Brief Synopsis: 

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed profound political, social, and cultural transformations across Asia. This edited volume, Emergence of New World Imagination in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Asia: Understanding Asian Colonial Countries through Travelogues, Memoirs, Testimonies and Archival Documents, seeks to examine how autobiographical narratives, letters, memoirs, travelogues, oral narratives, and archival documents written in various Indian languages engage with the colonial and postcolonial histories of East Asia, Southeast Asia, West Asia, and South Asia.

The volume explores how these texts describe unstable social and political environments while simultaneously narrating the emergence of new world orders and new modes of imagining Asia. Narratives on China, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, and West Asia document the transformative experiences of colonized subjects and their attempts to communicate such experiences to wider communities. These writings record reform movements, anti-imperialist struggles, migration, displacement, and everyday negotiations with colonial modernity, while revealing the interconnected histories of colonial nation-states divided by newly imposed borders.

Travel narratives, memoirs, and autobiographical writings frequently transcend reductive stereotypes, creating spaces where curiosity, hospitality, and intercultural encounters coexist with political conflict and ideological contestation. Emerging alongside the expansion of print culture and new literary forms, these texts often combine autobiography, testimony, travel writing, and archival documentation, producing dynamic and hybrid modes of expression. Such narratives illuminate how colonial trauma, resistance, and social transformation generated new literary and intellectual spaces across Asia.

The volume situates these texts as testimonies of both trauma and resistance, demonstrating how they construct complex literary spaces in which narrators negotiate shifting power structures and evolving cultural identities. By attending to the intersections of personal memory, collective experience, historical documentation, oral narratives, and archival materials, the collection seeks to expand the conceptual horizons of colonial and postcolonial studies. Ultimately, it investigates how these writings document history as lived experience while offering new ways of understanding unfamiliar geographies, cross-cultural encounters, and the emergence of new world imaginaries in Asia.

We invite original chapter proposals from scholars, researchers, and advanced doctoral candidates. Abstracts should clearly indicate the research problem, theoretical framework, methodology, and relevance to the theme of the volume.
Suggested Themes and Topics (including but not limited to):

Travel Writing, Memoirs, and Autobiographical Narratives
Asian travelogues and colonial encounters
Travel writing as historical testimony
Memoirs and autobiographical narratives of colonial Asia
Mobility, migration, and displacement
Narratives of border-crossing and intercultural contact

Testimony, Trauma, and Resistance
Testimonial literature and historical witnessing
Colonial trauma and collective memory
Narratives of anti-imperialist struggles
Resistance, resilience, and survival
Literary representations of violence and recovery

Memory, Archive, and Alternative Histories
Memory studies and postcolonial archives
Literature and archival practices
Oral histories and alternative historiographies
Personal memory versus institutional memory
Recovering marginalized voices and forgotten histories

Transnational and Comparative Asian Perspectives
Inter-Asian cultural exchanges
Comparative colonial experiences in Asia
Translingual and multilingual narratives
Nation, identity, and regional consciousness
Asian modernities and world imaginaries

Space, Place, and New World Imagination
Representations of unfamiliar geographies
Colonial cities and changing landscapes
Mapping Asia through literature
Spatial imagination and nation formation
Future-oriented visions in colonial and postcolonial narratives

Abstracts (450-500 words) along with a short bio-note (100 words) should be sent to:

barnali.chanda2@adamasuniversity.ac.in

Important Dates

Abstract Submission Deadline: 31 August 2026

Notification of Acceptance: 15 September 2026

Full Chapter Submission: 31 January 2027

Tentative Publication Date: Fall 2027

All submissions will undergo a rigorous double-blind peer-review process. Final selection will be made by the editorial board based on originality, scholarly merit, and relevance to the theme of the volume. A leading international publishing house has expressed interest in publishing this edited volume, subject to the successful completion of the editorial and peer-review process.

Editor

Dr. Barnali Chanda,

Assistant Professor,

Department of Language and Literature,

Adamas University, India