world literatures and indigenous studies

Since 2017, the #metoo movement has been successful for the conviction of Harvey Weinstein, who was at the center of the landmark trial. The same cannot be said in the case of India, which is still coming to terms with the issue of gender-based violence. Our panel will examine the representations of women who have been forgotten or have been rendered invisible in the national and international media discourse. Our panel will examine such representations through the study of South Asian filmic and theatre representations of Dalit (lower-caste), Northeast Indian, and women who were foundational figures in the defining the newly minted nation—India and Pakistan.

This CFP is for a seminar session at the 2021 NeMLA Convention.

Literature and film that bear witness to injustice can create space for voices that have been silenced. They can lead to the recognition of people subjected to human rights violations and produce shared national and transnational identities. They can draw readers’ attention back onto the politics and power of reading audiences. 

The sudden arrival of COVID-19 and its profound impact on nearly all aspects of daily life for people across the globe will undoubtedly produce a substantive re-examination of the canon of ‘plague writing’ that has, historically, been dominated by European voices. While the predominant influence of European authors in the genre of plague writing can, to a certain extent, be explained historically by the Black Death being the most deadly pandemic in human history, more recent and more global pandemics provide the opportunity to re-examine the situation of these canonical texts and to consider the stakes of plague writing on a broader international stage.

Peripheral Literatures and the History of Capitalism

Guest Editors: Ericka Beckman, Oded Nir, and Emilio Sauri

Deadline for Submissions: 1 August 2020

In the wake of the worldwide protests after the killing of George Floyd, and the toppling of statues implicated in the legacy of the slave trade, we propose a special issue of Foundation on the topic of ‘decolonising science fiction’. As John Rieder and others have argued, the emergence of sf as a genre is embedded in colonial discourses of the late nineteenth century. The pursuit of new frontiers in outer space, within the Earth or under the oceans not only mirrored ‘the scramble for Africa’ but was also informed by the racialist and pseudo-scientific ideologies of the period. In more recent years, authors such as N.K. Jemisin, Jeannette Ng and Tade Thompson have sought to confront sf with the racist legacy of its origins.