The Department of English
University of Delhi
organizes an
International Conference
on
Gandhi in the Private and the Public Sphere:
Image, Text, and Performance
March 4-5, 2020
Call For Papers
On the occasion of 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, the international conference will focus on the steadily growing debates around the multi-layered discourses that circulate with regard to the figure of one of the most influential and complex public personas of our times. The circulation of the Gandhi signature in variegated registers includes, but, is not confined to the fields of print culture, to the newspaper archive and other media, to visual and cinematic studies, to performances, to scholarly and popular textual works, to his influence on the plastic arts and other art forms, moving onto the recent reformulation in new genre music and graphic culture. To effectively mine the rich and palpably living network that has
is the locus of the diverse and ever growing interest globally we set the inclusive parameter of the well-documented life and after-life of Gandhi in both the private as well as the public sphere. The conference invites academics and scholars to interrogate some of the following areas of critical enquiry:
Themes
• Gandhi’s personal life and its reception and representation in the public sphere.
• ‘Gandhi as an idea’ in a transnational dimension.
• The adoption/appropriation/ re invention of Gandhi’s ideas and thoughts in contemporary socio-political and commercial discourses.
• Gandhi and the problematic of race and caste.
• Gandhi’s ideas of ‘ahimsa’ and ‘satyagraha’ and their operation in conflicts zones.
• Gandhi and his contemporaries.
• Gandhi in fictional, cinematic, artistic and graphic culture.
• Gandhi in Asian and European thought worlds: then and now.
• Gandhi and the narration of Trauma.
• Gandhi and Cosmopolitanism.
In summation, how his image, his words, his ideas have shaped us multi generationally and cross culturally.
Deadline for Abstracts
Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be submitted as Word documents/PDF to gandhiconf.du@gmail.com by 10 January, 2020.
Convenors:
Prof. Raj Kumar (Head of the Department)
Dr. Anjana Sharma. Dr. Haris Qadeer
