Call For Applications : Summer workshop on The Question of Representation in #Contemporary #Indian #Literature( Funded Accommodation)-University of Tübingen, Germany

Summer Workshop at the University of Tübingen, Germany

10-12.06.2024 (in person)

In Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, The Wife of Bath refers to the Aesopian fable of the painting of the lion. The lion complains about the painting, which demonstrates a man defeating a lion, and asserts that the painting would look very different if a lion had painted it. And so asks the Wife of Bath: ‘Who painted the lion, tell me, who?’

If the dominant narrative is shaped by the powerful and the victorious, then voice, narration, and representation become powerful tools, especially for marginalized groups.. Re-examining and interrogating these frames of reference help to find new answers to important questions: who gets to tell whose story? Who has what at stake and who is representing whom? Where does the line between fiction and authentic representation get drawn?

Who is allowed to tell whose story? If in fiction one is allowed to only tell their own privately lived experiences, how is that fiction? What does it do to representation of groups that are already endangered?

In this context, the question of authentic voice and its representation looms paramount and the writing of literature its biggest ally.

Gayatri Chakrovarty Spivak asked in her influential work ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988), and scholarly work in literary and critical studies is still attempting to satisfactorily answer the question. Are the powerless ever able to raise their voice in a world where even the medium of language is biased to favor those in power?

Postcolonial and subaltern studies have repeatedly questioned the ways in which established ideologies suppress the needs and demands of the most vulnerable sections of a society. These questions take on even more significance in literature from India where issues of caste, class, religion and gender, and the many inbuilt inequalities and discriminations, constantly determine identity and its representation. The reading of literature presents a richer understanding of this new and complex world, where capitalism disrupts and catapults lives, and a postcolonial framework seeks to define itself without its colonial past, and not simply react to it.

The workshop’s interdisciplinary approach looks at the topic and the literary frameworks that surround it from two points of view: the literature on the page and its many facets, as well as the tools employed in the writing of that literature. The two-pronged outlook will help deepen the understanding of what is perceived as literature and its production.

The workshop encompasses the wider areas of subaltern and postcolonial studies, as well as the craft employed in a work of literature. Researchers are invited to engage with the questions of representation and its nature in contemporary Indian literature, as well as in the wider postcolonial framework.

The following themes within research will be given priority for participation:

· Subaltern and marginalized voices in Indian literature

· Point of view and narrative in fiction

· Representation of the subaltern

· Identity and power in terms of religion, caste, class, gender, and sexuality

· Writing and marginalized voices

· Narrative and language

· Revisionist narratives

· Identity politics in Indian literature

· The writing of contemporary Indian fiction

· Identity in postcolonial literature

· Postcolonial subjects and identities

· Nation, nationalism and literature

· Perspective and voice in creative writing

For an interdisciplinary approach, we encourage participants who work in literary studies, creative writing, history, philosophy, anthropology, cultural studies, linguistics, psychology, political sciences, sociology, and artificial intelligence for arts to apply.

We invite researchers to present 20 minute presentations of papers and articles. Abstracts of up to 300 words, with a brief bio note, and a short academic CV, should be sent to srishti.chaudhary@uni-tuebingen.de or on the form linked here:

https://forms.gle/GBML7SoGMiFJrKmy7

Deadline: 15.03.2024

Notice of acceptance: 22.03.2024

The accommodation for the duration of the workshop for all participants is funded as a part of the Excellence Strategy of the German Federal and State Governments.

Transportation costs will have to be self-funded.

srishti.chaudhary@uni-tuebingen.de

Srishti Chaudhary

CALL FOR PAPERS :National Conference on New National Allegories: Twenty-First Century India in the Indian English Novel from 1990s to the present 1st March 2024 -Zakir Husain Delhi College (Evening) University of Delhi

Since its earliest formative years, the Indian novel has been preoccupied with the thematic of the nation, its formation, its articulation and its narration. Early novels like Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Anandamath, Tagore’s Home and the World and Raja Rao’s Kanthapura set the initial trends in the modes of allegorizing the Indian nation. Along its long trajectory, over the twentieth century, the literary form managed to permeate almost all the languages of the Indian subcontinent, picking up other thematics such as the anti-colonial struggle, gender, caste and class concerns, communal, regional and ethnic questions. Even while being ostensibly focused on these concerns and questions, the Indian novel in English remained largely centred around the ideations and elaborations of the Indian nation. As the first nation-republic, installed in 1950, began to transform, irrevocably, in 1991 under global and domestic imperatives, the corollary cultural impacts and their cultural products, such as the Indian novel, were also bound to transform. The Indian nation emerged anew as an interesting subject where writers from various social, political and economic groups vied with each other to present and represent the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’ India. In other words, the post-1991 India which laid the foundations of twenty-first century India produced a newer version of the Jamesonian ‘national allegory’, as much as it had been produced pre- and post-1947. It is this post-1991 ‘national allegory’ that the proposed conference aims to investigate. Understanding the manners in which the post-1991 Indian novel addresses the issues and questions of Indian representations (to the home and the world), both from nationalist and decolonial as well as postcolonial points of departure is to form the anchor of the conference. To this end, the conference invites scholarly research papers in English on how the nation has been discussed, imagined, represented and narrated in the works of English language writers located within or outside India. Therefore, without placing a limitation, it is encouraged to bring the works of such writers to the fore who have followed the generation of Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, VS Naipaul, Vikram Seth, Rohinton Mistry, Jhumpa Lahiri and such others. This may include Arvind Adiga, Chetan Bhagat, Jeet Thayil, Amish Tripathi, Ashwin Sanghi, Manu Joseph and their contemporaries. The papers may include but may not be limited to the following topics:

Indian nation in the Indian novel in the twenty first century

Neo-nationalism/national self-assertion in the Indian novel

Postcolonialism versus decolonialism in the Indian novel

Return the white western gaze in the twenty-first century

Cognising neo-orientalisms and neo-imperialisms

Indian literary subjectivity in the twenty-first century

Abstracts of 300-350 words along with a brief bionote may be sent to zhceengconference@gmail.com by 18th February 2024.

The acceptance will be notified by 21st February 2024. Full papers may be submitted up to 5 days prior to the conference.

Registration fee and the payment process will be shared upon acceptance.

CFA: International Conference on "Linking Latitudes: #Postcolonialism and After"- 3-5 Feb, 2024 #Swami #Vivekananda University Organized in collaboration with #Oxford University #Press, #Cambridge University #Press, #Taylor & #Francis (#Routledge) and #SAGE

This international conference intends to bring together emerging insights from across the humanities and social sciences to highlight how postcolonial studies is being transformed by increasingly influential and radical approaches to nature, matter, subjectivity, human agency,  politics, literature and cultural practice. These include decolonial studies, political ontology, political ecology, indigeneity, posthumanism, transnationalism and so on. It therefore demands new ontological discourses that will reflexively situate our new intellective challenges within the long histories of theoretical narratives. It is time now we had devised and developed interdisciplinary episteme to think  through global, critical, transnational and empirical phenomena that include city spaces and urbanisms in the Global North and South, food politics, colonial land use, cultural and cosmic representation in film, theatre, and poetry, nation building, the Anthropocene, materiality,  pluriversality,  cosmopolitan world views etc  Arif  Dilrik therefore ironically quipped in The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism: “Postcolonial begins …when Third World intellectuals have arrived in First World academe…then perhaps it ends when every department has hired a postcolonialist”.

Already there are multiple critical voices in this direction. There are dramatic suggestions that postcolonialism is over and it has been replaced by new critical discourses. In 2007, PMLA published an Editor’s Column provocatively entitled “The End of Postcolonial Theory”. We may also  refer to certain critical works, such as Hamid Dabashi’s The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism ( ZED Books, London, 2012), Jane Hiddleston’s Writing After Postcolonialism (Bloomsbury, 2017), or Patrick Chabal’s The End of Conceit: Western Rationality after Postcolonialism (ZED Books, London, 2012).

2%

A Warble of Postcolonial Voices | Short Stories

₹275.00

7%

The Post-Colonial Studies Reader

₹750.00

The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English

DOABA'S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POST-COLONIAL LITERATURE

3%

The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel

₹695.00

18%

Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics, and Self-Representation: 24 (Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures)

₹3,693.00

14%

Mapping Postcolonial and Subaltern Perspectives : A Reading through Indian Literary Texts

₹320.00

Camb Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies

Colonial and Postcolonial Literature

51%

A Critique of Postcolonial Reason – Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Paper) (OIP)

₹5,747.92

This conference will be attended by Prof. Bill Ashcroft, Prof. Paul Sharrad, Prof. Helen Pringle and other experts from the field.

Under the  rubric of new shifting voices, we intend to focus on, though not strictly limited to,  the following areas:

 

• Postcolonialism: Concurrence and Ruptures
• Subalternity and Indigeneity
• Global South and the postcolonial aftermath
• African postcolonial Negotiations
• Nationalism to Transnationalism
• Power, Justice and Ideology
• Disnarration and postcoloniality
• Memory, amnesia and power
• Translation transcription and mimicry
• Postcolonial Environmentalism
• Gender and Postcolonial Studies
• Postcolonialism to posthumanism

 

Abstracts not exceeding 200 words should be sent to by email: icllpa@svu.ac.in

Deadline for submissions:  January 20, 2024

Registration Fees: Faculty Members and others: Rs 3000 (National)

                              Students and Researchers: Rs 2000 (National)