Call for Papers to the special issue “Dalit Studies in India: Interrogating Epistemological Injuries and Silences” for Global South Literary Studies

Special issue editors:

Arunima Ray, Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi, India

Milind E. Awad, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India

In recent times, Dalit Studies has increasingly engaged with a wide range of academic disciplines as well as public discourse. Within this expanding field, the literary representation of Dalit experience has emerged as a dominant corpus, encompassing diverse regional variations that reflect and articulate the socio-cultural and historical exclusions, humiliation, and stigma attached to the collective past and present of Dalit lives. The textual and visual representations of Dalits embody a synchronisation of a painful and oppressive history with the intersecting realities of stigmatised and marginalised social and cultural identities. This collective memory of humiliation and stigmatised identity not only reveals the material deprivation and socio-cultural exclusion of Dalit lives but also exposes the moral and epistemological injuries inflicted by the irrational and hierarchical logic of caste, deeply embedded in the moral and cultural fabric of caste society in India. The corpus of Dalit Studies is thus grounded in empirical sites of knowledge production, animated by narratives of self-memory, testimonial writing, and lived experience.

While Sharan Kumar Limbale discusses the persistent attempt at othering and silencing dalit narratives within the realms of literature and culture, Chinnaiah Jangam argues that nationalist history too remains profoundly elitist, thereby asserting that nationalist historiography arises from indigenous elitism and that Dalit leaders have persistently been marginalised from its established frameworks. Dalits have been systematically excluded from almost all mainstream discourses, resulting in a condition of profound epistemic injuries. Despite this exclusion, Dalit society has produced many great thinkers and cultural practitioners whose contributions have often been marginalised or erased. Whether in literature, art, or culture, the relationship between creativity and structures of power remains deeply entrenched. Kancha Ilaiah’s inclusion only in the Ninth Volume of Ranajit Guha’s Subaltern Studies series further demonstrates how long it took even the Subaltern Collective to open its doors to Dalit interpretations of subaltern history. The Dalit experience becomes particularly complex because, at times, epistemic violence turns inward and becomes self-inflicted, born from the shame and stigma imposed by caste society. Yashica Dutt’s decade-long concealment of her Bhangi family history, hidden even from her mother, and her grandfather’s decision to change the family surname to “Dutt” to mask their Bhangi identity (manual scavenging), a stigmatised one, are all instances of epistemic violence. However, a vibrant generation of young Dalit poets, writers, and social activists today are actively thinking, reimagining, and occupying mainstream cultural spaces.

This special issue seeks to foreground the notion of epistemological injuries and silences in its multiple manifestations, subtle and overt, across the language and literature of Dalit narratives, further exploring the ongoing processes of counter-canon and mainstreaming Dalit voices within the production of knowledge and culture. The special issue also intends to examine the rise of young Dalit artists and scholars who are making them visible in the mainstream spaces today. The focus will also be on what challenges confront those who seek to bring Dalit discourse to the centre. How might this configuration transform social, political, and cultural discourse? Can the mainstream truly become the centre? Furthermore, what roles would literary production, circulation and reading play in amplifying Dalit voices and dismantling epistemic hierarchies? The above themes invite both theoretical engagements and textual explorations of these questions, with a view to reimagining the politics of voice, visibility, and knowledge in the twenty-first century.

The special issue invites submissions on areas that include but are not limited to:

• Dalit Epistemologies: Texts and Contexts 
• Dimensions of Dalit literature and Pedagogical importance
• Epistemological injury and Caste violence
• Dalit literature, epistemic violence and injustice
• Testimonial injustice, smothering and Dalit literature
• Hermeneutical justice and Dalit literary movement
• Material deprivation to emotional deprivation of Dalit Life
• Epistemic freedom and Dalit testimonials
• Cognitive justice, Dalit Literature and Aesthetics
• Epistemic trust, resistance and Dalit literary narratives  
• The Problem of Representation and authenticity in Dalit Studies

Submission Instructions

Abstracts should be 500 words (excluding bibliography and 100-word bionote) and sent as a single MS Word file to special issue editors Arunima Ray (arunimaray@lsr.du.ac.in) and Milind E. Awad (milindawad1@gmail.com) no later than March 15, 2026. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact the special issue editors. A decision on the submission of the abstract will be communicated by the guest editors by March 30, 2026. Submission of full manuscripts is due by August 31, 2026.

Articles should be no more than 8,000 words, including the abstract, keywords, main body of the article, figures, endnotes, and references. All completed articles must be initially emailed to the guest editor, and following their feedback, submitted to the journal’s online submission portal for external review.

Please visit the website of Global South Literary Studies to prepare the article as per author instructions that can be accessed at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?show=instructions&journalCode=rgsl20