic Narratives in South Asian Drama (ACLA 2026)

updated: 
Thursday, August 28, 2025 - 7:54am
Dr Muhammad Numan (UMT Lahore)
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, October 2, 2025

Call for Papers – ACLA 2026 SeminarSeminar Title: Heteronormativity, Resistance and Censorship: Queer Gothic Narratives in South Asian DramaConference: American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) Annual Meeting 2026Dates: February 26 – March 1, 2026Venue: Montréal, Canada (in person)

Organizers: Muhammad Numan, Faham Zeeshan (UMT Lahore)

16th Annual AAAD Studies Conference: "Sanctuary: Sites of Survival and Spontaneity"

updated: 
Thursday, August 28, 2025 - 7:54am
African, African American, and Diaspora Studies (AAAD) Center, James Madison University
deadline for submissions: 
Wednesday, October 15, 2025

CFP: 16th Annual African, African American, and Diaspora Studies (AAAD) Interdisciplinary Conference
A conference hosted by James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA

Conference Theme: Sanctuary: Sites of Survival and Spontaneity 

February 11-13, 2026
Deadline: October 15, 2025

Chapters for Edited Collection on Resistance Narratives: Voices of Defiance and Survival

updated: 
Sunday, August 24, 2025 - 6:58am
Dr. Ferma Lekesizalın, Istanbul Topkapi University
deadline for submissions: 
Friday, September 26, 2025

  

            As a vital medium of resistance, literature has long served as a cultural expression of oppression, displacement, censorship, and violence, offering both testimony and critique. Resistance narratives respond to the structures of domination that are colonial, patriarchal, racial, economic, and ecological. These texts often articulate alternative modes of existence, agency, and solidarity. While resistance may take multiple forms, it remains grounded in a shared ethical impulse: to challenge authority, expose injustice, and envision transformation.

Fear as a Political Emotion: The Rise of New Violent Orders

updated: 
Saturday, August 23, 2025 - 8:09am
Maximiliano E Korstanje / University of Palermo, Argentina
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, October 30, 2025

CALL FOR CHAPTERS:  Fear as a Political Emotion: The Rise of New Violent Orders (Nova Science Publishers).

 

Maximiliano E Korstanje, University of Palermo, Argentina

Adrian Scribano, CONICET, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina

 

Borders, Bridges and Belonging: Neighborhoods in Global Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Culture

updated: 
Saturday, August 23, 2025 - 7:58am
Global Committee, Children's Literature Association (ChLA)
deadline for submissions: 
Tuesday, September 30, 2025

Call for Papers:

Global Committee Panel on

"Borders, Bridges and Belonging:

Neighborhoods in Global Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Culture"

Deadline: September 30, 2025

11:59 p.m. (Eastern US Standard Time)

Children's Literature Association Conference

May 28-30, 2026

Omni William Penn Hotel

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

 

India, Poverty, and Western Eyes

updated: 
Wednesday, August 20, 2025 - 12:36pm
American Comparative Literature Association
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, October 2, 2025

While ancient Europe regarded India as a land of material wealth and proverbial wisdom, it also saw it as a land of man-like monkeys, banyan trees, and enormous elephants. Ancient Europeans perceived Indians as wearing bright colors, eating rice and meat, and lacking wine-drinking finesse. Today, portrayals of India in prose fiction, cinema, social media, and historiography have shifted from polarized images of Europe and India to narratives depicting a “Dark” and a “Shining” India. Characters in these texts strive to be part of an economically thriving “shining” India, even as they face social, cultural, and political challenges daily.

Feminism and Literary Studies

updated: 
Wednesday, August 20, 2025 - 10:37am
Marmara University in coop with Maurer Press in Frankfurt am Main, Germany
deadline for submissions: 
Monday, September 15, 2025

Book Series Title: Contemporary Literary Studies on Language and Literature
Publisher: HJ Verlag Maurer – Maurer Press, Frankfurt, Germany
Website: www.maurer.press

We invite contributions for the next volume of our series, Contemporary Literary Studies on Language and Literature. This volume is dedicated to exploring feminist perspectives in literature and culture, providing a platform for work that highlights the diverse ways feminism continues to shape literary scholarship.

Ecocriticism

updated: 
Wednesday, August 20, 2025 - 10:36am
Marmara University in coop with Maurer Press in Frankfurt am Main, Germany
deadline for submissions: 
Monday, September 15, 2025

Book Series Title: Contemporary Literary Studies on Language and Literature
Publisher: HJ Verlag Maurer – Maurer Press, Frankfurt, Germany
Website: www.maurer.press

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