Concept and Rationale

Following the long critical trajectory inaugurated by post-Independence Indian English fiction and

expanded by the transnational turn, South Asian Fiction in the 21st Century seeks to investigate

how writers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the diaspora reinterpret the region’s

social, cultural, and ecological histories amid conditions of global flux. The book project shall

revisit questions of identity and belonging through three conceptual coordinates, viz., memory,

mobility, and the posthuman. These categories allow for an inclusive conversation between the

ethnographic and the planetary, the personal and the ecological, and the human and the more-than-

human. The proposed work takes up a fresh stance in terms of responding to emergent theoretical

shifts including postmemory (Marianne Hirsch), affect and trauma studies (Cathy Caruth),

transnational mobility (Avtar Brah, Paul Gilroy), and posthuman materialism (Donna Haraway,

Karen Barad). Through these frameworks, the volume situates South Asian fiction within global

debates on climate change, digitality, migration, and the ethical re-imagination of coexistence. The

book proposes a four-part architecture mirroring thematic segmentation and dialogic variety:

1. Remembering the Unremembered: Memory, trauma, and historical afterlives (Partition,

caste, and subaltern recoveries).

2. Narratives of Motion: Diasporic identities, cultural translation, and digital displacements,

decoding the cosmopolitan South Asian self.

3.Posthuman Landscapes: Ecological fiction, nonhuman agencies, and the ethics of

entanglement in the Anthropocene.

Re-imagining Futures: Speculative fiction, dystopian South Asias, and literary responses

to algorithmic modernity.

Projected Timeline

Stage Deadline

Full Chapter Submission: 31 Jan 2026

Peer Review and Revisions Feb–March 2026

Final Submission to Publisher April 2026

Publication Target: June 2026

Guidelines for Authors

•The volume will include 12-14 peer-reviewed essays with an introductory chapter that shall

map the evolution of 21st-century South Asian writing.

•Each chapter should be 4000 words, including notes and references.

•Use Times New Roman 12 pt, double spacing, and 1-inch margins.

•Provide a 150-200-word abstractand 4-6 keywords.

•Follow MLA 9 style for in-text citations (author–page) and a Works Cited list with hanging

indentation.

•Use endnotes only when necessary; avoid footnotes.

•Submissions must be original, unpublished, and have a similarity index and AI match score

below 10%.

•Send manuscripts in Word (.docx) format titled as AuthorName_ShortTitle.docx to

narinder.sharma@cup.edu.in.

•All entries will undergo double-blind peer review before final acceptance.

•There won’t be any publication charges.

About the Publisher

Pencraft International, New Delhi, is a reputed academic press specializing in South Asian

literary and cultural studies. It offers ISBN-certified, peer-reviewed publications with national and

international circulation and provides complimentary copies to contributors.