Call for Papers for a Special Issue

Vernacular City-Narratives from Postcolonial South Asia

We are inviting short abstracts (100 words) of papers on “Vernacular City-Narratives from Postcolonial South Asia”, to be published in a special issue for a Scopus-indexed journal (Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Taylor and Francis, Q1). The deadline for the abstract submission is June 14, 2025. 

This special issue seeks research articles that address the complex intersections between postcolonial urban narratives and vernacular language communities in modern South Asia. We aim to contribute to the growing critical interest in the vernacular literatures of South Asia, which can be termed as the vernacular turn, redefining the boundaries of disciplines such as Postcolonial Studies, Comparative Literature and World Literature (Shankar 2012; Gupta et al. 2020; Raveendran 2023). The objective is to examine and foreground the role of the vernacular in the converging spaces of the postcolonial metropolis, without succumbing to the dominant language of globality.

For this special issue, the vernacular mainly refers to the South Asian languages and their cultures, which are under-discussed in critical disciplines dominated by the hegemony of elite English-speaking publics. However, considering its ambivalent realities and historical connections with neo/colonialism, the vernacular should not be articulated as neatly detached from the influence of English or other Euro-American cultural forces (Harder, Zaidi, and Tschacher 2024; Saxena 2022). Therefore, vernacular city-narratives can be defined as the set of representations and practices of navigating the modern city, which are deeply embedded in the proliferation of vernacular cultures and literatures, including the ‘desi’ Englishes. 

While the canon of postcolonial Indian city literature in English is already robust, it is undeniable that the anglophone literature is rather limiting in representing the postcolonial urban experience due to an inherent assumption of socio-cultural capital both in the authors and their readership. For instance, Rushdie’s pejorative comment on vernacular literatures as essentially inferior to Indian English literature reflects the general ignorance towards the fractal, prismatic perspective of South Asian cities that the vernacular narratives open up. There is a need to consider postcolonial urbanity from these vernacular perspectives by accessing a critical archive of authors and texts across nationalities, caste, class and gender. Therefore, this special issue attempts to collate diverse critical discussions on the vernacular archives of urban narratives that will help to envision the South Asian postcolonial city as multilingual, multicultural and translational. 

While the guest editors will consider research papers dealing with widely translated versions of vernacular texts, the preference in selection will be given to articles that use less or untranslated, non-canonical vernacular literatures and genres. Papers with original translations from vernaculars by the authors will be prioritized as well.

A few topics that the special issue may address are:    

• Vernacular cosmopolitanism and South Asian city

• Globalization and the vernacular in South Asian city

• Vernacular narratives and the “world-class” city in South Asia

• South Asian city fiction in the vernacular

• The vernacular city and ‘minor’ readerships in South Asia

• South Asian city and vernacular theatre cultures

• South Asian city and vernacular poetry

• South Asian city and little magazines in the vernacular

• English and/as vernacular in South Asian city

• Vernacular public sphere and the postcolonial city

Name of the special issue: Vernacular City-Narratives from Postcolonial South Asia

Journal: Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Taylor and Francis, Q1 (tentatively, to be published by the end of 2026)

Deadline for abstract submission: June 14, 2025 

Abstract length: 100 words (excluding title and keywords), with a clear indication of the case studies to be considered. 

Abstracts to be submitted by email to sdas07069@gmail.com. 

Issue editors: Dibyakusum Ray and Sagar Das

Dibyakusum Ray is an assistant professor in English at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Ropar, India. He is the author of Postcolonial Indian City-Literature: Policy, Politics and Evolution (Routledge, 2022) and the co-editor of Cinema and the Indian National Emergency (Bloomsbury, 2025).

Sagar Das is a doctoral scholar in English at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Ropar, India. He is currently working on Bengali modern poetry movements and postcolonial urban history.