Primary Area / Secondary AreaGlobal Anglophone ModalityIn Person Only: The session will be held fully in person at the hotel. No remote presentations will be included. Chair(s)Roma Lucarelli (University of Minnesota Twin Cities) Abstract

This panel examines how twentieth-century global Anglophone literature stages what might be called chronotopic clashes—moments when competing temporalities and spatial imaginaries collide within a single narrative. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, the panel invites papers that explore how writers from postcolonial, diasporic, and transnational contexts use formal disruptions of time and space to unsettle narratives of modernity, progress, and belonging. Such clashes often emerge where colonial temporal regimes meet Indigenous or local temporalities, where migrant or diasporic subjects navigate overlapping spatial logics, or where ecological and human timescales intersect in ways that challenge linear historical thinking.

By foregrounding these narrative collisions, the panel seeks to illuminate how global Anglophone texts theorize community in the wake of empire. Chronotopic clashes reveal the instability of national, imperial, and developmental frameworks, opening space for alternative forms of relationality that exceed the boundaries of the modern state. They also highlight how literary form becomes a site of political and epistemological struggle, where competing worldviews are negotiated, resisted, or reimagined.

This panel contributes to ongoing conversations in postcolonial studies, narrative theory, and global Anglophone literature by offering a formal lens through which to understand how writers articulate new modes of collective life. In a moment when global displacement, ecological crisis, and resurgent nationalisms reshape the conditions of community, examining chronotopic clashes allows us to see how literature imagines alternative futures and reconfigures the terms of belonging. The panel aims to bring together scholars working across regions and genres to consider how temporal and spatial disruptions generate new possibilities for thinking community beyond the nation-state.

Description This panel explores how twentieth-century global Anglophone literary texts stage temporal and spatial collisions that unsettle colonial modernity. Drawing on Mikail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, we will examine how African, Caribbean, and South Asian writers reconfigure time, space, and belonging through narrative form. Papers might address ecological temporality, migration, or species movement as modes of resistance that redefine community across imperial and postcolonial geographies.