Call for articles
Commonwealth Essays and Studies, Spring 2016
Post-conflict territories: representations and reconfigurations

Through the creation of a bounded space, territory, as Stuart Elden points out, 'is already a violent act of exclusion and inclusion; maintaining it as such requires constant vigilance and the mobilization of threat, and challenging it necessarily entails a transgression' (Elden, Terror and Terrorism xxx). This organisation and maintaining of territorial limits as an enterprise fraught with violence is clearly apparent in the postcolonial world, the boundaries of which, ever since European imperial expansion began and right through to decolonisation and the present era, have been drawn and redrawn with little or no consideration for the cultural and historical affinities among the inhabitants of those places.
This issue of CES seeks to reflect on the ways in which contemporary postcolonial literatures in English engage with and represent territorial conflict and transgression. We invite articles which reflect on the aesthetics developed by various authors to question political and ideological positions on territory, reveal how its space is delineated and its boundaries preserved, and explore possible reconfigurations of it. Articles may address questions pertaining to the ethics of representation of violence engendered by the drawing up of territorial borders and the resistance to, and transgression of, those borders. Both national and intra-national territories may be considered, including the means by which certain spaces are reconfigured and reterritorialised by those who find themselves imprisoned (literally or figuratively) within them.
CES is a double blind peer-reviewed journal. Articles of no longer than 6000 words should be sent to guest editors Fiona McCann (mccannfiona@gmail.com) and Alexandra Poulain (poulain.al@orange.fr) and General Editor Claire Omhovère (claire.omhovere@univ-montp3.fr) before 20 September 2015.