Postcolonial Studies Association of the Global South (PSAGS)

Annual Conference 2025

“Backyard Texts and Junkyard Epistemes”

19-20 December 2025

Concept Note

The current conjuncture is marked by the clash of axioms, metaphorically represented by the

backyard/junkyard and the fore-yard. While the junkyard/ backyard relates to the obscure, the

unconscious, the leftover; the fore-yard, the screened and the hyper-projected or hyper-

narrativized stand for the accepted, the normative, the light and show, the conscious, the

progressed and the advanced. The dominant intellectual leitmotif of our time is a fore-yard

show that relegates anything unsophisticated, unprofitable, the heterodox and the “uncouth” to

the junkyard. Consumerist Ecocides, mindless accumulation and its productionist metaphysics

allow no memory to sediment, no thought to ground. Added to that is our everyday consent to

conformity and the formulaic in both the personal and the public space - it governs the

monolithic and monolingual media-yard, the dissent yard and the pre-determined yard of the

critique. Junkyard is, thus, the repository of memory; an archive of lost times, ways of being

and epistemes which have been obscured by the politics of erasure and relegation.

Governmentally, we return to this mythic time without, however, taking into account the

kernel of the mythos. The mythic past, as imagined by many is sometimes guided by

representational calculus and its reflection in the hustings. The mythos, however, transcends

this calculative reason. As the house of being and the deposit of collective unconscious, the

backyard/ junkyard is also used as an escape route from the invading crisis of the present. This

seminar proposes to critically return to the backyard texts and junkyard epistemes - the faded

traditions, the left-overs of colonial/ accumulative modernity, the forgotten dialogues on

conviviality, and archetypes of co-living and cross-cultural standing.

We invite scholarly submissions from early career and experienced scholars on but not limited to the

following areas:

Withering of Texts, Life-worlds and World Views

The Postcolonial Hangover? Ossified Critique? Time for New optics?

Methods of practices, and texts assuming prominence and power

Temporal and Spatial window of synchronicity

Gradual fading of cultural experiences, knowledge systems

Look/gaze to ponder about this cultural electoralisation

Epistemic vantage points, narrative formations

Critique, formulaic reactions, responses

Epistemic monolingualism and monoliths of the media-space

Auto-critique, Immunity to essentialized thoughts

Submit an abstract (300 words maximum) with a short bio-note to psagsindia@gmail.com

within 30 June 2025. Selected candidates will be informed within 6 September 2025.