world literatures and indigenous studies

"Digital Memory and the Translation of World Literature"

Conference organized by the American Comparative Literature Association
Official Seminar organized by The ICLA Translation Committee
To submit a proposal, please follow the link:
https://www.acla.org/seminar/fde38874-a710-4e69-b62e-f169ab7f722e

Venue: VIRTUAL 2027 Annual Meeting

15-16 May 2027, Virtual

Sensory Aesthetics Beyond the Five Senses Paradigm

Call for Submissions for 15-20 minute presentations--virtual conference session at the American Comparative Literature Association, May 15-16, 2027

This seminar is interested in non-anthropocentric or even anti-anthropocentric understandings of gender-sexuality arrived at through transdisciplinary conversations between feminist theory, queer studies, the philosophy of biology, multispecies ethnography and environmental humanities. It posits that such understandings can emerge as accurate and effective translation practices across the material-semiotic continuum of multispecies worldmaking. In addition, it argues for aesthetic and affective valuations of multispecies desires, intimacies and sociosexual infrastructures.

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.

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.

***Please use this link to submit your proposal: https://www.acla.org/seminar/e8248863-9bba-4144-b079-9c355f34a4f7***

CALL FOR PAPERS

Disposable Bodies and the Aesthetics of War: Representations of Vulnerability, Violence, and Resistance in Literature and Culture

Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai. Philologia

3/2027

Guest Editors:

Dr. Andrea Roxana Bellot

Associate Professor, Department of English and German Studies

Rovira i Virgili University (URV), Tarragona, Spain

andrearoxana.bellot@urv.cat

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.

CALL FOR PAPERS | ACLA 2027 Virtual Seminar

Seminar Title: Comparative Literature and Commodity Worlds of Mainland Southeast Asia
Co-organizers: Nanthanoot Udomlamun (Kasetsart University) & Chi P. Pham (Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences)
Dates: May 15–16, 2027 (Virtual Sessions)
Co-organizers Nanthanoot Udomlamun and Chi P. Pham invite paper proposals for their seminar at the ACLA 2027 Annual Meeting.

The Aesthetics of Mythmaking: Narrative, Culture, and Power 

Editors-in-chief: Alyse Kaweng Fan and Thales Reis Alecrim 

Deadline for abstracts: October 31, 2026

Silences as Resistance in Public Narratives

Silence is generally seen as something to surmount: we break silence; we give voice to silenced stories; we speak out against injustice. But silence can be a powerful mode of expression in its own right. There is a history of silent protest. Silence can reject dominant expectations or refuse to offer up a story for voyeurism, appropriation, or commodification. It can push reader-listeners to listen for something wordless, to play an active role in striving to understand, and simultaneously to recognize the limits of their ability to understand another person’s trauma. Silence is rarely ever singular.

“We are now in the middle of a deep and decisive moment towards a more disciplinary, authoritarian kind of society,” says Stuart Hall in his speech for Human Rights Day in 1979 (78). He proceeds to explain the components and manifestations of this “crisis,” which eventually morphs into a drive for more “Law and Order” (79). If that was the middle, are we at the end of the crisis? Our daily experiences prove otherwise, as the drive for more Law and Order keeps us in a chokehold. We seem to be in a perpetual global crisis in which we watch global systems of justice like international law and the International Criminal Court deteriorate in front of our eyes, while capitalist and genocidal systems globally continue to thrive and strengthen their hold.

Recent scholarship in autobiography and life writing has expanded beyond traditional literary forms to encompass a wide range of practices through which individuals narrate, perform, and negotiate their identities. As scholars such as Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have argued, life writing constitutes not merely the representation of a life but a dynamic process through which identities are constructed, mediated, and made visible within specific social and cultural contexts. Consequently, autobiography has evolved into an interdisciplinary field of inquiry encompassing visual art, graphic narratives, performance, body art, digital media, and other forms of self-representation.

Shakespeare Here, Shakespeare Now 27-30 May 2027, Cape Town, South Africa

This conference, held as part of the thirteenth triennial congress of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa (SSOSA), invites delegates to reflect on and utilise the axes of space and time in making new contributions to the field of Shakespeare Studies.

Keynote Speaker: Farah Karim-Cooper (Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC)