In the Humanities, notions of coloniality and postcoloniality are usually entangled with nation states that are, by nature, multilingual and multicultural. The societies of each of these nations are further stratified based on hierarchies of economic and social-political classifications. In other words, motivated and maintained by and through power and notions of telos, differences of race, sexuality, caste, and religion exist in differing ways. Literatures of these differences then occupy their space(s) under the larger category of ‘postcolonial literature(s)’.

The question that subtends and underscores this panel is one that is simultaneously critical of and constitutive of this categorisation. What makes a text 'African' or 'Anglophone'? What makes a text 'Muslim' or 'queer' or 'diasporic'? We are asking: if what the reader encounters is a ‘voice’ in a particular work of (postcolonial, for the purposes of this panel) literature, how then does or does it not end up becoming the voice? Individual voices resist classification; yet collectives provide agency. How then can we map the tension between the collectives of the categories mentioned above and the voices they constitute?

Barthes says that “the multiplicity of all writing” has a site, and it is not the author – it is the reader. By centering the reading of a text (as opposed to work), we learn of not just polysemy, but of the inevitably plural nature of meaning and reception itself. Literature then, understood as an event that requires the author’s intentionality, the reader, and the text, becomes the site of infinite relational possibilities of reading. Each reading, then, being particular and unique, has the capacity to form a relation with the text differently.

It is inside the practice and philosophy of Comparative Literature wherein we situate such a conception as the discipline, by name and definition, assumes – and rightfully so – the existence an ‘other’ who exists as different and apart from the ‘I’. By assuming this difference, Comparative Literature allows us to reopen and critically examine categories of difference.

Even after facing “deaths”, this discipline remains acutely relevant and thriving through its foregrounding of method, rather than theory worship. Perpetually assuming, perceiving, and acknowledging alterity, the methods and frameworks of comparative literature perceive existences as opposed to essences.

We are looking for papers that employ conceptual frameworks that challenge and go beyond (both, Western and local) categorisations and hierarchies, and we would welcome papers that also disagree with this panel.

Please send in your abstracts (around 250 words) that involve any of the following categories: Postcolonial Studies, South and Southeast Asian Studies, Queer Studies, African Studies, Migration Studies, Dalit Studies, and other areas categorised by geopolitics and experiential markers. You can send your abstracts to any (or all) of the three following email IDs: anupamak97@gmail.com, chenadanrafid@gmail.com, cpandharipan@umass.edu