We invite original book chapter proposals for the upcoming edited volume“Emergence of New World Imagination in the 20th Century Asia:Understanding the Asian Colonial Countries through the Lens of Travelogues, Memoirs, Testimonies and Archival Documents" to be published with an International publishing house. This edited book aims to provide a multidisciplinary platform for advanced doctoral students, researchers, academicians and faculty members to publish their original works with us.

Brief Synopsis :

The book project situates colonial and post-colonial texts like auto-biographical narratives, letters, memoirs, travelogues written exclusively in various Asian languages about the Asian colonies including East and South-East Asia, West Asia and South Asia, written during the 20th century. These texts usually describe the extremely unstable social and political environments while simultaneously narrating an emergence of a new world order and world imagination in Asia. These narratives on China, Japan, Korea, South-East Asia, West Asia with the support of the archival documents and oral narratives document the transformative experiences of the narrators and their intentions to transfer such experiences as the colonised subjects to different stratum of the society and communities. The content of the chapters should incorporate these transformative experiences and society that underwent numerous reform struggles and anti-imperialist movements by acknowledging the empirically connected colonial nation-states, divided by the newly designed borders, as documented in the above-mentioned genres.

These chapters should deal with various texts about Asian colonies which are testimonies of both trauma and resistance, demonstrating how they produced complex literary spaces in which narrators grappled with shifting power structures and evolving cultural identities. By attending to the multiple layers of personal memory, collective experience, historical documentation and archival documents, the book underscores how these writings articulate both an individual's intimate perceptions and a broader socio-political consciousness. In doing so, the book will document history as lived experiences with an understanding of new places, people and milieus and provide readers with new ways of apprehending unforeseen reality, unfamiliar geography and unimagined future by expanding the conceptual horizon of colonial and postcolonial studies.

Submission Guidelines

Abstracts should be 500 words with clear indication of the primary texts, research problems, theoretical frameworks, methodology and relevance to the theme of the volume.
Include a brief biographical note (100 words).
Submit abstracts in .doc or .docx format.
Use Times New Roman, 12-point font.
All submissions must be original and unpublished.

Important Dates:

Abstract submission deadline : 31 July, 2026

Information of the Shortlisted Abstracts : 15 August 2026

Full chapter submission : 31 December, 2026

Tentative Publication of the book : August, 2027

Selected contributors will be invited to submit full chapters for peer review.

Suggested Theme and Topics : 

• 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
• Literature, Culture, and Society
• Print culture and literary modernity
• Hybrid genres and narrative experimentation
• Literature as social documentation
• Cultural reform movements and literary expression
• Community formation and cultural identity