CFP - Postcolonial coming-of-age novels in the Indian and Pacific Ocean worlds

Open Group Session at the 2025 ICLA Conference

This panel aims to gather critical reflections on the postcolonial coming-of-age novel, with a special comparative focus on fictional works set in the Indian and Pacific Ocean worlds. Defined as the European literary genre par excellence, according to Franco Moretti (2000), the evolution of the Bildungsroman is the key to understanding cultural transformations in modern Western societies. But what about reading the coming-of-age novel as a key to understanding cultural and social transformations after the end of colonial empires? By portraying the effects of colonial domination on education, family relations, and gender– among many other issues – literary works narrating colonial violence shaping young agents’ lives are essential to interpreting the complexity of postcolonial societies today. Going beyond Moretti’s idea of associating specific areas of the world to specific literary genres, and also questioning traditional views of the coming-of-age novel with its well-known and identifiable subgenres (Erziehungsroman, school novel, boarding school novel, etc), the panel will look at new tendencies in postcolonial coming-of-age literature as a form of reacting to the problems of the contemporary world. Our goal is to put forward critical strategies, from a comparative perspective, to help decentralize it from Europe. Accordingly, the panel will welcome papers proposals approaching the representations of the following topics in the coming-of-age novel:

- colonial education and school system;

- anticolonial student activism;

- imperial transits VS post-Bandung migrations of young agents;

- sexual education in colonial times and its aftermaths;

- contested girlhood and boyhood;

- the environmental turn and the postcolonial coming-of-age novel.

While the panel's language will be English, the organizers are open to receiving paper proposals on literatures written in any language.

This is an open group session at the XXIV ICLA International Comparative Literature Association Congress (https://icla2025-seoul.kr/en). Proposal must be submitted through the ICLA 2025 website (https://icla2025-seoul.kr/en/abstract-submissions/abstract-submissions)