Call for papers: "History and Memory: Epistemological Reinterpretation of #Africa's #Past in a #Post_Colonial Context" -Práticas da História: Journal on #Theory, #Historiography and Uses of the Past (#SCOPUS, Open Access)

 Call for papers for Práticas da História: Journal on Theory, Historiography and Uses of the Past (SCOPUS, Open Access)

 

Theme: History and Memory: Epistemological Reinterpretation of Africa's Past in a Post-Colonial Context

Editors: João Pedro Lourenço (Instituto Superior de Ciências da Educação de Luanda), Maria da Conceição Neto (Universidade Agostinho Neto)

 

The extraordinary advances in historiography on Africa and in Africa in the 60s and 70s of the twentieth century, running parallel to the contestation and end of colonial empires, were not accompanied by an equivalent pace of transformation in the teaching of history in African countries, in terms of theories, methods and organization of content to be transmitted. After several decades, the distance remains between the "decolonizing" effort in historiography, with some success, and the way history is taught to young Africans, still reflecting a Eurocentric vision of the history of humankind, whether in periodization or in selection of the most relevant themes. In general, the history of Africa continues to be studied in a fragmented way, with little emphasis on its connections with world history, in which it only appears fully integrated with (as a result of) European expansion and subsequent colonization. Despite the now classic reference to the continent as the "cradle of humankind", there are still narratives that do not take into account the temporal depth of African history, its ancient relationships with other spaces and the diversity of historical situations before, during and after European colonial exploitation. Inadequate and Eurocentric periodizations also prevail, whether for world history (the already much criticized division of the four "Ages") or for the history of Africa (a "pre-colonial period" for millennia of history). UNESCO's commendable efforts were important but insufficient to overcome Africa´s external dependence (mostly from former colonizing countries) in terms of the production of didactic content and means of teaching history, from basic to university level.

It is important to better understand what is happening in different African countries, at the level of the Academy but also in other spaces where social memory and history confront each other, and how political, ideological, economic and linguistic factors interfere in those situations. In the case of the former Portuguese colonies, which will soon celebrate 50 years of independence, there are additional factors, such as the later end of colonial rule and the delay in historiography about Africa that occurred until recent decades, both in Portugal and in Brazil. Despite current progress, most of the bibliography essential for the study of world history, and of the African continent in particular, is not available in Portuguese.

This special issue of Práticas da História is interested in receiving contributions, referring to colonial and post-colonial African contexts, that explore, question and/or reflect on aspects such as:

- The (im)possibility of epistemological autonomy of African Universities: debates and concerns around History Courses, Curricula and Programs.

- The relationship between historical discourse validated by scientific institutions and other forms of social and collective memory, generally ignored in educational institutions, despite their social importance.

- The way in which memory, history and contemporary policies of African national states intersect in spaces of debate and knowledge production, on the continent and beyond.

- The penetration and impact on the historiography of digital humanities - and the possibilities and difficulties, in the African context, of articulating the teaching of History with the world of digital information.

- The place and contribution of historiography and the teaching of History in the construction of memory in Africa, considering the multiple relationships between the constructions of historiographical discourses, public spaces and the public sphere.

- Policies for the construction of archives, public libraries and other infrastructures, as well as the constitution, dissemination and access of funds and collections, a condition for democratic processes in the construction of public memories.

- The relationships between African historiography and Africanist historiography - networks, internationalism, issues of power, publishing markets and their impacts.

- The construction and teaching of "national histories" in the face of the risk of teleological and anachronistic interpretations, projecting current borders into the past.

- The use of the past (known, imagined, manipulated) by different social actors (political parties, unions, churches, groups and social movements, individuals and collectives of citizens or others) as a place of confrontation, contradiction and legitimation.

 

Proposals (maximum 500 words) must be sent by 31 July to praticashistoria@gmail.com, accompanied by a short biographical note from the author(s). Your acceptance or refusal will be communicated by 10 September. Articles from accepted proposals must be submitted by 15 December. Contributions are accepted in Portuguese, English, Spanish and French.

 

Contact Email

praticashistoria@gmail.com

URL

https://praticasdahistoria.pt/history-memory-epistemological-reinterpretation-o…

CFP: International Conference on #Bengal and its Neighbors: From Early Modern to Contemporary South Asia -Oct 2024.

 The aim of this panel is to initiate a broader dialogue with regards to the Bengal region, as it evolved from the early modern era — then, a region being ruled a motley of Sultanates with periodic eruption of Mughal expeditions against the independent Sultans — to an important resource extraction zone during the colonial era. Eventually, the region evolved into a contested terrain during the anti-colonial movement in the Twentieth Century that pitted two distinct nationalist projects against one another, as the post-colonial future of the region’s heterogeneous ethnic, linguistic and religious communities were being decided. Fast forward to the Partition, Bengal’s religious fault-lines became exposed, as the Muslim majority regions became part of Pakistan, while the Hindu dominated Western regions became part of India. 

However, this flared up communal fragmentation does not fully encapsulate the efforts undertaken by political forces, including the left-leaning ones, to oppose communalism’s impact on the widening gap between Hindus and Muslims. Interestingly, an echo of this anti-communal nation-building imperative can be traced in the movement leading up to the creation of Bangladesh, and, subsequently, the inscribing of the principles of nationalism, socialism, democracy, and secularism in its founding constitution draw up in 1972 following its break-up from Pakistan in 1971. The country experiences coups and countercoups in the late 1970s and early 1980s that had shacked its attempt to build a new society out of the ruins of Partition. 

Moreover, the wider Bengal region has experienced further tensions due to the acceleration of the climate crisis, onset of neoliberal globalization, and new forms of social divides along caste, class, ethnicity, and religious lines in the recent years. Therefore, it would be more than useful to interrogate the region from a broad historical perspective so that dialogues can be initiated to understand the wider implications of today’s crises as well as the traces of the past in the Bengal region’s turbulent present. 

With an aim to investigating the various traditions of resistance, in literary writing, oral and public culture, plastic and visual arts, to dominant ideologies of nation, class, religion, and gender, the esteemed panelists seek to engage with the following questions in order to understand the complex changes in the region from a broader perspective: 

• How can we address the influences of various cultural forces — Arab, Persian, Indic, and European — in a primarily agrarian region?
• How can we reconceptualize the major changes that occurred in the region as it transitioned from the colonial era to the postcolonial present? What are some of the major outcomes of this transition including the Permanent Settlement, the Bengal famine of 1943 and the creation of the successor three nation-states of British India impacted the region? 
• How is the region shaped by political changes such as the solidification of Hindu nationalism in India, the India-China rivalry to extend regional influence, as well as the ethnic tensions in the bordering countries such as Myanmar? 
• How can the region’s longue durée shifts be addressed from an interdisciplinary angle? What are the stakes of bringing scholars together who explore the Bengal and its neighboring region from a range of disciplinary angles including anthropology, history, literature and religion among others?      

Contact Information

Please submit abstracts of 250-300 words and a brief bio to the organizers, Auritro Majumder, Assistant Professor of English, University of Houston, amajumder@uh.edu &  Asif Iqbal, Visiting Assistant Professor of English, Oberlin College, aiqbal@oberlin.edu by 30 March, 2024. 

Contact Email: aiqbal@oberlin.edu

Call for Articles: Inaugural Issue of Creativitas: Critical Explorations in Literary Studies

 Inaugural Issue of Creativitas - Critical Explorations in Literary Studies (A Double-blind Peer-reviewed Journal of English Studies).

[We are in the midst of registering the journal under ISSN. However, as per guidelines, an issue has to be published prior to acquiring an ISSN. So, the inaugural issue will be published without an ISSN.]

Creativitas, an up and coming journal in the field of English Studies, invites scholars, researchers, and practitioners to submit original and innovative contributions for its inaugural issue. The journal aims to provide a platform for critical explorations in literary studies, fostering interdisciplinary discussions and pushing the boundaries of traditional approaches to literature.

Creativitas seeks submissions that engage with a broad spectrum of topics within literary studies. The theme for the inaugural issue is intentionally broad, allowing for a diverse range of perspectives and methodologies. We welcome papers that delve into, but are not limited to, the following areas:

·         Literary Criticism and Theory

·         Comparative Literature

·         Postcolonial Studies

·         Genre Studies

·         Cultural Studies

·         Digital Humanities and Literature

·         Eco-criticism

·         Intersectionality in Literature

·         Memory Studies

·         Global Perspectives in Literary Studies

·         Adaptation Studies

·         Narratology

·         Experimental Literature

·         Comic Books and Other Graphic Narratives

·         Literature and Film

·         Literary Translation Studies

·         Historical Approaches to Literature

Submission Guidelines: Authors submitting manuscripts to Creativitas for the inaugural issue are required to adhere to a comprehensive set of guidelines to facilitate the double-blind peer-review process. The journal follows the MLA Eighth Edition format, and authors are expected to submit an abstract for initial selection before the full manuscript.

Abstracts should be around 300 words long (with a maximum of five keywords), and should be sent to creativitasjournal@gmail.com with a copy of it sent to sapientia2024@gmail.com. The mail should bear the subject “Abstract Submission for Creativitas Inaugural Issue”.

Upon approval, authors can proceed with the full manuscript submission. Manuscripts must strictly adhere to the MLA Eighth Edition format guidelines. This includes proper citation style, page formatting, and referencing conventions.

Note: Authors submitting manuscripts to Creativitas for the inaugural issue are instructed to carefully anonymize their articles. To ensure a double-blind peer-review process, authors should remove any personal information, including names, affiliations, and acknowledgments, from the manuscript. Additionally, the document should not contain any metadata that may reveal the author's identity. Authors are encouraged to replace self-references in the text with generic terms (e.g., "the author") and ensure that any potentially identifying information is temporarily omitted.

Manuscripts, once prepared (according to the MLA Eighth Edition format) and anonymized, should be submitted as a Microsoft Word document via email to should be sent to creativitasjournal@gmail.com with a copy of it sent to sapientia2024@gmail.com, with the subject line: "Manuscript Submission for Creativitas Inaugural Issue".

The editorial team at Creativitas is committed to ensuring a fair and rigorous double-blind peer-review process. Authors are encouraged to reach out to the editorial team at sapientia2024@gmail.com for any clarification or assistance regarding the submission guidelines.

Important dates:

·         Deadline for Submission of Abstract – 01.03.2024

·         Notification of Acceptance of Abstract – 05.03.2024

·         Deadline for Submission of Full-length Manuscript – 15.04.2024

P.S. In the on-going process of registering Creativitas for an ISSN, it's important to note that, according to guidelines, an issue must be published prior to obtaining the ISSN. Consequently, the inaugural issue of Creativitas will be released without an ISSN. While this initial publication won't have the ISSN, it represents a crucial step in establishing the journal and facilitating academic discourse.

Contact Information

sapientia2024@gmail.com

creativitasjournal@gmail.com

Contact Email

contact@creativitasjournal.in

URL

https://creativitasjournal.in

Call for# Contributions: #Funded #Max #Weber Foundation #Conference on #Harmful #Entanglements. #Orient-Institute Istanbul, May 14th–15th, 2024.

Entanglements are the order of the day. In the last two decades or so, the notion of entanglement has not only been very popular with historians (histoire croisée, Verflechtungsgeschichte), but also on fields such as comparative literature, cultural anthropology, archeology, and some social sciences. The concept of entanglement enables researchers to avoid dealing with clearly (pre-)defined social or political entities. It has awarded researchers the opportunity to attain a freely chosen vantage point with regard to both their evidence and concepts. Finally, it has proved especially suitable for the analysis of social, intellectual and political agency and interdependencies because of the concept’s capacity to break down asymetries, dilute binaries and highlight questions of process (how?) over quiddity (what?) and cause (why?).

The conference on ‘Harmful Entanglements’ thus addresses a phenomenon caused not so much by a principal methodological flaw in the concept of entanglement. Rather, it aims to answer to the unacknowledged conditions of the concept’s ubiquity, or, with other words, by its own ‘entanglement’ in a particular political context. Arguably, the study of and the various approaches to entanglements are products of an era of run-away globalisation and the heuristic possibilities it has enabled/unleashed. Scholars also began to ask questions that, to a degree, mirror the concerns and expectations of this kind of neo-liberal instability and acceleration. While many studies of entanglement were fed by general optimism in their transformative power, significant research has also been conducted on problems created by entanglement that encompasses topics such as environmental history, international law and diplomacy, (post-) colonialism, and the position of racist and fascist cultural production in the history of modernity or the project of modernism.

By and large, however, a silent assumption has been dominant: entanglement has come to be considered a phenomenon that obeys a logic of accretion. Entanglement by default seems not to lead to disentanglement but to a new level of tighter entanglement.

The last few years with their crises of contagion, war, and economic rifts and collapses may offer a good occasion to question this assumption. It seems to be time to look at those who in the past or today reject to be entangled and at those etanglements that apparently proved detrimental. We aim to ask questions such as: What kind of entanglements have been regarded as sufficiently “bad” (harmful, exploitative, morally or legally unjustifiable, politivcally flawed, economically costly and so on) to provoke attempts at disentanglement? As dependencies (they may be understood as mutual as ever) involve power inequalities, the question of agency in disentanglements becomes crucial: What regimes of power trigger decolonialisation and neo-colonialisation processes? Do harmful entanglements lead to cultures of the vernacular, the backwater, the obscure – or at least to a longing for them? Do ever-increasing entanglements continuously diminish agency and lead to an animosity against connectedness  (as is observable in the present conjuncture of failing optimism in globalization)? Which actors are prone to fear or reject entanglements as principally dangerous or disastrous? When and why do attempts at disentanglement fail?

This year's Max Weber Foundation Conference is already the eighth such meeting organised by the Max Weber Foundation for German Humanities Institutes Abroad. The previous conferences of this format took place at the German Historical Institutes in Paris, Warsaw, Moscow, Washington, Kairo, Rome, and Tokyo. The Foundation Conference format takes up research topics from the institutes of the Max Weber Foundation and discusses them in an internationally comparative, trans- and interdisciplinary manner. The Foundation Conferences involve all of the Foundation's institutes and their partners.

The conference will take place in connection with the opening of the new building of the Orient-Institut Istanbul in the centre of Istanbul, in Galip Dede Caddesi 65, close to the Galata Tower. Keynotes will be delivered by Prof. em. Dr. Monica Juneja (Heidelberg University) and Prof. Dr. Eugene Rogan (Oxford University).

We invite papers that engage with these or related problems in the past or present and from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Funding (travel-expenses, board and lodging) are available for participants not affiliated with the Max Weber Foundation. The language of the conference is English. A volume of contributions will be published.

Please apply with an abstract of two pages and a cv to https://www.oiist.org/cfc/. Deadline for applications is Sunday February 25th.

Contact Information

Prof.Dr. Christoph K. Neumann

Orient-Institut Istanbul

Şahkulu Mah., Galip Dede Cad. No: 65

Beyoğlu - İstanbul TR-34421

Contact Email

neumann@oiist.org

URL

https://oiist.org

Attachments

Call for contributions: Harmful Entanglements, Istanbul May 14th to 15th, 2024

Call for Chapters: Unsettled childhoods in southern spaces (edited collection) Felicity Jensz (University of Münster, Germany) and Rebecca Swartz (University of the Free State, South Africa)

 

We are looking for a number of chapters of 7,000 words to expand our basis of an edited collection which examines the meaning of ‘settled’ and ‘unsettled’ childhoods in the southern hemisphere locations of the British Empire that became South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand from European ‘settlement’ to the present day. We are interested in the meaning of childhood in (settler) colonial contexts and these chapters show that a focus on children’s experiences can unsettle common understandings of settler colonialism. Children are unsettled and unsettling as they are not as ‘fixed’ as adults in their identities, and, are deemed still ‘malleable’. Their position in colonial society is also contingent on projected trajectories of settlement, with mixed race as well as children outside of the categories of white or indigenous also complicating as well as testing and straining the concepts of child, childhood and settler colonial societies. The bodies of children were projections of normative expectations of a ‘healthy’ settler colonial site, with bodies that deviated from the norm, either through illness or genetics, having the potential to unsettle both projected as well as lived realities within settler colonies.

Through a focus on children and childhood(s) in settler colonial contexts we are contributing to the academic discussion as to the meaning of what it meant to be a child in the past and how childhood was used in the construction of new political entities. Similar to contemporary contexts, childhood is inherently unsettled, as it is a phase of dynamic physical, emotional and mental change, prior to a more settled, adult phase. The collection, therefore, seeks to unsettle the idea of childhood itself, showing that understandings of what it meant to be a young person in the past varied significantly across the southern spaces under study. The edited collection stems from our work on childhood and institutions in settler colonial spaces across empires, see: Settler Colonial Studies vol 13 2023. 

The papers presented in this edited collection will present original research that engages with the following themes:

1. Migrant childhoods: What were the experiences of migrant children entering settler colonial spaces? How does including migrant children in our analysis shift understandings of children and childhood? How do these literally ‘unsettled’ children enter into colonial spaces and change the dynamics between coloniser and colonised and challenge the categories associated with childhood itself?
2. Indigenous childhoods: How did colonial regimes in these southern spaces impact on understandings of childhood and in particular on indigenous children themselves? How were these children brought into relationship with institutions in those contexts?
3. Settler childhoods: What did it mean to grow up as a settler child? How does studying white settler children in colonial contexts help us to understand the settler colonial context more broadly?
4. Institutions: How were and are childhoods - migrant, settler, indigenous - shaped by institutions in (settler) colonial contexts? What is the role of these institutions in shaping children’s lives, experiences and futures?
5. Sources of childhood: What kinds of sources can we use to understand the experiences and agency of children in the past, particularly in these southern locations? Papers in this collection illustrate the utility of a vast range of sources, including personal documents and writings, autobiography, anthropological field notes, oral history interviews, archival research, amongst others. How do we access children’s voices?

We are particularly looking for papers that examine the experiences of Maori children, mixed-race children, children of various socio-economic backgrounds, Indian children in South Africa, and migrant children in general.

Timeline:

By 1 March 2024: 300 word abstracts and one-page bios to be submitted to both Felicity Jensz (felicity.jensz@uni-muenster.de) and Rebecca Swartz (swartzr@ufs.ac.za)

15 March 2024: Invitations to submit a full manuscript will be sent

30 June 2024: Full papers due

Please note the tight turn around time as we are already advanced with the project.

Contact Information

Felicity Jensz (felicity.jensz@uni-muenster.de) and Rebecca Swartz (swartzr@ufs.ac.za)

Call For Chapters: EditedThe #Palgrave Handbook of #Monsters and #Monstrous #Bodies

 

Call for Chapters

The Palgrave Handbook of Monsters and Monstrous Bodies, under contract with Palgrave Publishers, is an interdisciplinary collection of chapters, that provides a snapshot of the evolving field of Monster Studies. This Handbook offers a comprehensive review of globalizing and expanding interdisciplinary explorations of monsters and monstrous bodies. It will become the only Handbook of its kind that focuses on both monsters and the monstrous by world-leading experts, established academics, emerging scholars, and new academics bringing together scholarship across disciplines about the monstrous in

multiple contexts and time periods.

We are seeking scholars of diverse identities, races, and genders, especially those from non-Western institutions or whose work examines monsters and monstrous bodies from global perspectives and nonnormative experiences and narratives to complete the text. Scholars will reflect on the tremendous growth and wide-ranging appeal of these engagements throughout the disciplines. The chapters will emphasize how cultures create ideas of monstrous bodies and utilize monsters as allegories for all manner of identities, issues, and socio-cultural experiences. The Handbook will serve as an interdisciplinary holistic reference to those interested in the links between monsters and socio-cultural attitudes.

CURRENT CONTRACTED CHAPTERS

1. “How To Create a Monster: From Anatomy To Trauma And All Points In Between” Sherry Ginn

2. “Abjection,” Dr. Katherine H. Lee, Indiana State University

3. “Imposing Order on the Monstrous: A Cultural Taxonomy of the Modern Zombie,” Rob Smid, Curry College Massachusetts

4. “Demonstrification: How Monsters Can Be Agents of Social Change,” Colleen Karn, Methodist College

5. “Holy Monsters: Bodies, Impairment and the Sacred in the Middle Ages,” Lisa R. Verner,

University of New Orleans

6. “In Sickness and in Hell: Monstrous Revenants and Infectious Disease,” Leah Richards, Ph.D., LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York

7. “Hell is a Teenage Girl”: Revenge and the Monstrous-Feminine in Jennifer’s Body” Hannah Hansen, Massey University New Zealand

8. “Monstrous Monster Makers: Examining Mad Scientists and their Creations,” Heather M. Porter,  M.S. & Michael Starr, University of Northampton, UK.

9. “Black Vampires and Antiblackness: New and Old Histories”, Deanna Koretsky, Spelman College

10. “Jordan Peele’s Horror Noire Oeuvre: Black Studies, White Students, and the Politics of DEI Curricula in this Era of Woke Culture,” Jayson Baker, Curry College,

11. “Let’s Do the Monster Mash” Dance Horror in Vampire Films,” Elizabeth Miller Lewis, The University of New Orleans

The Palgrave Handbook of Monsters and Monstrous Bodies

12. “A Monstrous Hunger: Female Vampires and Appetite,” Robin A. Werner, The University of New Orleans

13. “Monstrous Bodies: The Quadroons Balls of New Orleans,” U. Melissa Anyiwo, The University of Scranton

14. “Dumb show: Mute children in New Zealand literature and cinema,” Jenny Lawn Massey University New Zealand

15. “Obsessed with Fangs, Fur, and Tentacles: Monster Pornography and a Desire for Monstrous Sex,” Amanda Jo Hobson, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology

16. “The Danger of the White Progressive,” Liza A. Talusan, PhD

17. “The Demamification of Black Women in Educational Leadership: Sirol’s Song,” Loris Adams, National Cathedral School.

TOPICS MAY INCLUDE, BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO:

✓ Monster Hunters of Eastern Europe

✓ African monsters and monstrous bodies in fiction and folklore

✓ Manga & Anime Monsters: Globalizing Japanese Storytelling

✓ (Re)Envisioning (Dis)Abilities and Monstrous Bodies in Global Media

✓ Monstrosity in Asian contexts

✓ Exploring Monstrosity in International Children’s Media

✓ The Monsters of Nollywood & Bollywood.

✓ Selling Black Bodies in Pain

✓ Monstrous Tourism in Ghana and the US

✓ Making monsters? Historical Narratives of the Other.

✓ Monstrous mythologies of the Diaspora.

✓ Animating Monstrous Bodies in Indie Comics and Graphic Novels

✓ The Impact of Independent and Self-Published Production on Monstrosity in fiction and film

✓ Queering the Monstrous

✓ Monstrous Children and the Horrors of Caretaking

✓ Monstrous Bodies: Envisioning Queer Feminist Pornography

✓ Nasty Women of Gothic Literature

✓ Monstrosity, Comedy, and the Awkward Blurring of Genres

✓ Exploring the Quotidian and the Profane in Contemporary Monsters-Next-Door Fictions

✓ Romancing the Monstrous, Or Why We Want to Date Monsters

✓ Monsters and/or Monstrous Bodies to Redress Cultural Appropriation

✓ Policing Monstrous Flesh

TIMETABLE:

✓ Thursday, February 29th, 2024 – Proposals & Bio due

✓ January 1st, 2025– 1st drafts due

✓ June 15, 2025 – 2nd drafts due

✓ October 30, 2025 – Final Drafts Due

Please email 300-word proposals with a short biographical statement (50 words) and inquiries to Melissa Anyiwo and Amanda Jo Hobson by Thursday, February 29th, 2024. The final chapters will be approximately 7000-9000 words.

Proposals Due by Thursday, February 29th, 2024

Editors:

Amanda Jo Hobson, Associate Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, amandajohobson@gmail.com

U. Melissa Anyiwo, Associate Professor History, Director Black Studies, The University of Scranton melissa.anyiwo@scranton.edu

Call For Articles: Urdu Studies-(ISSN: 2583-8784)

 

Call for Papers

(Vol. 4 Issue 1, 2024)

Urdu Studies (ISSN: 2583-8784) is an online open-access bilingual (Urdu and English) journal bringing together academics, scholars, and researchers engaged in areas of theoretical, comparative, and cultural research and criticism in Urdu language, literature, film, and theatre studies. We focus on original and innovative research and exploration and encourage interdisciplinary studies. We accept translations and book reviews.

We are now accepting submissions for the 2024 issue.

Our Thrust Areas include:

• Postcolonial debates on Urdu language, literature, and culture
• Contemporary Eastern and Western critical theories, and their reception in Urdu
• South Asian cultural and historical studies
• Urdu and contemporary Western scholarship
• Intercultural & Comparative Studies
• Urdu theatre & cinema
• Translation Studies

Note: Urdu Research papers; book reviews; and translations from any language into Urdu; may be emailed to the Chief Editor (hashmiam68@gmail.com). Research papers in English; book reviews; and Urdu-English translations; may be emailed to the Guest Editor (rizvifatima67@gmail.com). Authors are requested to submit research papers/ translations/ book reviews in Urdu or English by 30^th May 2024. They will be notified about acceptance/ revision/ rejection by 30^th June 2024. Revised papers should be emailed by 30^th July 2024. The journal, included in the UGC-CARE List, will be published online in August 2024.

Please visit the following link for the submission guidelines.

https://urdustudies.in/call-for-papers-submission-guidelines/

Contact Information

Arshad Masood Hashmi, Professor, Department of Urdu, jai Prakash University, Chapra 841302 (India) hashmiam68@gmail.com

Fatima Rizvi, Professor, Department of English and Modern European Languages, University of Lucknow 226007 (India) rizvifatima67@gmail.com

Contact Email

hashmiam68@gmail.com

URL

https://urdustudies.in/

CFP: Panel on Family, Memory and Genealogy: Engaging Vernacular Modernities in South Asia on "Modernity Redefined' Conference Gitam University Feb 22-23, 2024

   

 We are organising a panel at the conference 'Modernity Redefined' at Gitam University Bangalore in February 22-23, 2024. This panel looks at ideas of genealogy, memory and family as they refracted through colonial modernity in South Asia. These ideas have been used by various communities for diverse purposes, from imagining a unified political identity, a glorious cultural past and for signifying status differences. A key aspect that lies at the heart of these imaginations is the views of sexual ordering and the reconfiguration of family relationships inaugurated by colonial modernity. Scholars like Kaviraj (2012), Udayakumar (2016) and Arunima (2003) have looked at novels, autobiographies and poetry which acted as discursive accompaniments and great archives of these transformations. Keeping these themes at the background, this panel probes into the ways in which various social groups in colonial South Asia imagined and sought to reformulate their own sense of selves and identities. The panel aims to move into the historical details as well as ethnographic impressions on changes to family histories, memories and genealogies retold from the colonial to post- colonial times in the Vernaculars of South Asia, including both established as well as spoken languages.

Contact Information

Please send a 150 words abstract to P.C. Saidalavi (saidalavi.pc@snu.edu.in) and Shaheen K. (shaheenkt@protonmail.com) by 19 December 2023.

Contact Email

saidalavi.pc@snu.edu.in

Call for Proposals :Radical Histories of Decolonization

 A Call for Proposals from the Radical History Review

Issue number 153

Abstract Deadline: January 8, 2024

Co-Edited by Manan Ahmed, Marissa Moorman, Jecca Namakkal, Golnar Nikpour

Radical History Review seeks contributions for a special issue entitled “Radical Histories of Decolonization.”

Historians have tended to treat decolonization as an event that began in the 1940s and ended by the late 1970s, primarily confined to large areas of Asia and Africa, though scholars of global Indigenous histories offer a deeper and unfinished timeline. Many activists today use the term to discuss a still-present need to end colonial institutions, from settler colonial occupation in places as widespread as Turtle Island (North America), Hawai’i, Puerto Rico, Palestine, and Aotearoa (New Zealand), to the hegemony of Western thought in university curricula, to the possession of art and artifacts expropriated from the colonies and displayed in museums in major cities such as New York, London, and Paris. The term “decolonization” has come to mean many things, some limited, and others expansive.

This issue of the Radical History Review seeks to explore the genealogy of decolonization as a category of analysis and how people have dreamed and enacted decolonization in past and present. We are interested in work that reconsiders how decolonization has occurred—as both success and  failure—throughout history, including in geographic areas that fall outside of the twentieth-century paradigm including Haiti and many parts of Latin America that press into the twenty-first century. We are interested in questions of how the colonized in overseas colonies, settler colonies, and informal colonies understood decolonization across different times and spaces. While the works of individual thinkers (Fanon, Cabral, Césaire, Nehru, Ho Chi Minh) tend to dominate histories of decolonization, we ask how people on the ground who are often left out of the story—including but not limited to women, soldiers, and ethnic and linguistic minorities—challenged colonial power and the dominant parties fighting for sovereignty. This issue aims to center the work of scholars, activists, and archives that lay outside of Western institutions.

Potential topics include (but are not limited to):

• While the etymology of decolonization begins in the nineteenth century, how is it useful for historians of the ancient or medieval worlds to work with this concept?
• What happens when anti-colonial movements have interacted with and taken up imperial imaginaries of an idealized pre-colonial past?
• How have people across the political spectrum interpreted (and perhaps instrumentalized) decolonization differently?
• Where does the concept of Indigeneity fit into histories of decolonization?
• Is decolonization a concept that can be understood universally? Or does it always need to be rooted in local struggles?
• What does history tell us about the relationship between decolonization and sovereignty?
• How do we understand the rise of religious, social, and political movements in the context of decolonization?
• How does the framework of decolonization work (or not work) in contexts of informal colonial or “semi-colonial” relations?
• Does decolonization mean the end of empire and/or has decolonization meant the end of empire? Historically, how have colonized subjects imagined and attempted to enact an end to empires?
• How does decolonization work as a language outside of the context of Western European imperialism (i.e. Japanese empire, Russian empire)?

The RHR publishes material in a variety of forms. Potential contributors are encouraged to look at recent issues for examples of both conventional and non-conventional forms of scholarship. We are especially interested in submissions that use images as well as texts and encourage materials with strong visual content. In addition to monographic articles based on archival research, we encourage submissions to our various departments, including:

• Historians at Work (reflective essays by practitioners in academic and non-academic settings that engage with questions of professional practice)
• Teaching Radical History (syllabi and commentary on teaching)
• Public History (essays on historical commemoration and the politics of the past)
• Interviews (proposals for interviews with scholars, activists, and others)
• (Re)Views (review essays on history in all media—print, film, and digital)
• Reflections (Short critical commentaries)
• Forums (debates and discussions)

Procedures for submission of articles:

By January 8, 2024, please submit a 1-2 page abstract summarizing the article you wish to submit to our online journal management system, ScholarOne. To begin with ScholarOne, sign in or create an account at https://mc04.manuscriptcentral.com/dup-rhr. Next, sign in, select “Author” from the menu up top, and click “Begin Submission” or “Start New Submission.” Upload a Word or PDF document, including any images within the document. After uploading your file, select “Proposal” as the submission type and follow the on-screen instructions. Please write to contactrhr@gmail.com if you encounter any technical difficulties.

By February 29, 2024, authors will be notified whether they should submit a full version of their article for peer review. The due date for completed articles will be in June, 2024. Those articles selected for publication after the peer review process will be included in issue 153 of the Radical History Review, scheduled to appear in October, 2025.

Abstract Deadline: January 8, 2024

Contact: contactrhr@gmail.com

Contact Information

contactrhr@gmail.com

Contact Email

contactrhr@gmail.com

URL

https://www.radicalhistoryreview.org/radical-histories-of-decolonization-due-ja…

Whither #postcolonialism? New directions in #postcolonialstudies -- International Online Conference, 1-2 December 2023

 Postcolonial studies as a way of reclaiming history from the perspective of the colonised continues to uncover the myriad fraught legacies of colonialism. The emergence of newer interdisciplinary areas of inquiry, such as climate change, has further revealed tangled legacies of colonialism that continue to persist. The burgeoning field of postcolonial print culture studies, in turn, has been bringing to the fore a fascinating terrain of production, circulation and consumption of print in colonial contexts that is particularly enriching our knowledge of anticolonial resistance in various ways.  This conference aims to bring together academic work in some of the newer sub-fields of postcolonial inquiry with attention to continuities. Research papers are welcome from across disciplines on, but not restricted to, the following themes:

• Climate change, caste and gender
• Climate change and endangerment of languages
• Climate change and changing cultural practices, and literature
• Climate change and marginalized sexualities
• Ecology and literature
• Environmental humanities and postcolonial studies
• Local knowledge and climate change
• Postcolonial autobiography
• Postcolonial print culture
• Translation and postcolonial studies

Keynote speaker: Professor Robert JC Young, Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature, New York University, USA

Timeline:

• Abstracts within 250 words, upto 5 keywords, and a bio-note within 100 words due by 12 November 2023.
• Link to submit abstracts:   https://forms.gle/iJvL5XdDSKLFo4Wp9  
• Selection of abstracts and details of online registration will be notified by email by 19 November 2023.
• Registration deadline for presenters: 23 November 2023
• Full papers for presentation not exceeding 2000 words, following MLA style (9^th edition), are to be submitted by email to english.conference.sjm@gmail.com by 28 November 2023.
• Conference dates: 1-2 December 2023

Publication: Submitted papers will be peer-reviewed by experts in respective areas and published in an edited volume by a reputed national academic publisher.

Conference registration fees:

Paper presentation: Rs 350.00 (Co-authored papers require individual registration)

Contact Information

Dr Durba Basu

Assistant Professor and Head

Department of English

Swarnamoyee Jogendranath Mahavidyalaya

Amdabad, Purba Medinipur

West Bengal 721650

India

 

Contact Email

english.conference.sjm@gmail.com

URL

https://www.sjmahavidyalaya.in/

CFP: MUSLIM WOMEN’S POPULAR FICTION INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE – 5-9 SEPTEMBER 2023

 MUSLIM WOMEN’S POPULAR FICTION INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE – 5-9 SEPTEMBER 2023

Muslim Women’s Popular Fiction AHRC Research Network International Conference

Birmingham, UK, 5-9 September 2023

Free to attend for all speakers and attendees.

Keynote speakers

Professor Claire Chambers

Dr Rehana Ahmed

In the twenty-first century, readers, publishers, and booksellers have noted a surge in popularity of genre works written by Muslim women, particularly in the Anglosphere. From the detective novels of Ausma Zehanat Khan to G. Willow Wilson’s fantasy fiction, Ayisha Malik’s romantic fiction to graphic novels by Marjane Satrapi – Muslim women authors are embracing popular fiction forms and genres.

We invite paper proposals for a free international conference on Muslim women’s popular and genre fiction and film across all languages, forms and periods. We aim to bring together researchers to examine the global turn in popular fiction, and the concurrent ‘popular turn’ in Muslim women’s writing and film-making. Focusing on writing by women deemed ‘popular’ rather than ‘literary’, we encourage proposals that engage with under-studied popular and genre texts (including romance, chick lit, detective fiction, Young Adult, fantasy, life writing, and science fiction) from a range of critical disciplinary perspectives.

Indicative topics (not exhaustive):

• Studies of individual authors or works of popular and genre fiction
• Translation of popular and genre works by Muslim authors
• Visual culture (graphic novels, comics, film, TV)
• Digital culture (Instagram, YouTube, BookTok)
• Decoloniality and popular fiction
• Teaching Muslim women’s popular fiction
• Publishing and production

A key aim of the conference is to encourage collaboration between researchers working in similar areas but across languages, disciplines and genres. The conference programme includes time for researchers to meet previously identified and new research partners during structured sessions in which network members can plan for future collaboration. We intend to publish collaborative outputs resulting from the conference in an edited book, Muslim Women’s Popular Fiction, intended for publication in Manchester University Press’ Multicultural Textualities series.

We have allocated funding to help with travel and attendance costs to make the conference as accessible as possible. The conference will be child-friendly, with play spaces available. We are investigating a hybrid option – please indicate in your proposal whether this is an option you would like to consider.

Please send abstracts of 250 words for 20-minute papers, including a short bio for all speakers, to a.burge@bham.ac.uk by 30 April 2023. Acceptances will be sent by the end of April. Panel proposals of three or more papers are also welcome. Please direct all queries to a.burge@bham.ac.uk.

For more information, go to: https://more.bham.ac.uk/mwpf-network/

Funding generously provided by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Contact Email: 

a.burge@bham.ac.uk

URL: 

https://more.bham.ac.uk/mwpf-network/muslim-womens-popular-fiction-international-conference/