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Friday, March 18, 2016

Postcolonial Interventions
Call for Papers

Vol. I, Issue 2 (June 2016)



DEADLINE EXTENDED till 15th April 2016




2016 marks the quartercentenary of Shakespeare’s death and the upcoming issue of Postcolonial Interventions will focus on the continued relevance of multiple Shakespeares in the culture-scape of the postcolonial world. Not only were Shakespearean plays shaped in many ways by colonial discourses, especially discourses of racial difference, but Shakespearean plays also initially functioned as those “signs taken for wonders” through which the colonial administrators sought to consolidate imperial hegemony, as evident from such critical works as Post-Colonial Shakespeares (1999). However, subsequent ages witnessed translation and localization as well as adaptation and transformation which contributed to manifold forms of appropriation, conditioned by differing contextual pressures and shifting equations of power, as illustrated by later works like Re-playing Shakespeare in Asia (2010). Quite naturally therefore, from Aimé Césaire’s adaptation of The Tempest, to Kalyan Ray’s novel Eastwords to Vishal Bhardwaj’s trilogy of films based on Shakespearean tragedies, the realm of postcolonial cultures has witnessed a variety of Shakespearean representations across several genres and media which have functioned as multifaceted interventions, endowed with diverse connotations. As Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia inform us in the introduction to Native Shakespeares,
… every spring, groups of women on the Caribbean island of Carriacou prepare elaborate costumes for their boyfriends, husbands, and sons, who will wear the regalia in the long- standing annual ritual known as the Carriacou Mas, a contest in which local men dance and deliver famous passages from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The contemporary Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih pauses over page while writing Season of Migration to the North to consider the vexed experience of expressing an Arab nationalism, and what comes to mind is the face of Shakespeare’s Othello, the Sudanese experience of expressing an Arab identity fixed and localized through the tragic hero’s story of betrayal. The Maori broadcasting agency Te Mangai Paho chooses its first film to promote the New Zealand language te reo, Te Tangata Whai Rawa O Weneti [The Maori Merchant of Venice] using Shakespeare’s romantic comedy to resurrect a native language.
Moving away from a rather unhealthy obsession with Shakespeare’s biography in various academic quarters, such global appropriations have created opportunities of multicultural negotiations, anti-colonial critiques, political contestations based on class, gender or race, formal experiments of diverse kinds and even critical discourses of varied theoretical orientations. In the process, the postcolonial world has testified, with a thousand different voices, to the veracity of the Bard’s own prophetic pronouncements on his dramatic art:
How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted over
In states unborn and accents yet unknown!

The next issue of Postcolonial Interventions invites scholarly articles which would analyse the continued and seemingly inexhaustible significances of Shakespeare in postcolonial cultures, not just in terms of rewriting or dramatic performances or cinematic adaptations but also by focusing on the continued presence of Shakespeare in other forms of popular culture, education and iconography. Topics may include but are not limited to:

• Political Shakespeares: critiques of race, class and gender
• Anti-colonial Shakespeares: marshalling the Bard against Empire
• Multicultural and Multilingual Shakespeares
• Shakespeare in Education
• Postcolonial Shakespearean Criticism
• Shakespeare in other media: from films to graphic novels
• Shakespearean Theatre Festivals and the Politics of Representation
• Shakespeare in Non-Western performance traditions
• Translations, Adaptations and Transcreations of Shakespeare


Submissions should be sent to the postcolonialinterventions@gmail.com by 15th March, 2016.

Submissions Guidelines:
1. Articles must be original and unpublished. Submission will imply that it is not being considered for publication elsewhere.
2. Written in Times New Roman 12, double spaced with 1″ margin on all sides
3. Between 4000-7000 words, inclusive of all citations.
4. With parenthetic citations and a Works Cited list complying with MLA format
5. Without footnotes; endnotes only if absolutely unavoidable
6. A separate cover page should include the author’s name, designation and an abstract of 250 words with a maximum of 5 keywords
7. The main article should not in any way contain the author’s name. Otherwise the article will not be considered.
8. The contributors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce any material, including photographs and illustrations for which they do not hold copyright.

Postcolonial Interventions

Call for Papers

Vol. 1, Issue 1 (January 2016)

For more than a decade, discussions about the purported death of postcolonialism as a discipline have been rife (see, for example Hamid Dabashi’s The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism; E. San Juan Jr’s After Postcolonialism). Such declarations of the discipline’s demise suggest that it has outlived its utility and that ongoing global socio-economic and politico-military changes require a newer intellectual paradigm which would be capable of grasping the ever-growing complexities of our contemporary world with its divergent and often chaotic changes. However, alongside this cacophony of naysayers there has also existed an equally potent strand of academic discourse which has continuously sought to proclaim the abiding relevance of postcolonial thought, especially in the face of the dominance of neocolonial and neoliberal practices on the one hand and various episodes of imperialist, military intrusions on the other. More importantly, in spite of such debates, scholars in various fields have been relentlessly applying the insights of postcolonial studies to newer fields of study (life narratives, Biblical readings, queer narratives, medieval romances, Foucault’s Biopolitics, the icon of the ‘pirate’ to name a few) and have also been seeking to consolidate the theoretical paradigm of postcolonial studies by fusing it with various emerging theoretical insights. Many of these developments have been governed by the belief that although empires and colonies have ceased to exist in the sense they used to before, the former colonies are still suffering from various lingering effects of the past and are troubled by new-born internal hierarchies, inequalities and global politico-economic forces which continue to thwart their quest for dreams which anti-colonial movements had once generated.
Such theoretical developments are testament to the persistent relevance of postcolonial studies for the present and the future. Postcolonialism is an emancipatory discourse – a discourse focused on “strategic interventions in the name of our future” (Young: 2001), a discourse marked by its “intention towards [a] possibility that has still not become” (Bloch: 1986) a discourse marked by its articulation of multidimensional forms of resistance – and it is as necessary as ever. The need for such an emancipatory discourse is evident in light of the growing imbalance of resources between the global North and the global South, or between national elites and impoverished multitudes, in light of rising forms of xenophobia and anti-immigration rhetoric across the West, specters of religious fundamentalism and terrorism in different parts of Asia and Africa, fissures within nation-states owing to victimization of minorities, weak democratic structures incapable of ensuring basic rights or access to fundamental amenities, and the imbrication of cultural representations/apparatuses within these processes. Taking the Indian subcontinent as a case in point, the necessity of an evolving and multifaceted theory to address the complex political scenario is evident, when faced with ongoing conflicts in Kashmir that remain a constant reminder of colonial rule and Partition, successive murders of secular bloggers in Bangladesh and rationalists in India, the precarious existence of the Rohingyas in Myanmar, the terror modules operating across Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan, ever-growing reports of rise in crimes against women, honour killings and ‘khap’ diktats, the continued criminalization of homosexuality in India, marginalization of minorities of different ethnicity or religion, predicaments of migrant labourers in the Middle-East, impoverishment of small farmers and industrial workers under the aegis of neo-liberal policies and so on.
Therefore the maiden issue of Postcolonial Interventions invites scholarly articles that would highlight not only the ways in which postcolonial studies have been evolving to create theoretical frameworks suited to the multiple challenges of the present, but also the ways in which cultural representations are responding both to the discontents of the present and the resistances that are simultaneously taking shape. Topics may include but are not limited to:

 Neocolonial/neoliberal practices and resultant subalternization
 Fissures in nation states
 Utopian imaginings in times of despair
 Transnational flows and emergent subjectivities
 Islamophobia in the post 9/11 world
 Democracies in crisis
 Evolving configurations of race, class, caste and gender
 Rising fundamentalism and the threat of ISIS
 Reconstituting canons for the 21st century
 Postcolonial aesthetics
 Comprador elites and global capital
 Insurgent movements: past and present

Submissions should be sent to postcolonialinterventions@gmail.com within 10th November, 2015.

Submission Guidelines:
1. Articles must be original and unpublished. Submission will imply that it is not being considered for publication elsewhere.
2. Written in Times New Roman 12, double spaced with 1″ margin on all sides
3. Between 4000-7000 words, inclusive of all citations.
4. With parenthetic citations and a Works Cited list complying with MLA format
5. Without footnotes; endnotes only if absolutely unavoidable
6. A separate cover page should include the author’s name, designation and an abstract of 250 words with a maximum of 5 keywords
7. The main article should not in any way contain the author’s name. Otherwise the article will not be considered.
8. The contributors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce any material, including photographs and illustrations for which they do not hold copyright.



For further details, refer to