postcolonial

Buddhadev Bose, the Bengali poet, critic, and academic, set out to write his ideas behind introducing comparative literature in India. He posits comparative literature as a discipline of non-specialization, “an eclectic study.” It is a “corrective to the excess of esoterism which now prevails in academic circles.” Although Comparative Literature “needs the knowledge of languages,” it is “not a language school.” Bose’s idea of comparatism as a method was centred on translation. Although the initial impulse was to study Indian classical and native languages alongside other literatures, one of the most important outcomes of the comparative method was the conceptualization of the idea of Indian literature.

This seminar examines performance as a multilayered concept that is continually reshaped through travel and other mobilities. Performance, in this context, can be understood in its broadest sense as a dynamic practice through which identities, relationships, meanings, and experiences are negotiated and transformed. By bringing performance and mobilities into conversation as mutually illuminating frameworks, the seminar seeks to explore how their intersection creates new critical possibilities. 

This session explores how women's bodies function as contested archives of trauma, sites of testimony that dominant social, legal and political structures have often silenced or delegitimised. Drawing on feminist trauma theory, postcolonial critique and affect studies, it examines bodily memory as a form of somatic knowledge that exceeds conventional language and probes the tension between trauma's structural unspeakability and the ethical urgency of testimony and witnessing.

The special issue of our open access, Q2 journal explores how contemporary literary, artistic and cultural practices engage with, interrogate, and imagine decolonial ecologies. While decolonial ecology is best understood as a constellation of different ideas, schools, and disciplines, Malcom Ferdinand’s insistence on the politicization of ecology offers a useful point of departure. In his book, Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (2019; English trans. 2022), Ferdinand identifies a “double fracture” in modernity:the colonial fracture, which produces hierarchies among people, and the environmental fracture, which separates humans from nature, treating the latter as an object of exploitation.

CR: The New Centennial Review Special Issue CFP 

“Spirituality, Technology, and Artificial Intelligence”

This special issue explores how contemporary literary, artistic and cultural practices engage with, interrogate, and imagine decolonial ecologies. While decolonial ecology is best understood as a constellation of different ideas, schools, and disciplines, Malcom Ferdinand’s insistence on the politicization of ecology offers a useful point of departure. In his book, Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (2019; English trans. 2022), Ferdinand identifies a “double fracture” in modernity:the colonial fracture, which produces hierarchies among people, and the environmental fracture, which separates humans from nature, treating the latter as an object of exploitation.

Call for Chapters

Kenneth Cook’s Australia: Masculinity, Violence, Politics and the Outback on Page and Screen

Before Australian cinema made the outback terrifying, Kenneth Cook was already writing it that way.

36th ANNUAL BRITISH COMMONWEALTH AND

POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES CONFERENCE

MARCH 5–6, 2027

GEORGIA SOUTHERN UNIVERSITY, ARMSTRONG CAMPUS, SAVANNAH GA

CALL FOR PAPERS

The BCPS Conference, inaugurated in 1992, is the oldest and longest-running annual meetings of its kind in the U.S. We call 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.

In her resolute commitment to telling stories about Black life without the white gaze, Toni Morrison articulated a model of community empowerment grounded in local knowledge, intra-communal collaboration, and the self-reflexive narration of Black worlds. While Morrison remains one of the most visible public advocates of this aesthetic and ethical orientation, practices of Black worldmaking across African and diasporic literatures have long exceeded mere response to anti-Blackness. Even under conditions structured by racial violence, coloniality, displacement, and social rupture, Black communities have continually generated modes of life, relation, memory, and imagination that assert the possibility of worlds otherwise.

In his seminal and final film Black Is…Black Ain’t, the documentarian Marlon Riggs utilizes a pot of gumbo to articulate his thesis that Blackness necessitates an identity built on multiplicity, complication, and depth, a production requiring expansiveness in its sustained attention (Riggs 1995). Such a vision contests and destabilizes narratives depicted within the film that sought to limit Black identities and identifications, and it cuts against the second half of his title, which suggests Blackness in terms of negation, evasion, and minimization. The title to this conference continues a conversation with Riggs and also with Ralph Ellison, Ama Ata Aidoo, Toni Morrison, Stuart Hall, and centuries of international Black thought.

Concept Note

Bengal as a cultural, social, and analytical territorial space carries a series of nuances that bear, directly and indirectly, on the processes of identity formation. While these processes may be read as organic phenomena in pre-colonial and undivided Bengal, they became a prominent aspect of colonial and national identity politics in post-Partition Bengal. This volume explores the spectrum of such processes as they unfold across the transition from the pre-colonial to the post-colonial cultural and political history of Bengal, from the eighteenth century to the present.

Hosted by James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA

Conference Dates: February 10-12, 2027
Submission Deadline: October 23, 2026

The African, African American, and Diaspora Studies Center at James Madison University invites proposals for its annual interdisciplinary conference Beyond Repair: Reconciliations, Restorations, Resurgences. The conference will be held from Wednesday, February 10 to Friday, February 12, 2027 and brings together scholars, archivists, and practitioners from a variety of overlapping and intersecting fields. Submit proposals by October 23, 2026.

Over the past two decades, the environmental humanities have profoundly reshaped our understanding of oceans, rivers, and other aquatic environments. Simultaneously, Gothic studies have increasingly turned toward maritime spaces, revealing the sea not merely as a sublime backdrop but as a haunted archive where colonial violence, environmental catastrophe, and spectral histories continually return. This seminar proposes a dialogue between Blue Humanities and the Gothic by examining how oceans, rivers, and littoral zones emerge as spaces of haunting in world literature.

In what ways can literary mobilities provoke questions about social movements and forms of resistance in the current global order?

Mobility is not simply the physical navigation of spaces, but an embodied and affective act with deep socio-cultural and political significance. Literary and cultural work that represents varied forms of mobility can reveal contradictions between the exercise and assumption of agency and uneven historical and social conditions of restriction. Whether mobilities are framed as environmental, diasporic, colonial, or decolonial, they pose questions about material and symbolic conditions of power that dictate who can move and in what ways.