Call for Papers - Indian #Folklife Journal - ‘#Translating #Texts, Translating #Cultures’-#Indian #Folklife a Quarterly quasi-research #Journal-June 2024

 “Translation is the performative nature of cultural communication” (Homi Bhabha )

The process of translation and the interpretation of any given text are intimately intertwined with the notion of culture. In the past two to three decades, translation has undergone a notable transformation, emerging as a more creative and noticeably active discipline. Translations go beyond mere translation of words and sentence structures; they encapsulate ideologies, values, and ways of life specific to a particular culture. In traditional discussions on translation, the challenges, often labeled as "culture-specific," centre around crucial elements that pose intricate difficulties in conveying them with precision.

Literary translation stands out as a primary means of communication across cultures. It is imperative to acknowledge that literary texts are essentially cultural constructs, where language functions as the medium for cultural expression. Literary texts as such exhibit numerous linguistic nuances, along with reflections of social and cultural aspects of our lives. The translation of a literary text is thus no longer a mere exchange between two languages but a nuanced negotiation between two distinct cultures. The ability of culture to engage in translation is therefore a crucial aspect to be considered at this point. Cultural dynamics predominantly operate through translational activities as the incorporation of new texts is essential for cultural innovation and the recognition of its distinctiveness.  

Translation is a process for folklore ethnographic research as well. The translation of folk literature necessitates an exploration into the thought processes of the narrator, the translator, and the reader. More so in the native contexts. Clearly, these considerations merit discussion within the context of translating both texts and cultures. There appears to be an imminent need to safeguard and reserve a modest space for the translations of folk literature and folklore ethnography in this postcolonial-postmodernist era, where constant innovation arises through the lens of cultural translation. In the new century, there exists an increased understanding of the cultural significance of translated texts, especially on folk literature and folklore ethnography, in relation to their influence on the identity of the receiving culture.

76%

EthnicJunction Women's Chanderi Silk Jacquard Straight Kurta Pant with Dupatta Set (Skd34-Sita-Green_2Xl)

₹2,676.00

69%

Rangnavi Women Rayon Anarkali Embroidered Printed Anarkali Salwar Kameez XL

₹2,499.00

67%

Sidhidata Women's Georgette Printed Ready To Wear one Minute Saree With Unstitched Blouse Piece (1000 Butty White_White_Free Size)

₹2,999.00

75%

Women Rayon Anarkali Embroidered Printed Kurta Pant and Dupatta Set Kurta Sets Kurtis | Women Kurta Pant Set Women Kurti Set with Pant | Women Kurti Set with Pant Light Pink (XX-Large, Light Pink)

₹2,999.00

80%

Fashion Basket Women's Georgette Green Semi-Stitched Anarkali Dress Material

₹4,699.00

50%

INFOTECH Traditional Ethnic Sequence Anarkali Full Length and Stitch Embroidery Work Made with Pure Georgette Gown for Stylish Women (Small, Rani)

₹1,999.00

78%

EthnicJunction Women's Chinon Embroidered Straight Front Slit Kurta Palazzo & Organza Dupatta Set(SKD36-Begum-Pink_S)

₹2,996.00

76%

EthnicJunction Women's Georgette Chikankari Embroidered Short Kurti(T6-Paaro-Black_L)

₹1,716.00

40%

Chitra Creation Naira Cut Suit With Pant & Malmal Printed Dupatta Set for Women | Heavy Embroidery Work 3/4 Sleeves Pure Rayon Kurta For Girls Women Red XXL

₹1,299.00

83%

EthnicJunction Women's Woven Striped Work Straight Kurta with Pant (BT5-Rangsari-Pink_XL_Pink)

₹2,396.00

Indian Folklife a Quarterly quasi-research Journal [https://indianfolklore.org/index.php/if] invites original, unpublished research/reflective papers for the forthcoming issue (June 2024). The theme for the papers is on ‘Translating Text, Translating culture’ within the context of folklife in general. The word limit for the papers is 1500-2000. 

Contributions in English should be submitted in MSWord (.docx or.doc) to 

jocicausa@gmail.com [Dr JP Rajendran- Special Editor] 

and 

muthu@indianfolklore.org 

[CC to Dr MD Muthukumaraswamy - Director, NFSC] on or before 31st March 2024. Indian Folklife follows the latest MLA Stylesheet. For article submissions, please follow the guidelines in the website. https://indianfolklore.org/index.php/if/about/submissions 

Contact Information

National Folklore Support Centre (NFSC), having its address at #508, Fifth Floor, Kaveri complex, 96, Mahatma Gandhi Road, Nungambakkam, Chennai- 600034 Tamilnadu India. NFSC is a non governmental, non-profit organisation, registered in Chennai, dedicated to the promotion of Indian Folklore, research, education, training, networking and publications.

Contact Email

jocicausa@gmail.com

URL

https://indianfolklore.org/index.php/if/about

Attachments

Call for papers - Indian Folklife

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)

CFP: 10th Annual National RAW.Conference on COMPARATIVE LITERATURE: PERSPECTIVES, PRACTICES, POSITIONS: 5th – 7th March 2024 University of Hyderabad

Centre for Comparative Literature

School of Humanities University of Hyderabad

Hyderabad, Telangana – 500046, India

CALL FOR PAPERS

“We all know that the word ‘method’ is eventually derived from the Greek ‘methodos’ which again is derived from ‘meta’ meaning ‘after’ and ‘hodos’ meaning ‘way’. If method is moving after a way, then it must have been arrived at after moving wayward for some time.” 

-Amiya Dev, “Comparative Literature from Below”, JJCL 29

Comparative literature is a way of reading literature. Literature is the object of study and the method is ‘comparative’. This begs questions like: what does a comparative reading entail? Why should we study literature comparatively? And most importantly, how do we do a comparative reading? These questions have been raised time and again at different locations, both by people within and outside the discipline and various answers have been offered. Historically, different ‘schools’ of comparative literature (the French school, the Russian school, the German school et al.) have conceptualized the method of comparison in different ways. If we look at comparative literature as a situated interpretive practice (as opposed to a theory or body of works), the question of (spatio-temporal and cultural) location becomes very important. Given our location in the plurilingual and pluricultural society of India, where living with plurality and difference is part of our quotidian reality, can we think of an Indian way of doing comparative literature founded upon plurality, relationality and an ethical engagement with difference?

Given the nature of literature which is marked by the singularity of each ‘text’ and its irreducible difference from another of its kind, how do we conceptualize a comparative method that is sensitive to this fact? Our method should follow a  “from below” (Amiya Dev) approach which modifies itself according to the literary data and does not tweak data to fit the method and creates an open and inclusive discourse. Such an approach makes comparative literature a willing and ethical engagement with alterity and difference aimed at understanding the Other. Our textual practices of reading, writing and interpretation are aimed at understanding the process of textualization, its production and reception, in order to access through literature what Simone de Beauvoir calls a “taste of another life”. These acts of conscious and reflective reading taking into account the ontological plurality, relationality and living with alterity which are conditions of our being, we believe, are fundamental to comparative literature as a practice across the world.  

Apart from this, what else can we say, if anything, in general about our research method  given that each literary text is singular and hence, each engagement with it is unique? What are the essential characteristics our method must have so that we don’t move too wayward and invite charges of dilettantism that is often levelled against our discipline? Given the history of the discipline which has been beset by a number of crises, even pronouncements of death, calls for dissolution into other disciplines which are often from the Anglo-Saxon academia, how should the comparative method be applied, especially in the Indian academia, to different areas of research and assert its vitality and relevance for a location like ours? What makes our practice different from that of other disciplines like English studies, cultural studies, translation studies, area studies etc.? What is the relationship of comparative practice with theory? How do we negotiate with categories that are often used for the study of literature such as those based on region (South Asia, the Global South, the ‘third world’, regional language literatures, the Commonwealth, the nation), history (the post-colonial, industrial modernity) or identity (based on caste, class, race, gender, sexuality, religion,  and other theories of marginalization)? What are the ethics and aesthetics of our engagement with alterity and plurality? Can we interrogate received categories and ideas of comparison and construct a method for research that is suitable to study our lived realities? This conference is an attempt to bring fellow comparatists together to reflect on these questions and clarify for ourselves and “others” the relevance of comparative literature methodology for literary studies today, in India and elsewhere and share our insights and ideas from the point of view of our own practice of comparative literature.

We invite papers that engage with, but not limited to, the following themes:

• Literary historiography, genology and thematology: Integrated approaches

• Comparative poetics: Sanskrit, Tamil, Greek, Perso-Arabic et al.

• Literature and other arts: relations and intermediality

• Reception aesthetics and reception history

• Organic plurality of Indian languages: implications for literary studies

• Literary movements and movements of literatures

• Otherness and difference: encounters, engagements and ethics

• Literary relations: interliterariness, contact and literary transactions

• India as a site for comparative literature

• Comics and graphic narratives

• Spatiality, temporality, chronotope, heterotopia

• Affective and existential and experiential/phenomenological categories for literary studies

• Canons: making, unmaking and beyond

• Dismantling hierarchies in differences

• Aesthetics: poetics and politics

• Identity and difference: comparative perspectives vis-à-vis literature

• Disability as difference

• Discourses of identity and comparative literature: caste, class, race, religion,  gender, sexuality, marginality 

• Virtuality and literariness: new forms and modes of writing

• Orality, oratures, oral and performance traditions

• Narratology, narrativization and narratives of the other/ othered narratives

We expect the papers to deal with the practical aspects of Comparative Literature and demonstrate how the comparative approach shapes their actual practice of engaging with and reading literary and cultural texts, practices and phenomena. In other words, we expect to see the application of the comparative approach in reading of particular ‘texts’ in the papers and not just an exploration of theoretical ideas. Research scholars working in any discipline, particularly those working in literary studies in any language from a comparative perspective, are encouraged to send in their abstracts. Language of presentation will be English only due to logistical reasons. 

15%

Comparative English Literature

₹595.00

14%

Comparative literature

₹3,592.00

19%

Comparative Literature: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

₹895.00

22%

Studies In Comparative Literature

₹695.00

13%

Glimpses Of Comparative Literature

₹595.00

15%

MEG-15: Comparative Literature: Theory and Practice (IGNOU Study Guide Book)

₹350.00

20%

Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturism (Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society)

₹3,800.00

35%

NEERAJ MEG-15 Comparative Literature : Theory And Practice- English Medium for MA- IGNOU - Chapter Wise Help Book including Solved Sample Papers – Published by Neeraj Publications

₹320.00

34%

Gullybaba IGNOU 2nd Year MA (Latest Edition) MEG-15 Comparative Literature : Theory and Practice IGNOU Help Book with Solved Previous Years' Question Papers and Important Exam Notes [Paperback] Gullybaba.com Panel

₹300.00

Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization

Abstracts of about 300 words with a title and 5-6 keywords may be uploaded to https://forms.gle/dwt7tKGxgnWiJTLeA  by  25th January 2024.

RAW.Con or Researchers at Work Conference is an annual offline event organized by the students of the Centre for Comparative Literature (CCL) at the University of Hyderabad. The conference is open to students who have registered for Ph.D. or aspiring PhD scholars (a few slots are available for MA students). As per practice, some of the eminent scholars will also be invited as resource persons for the conference. Candidates whose abstracts have been selected will be informed by 10th  February 2024. If your abstract is accepted after review, you will be required to email the full paper by 24th February 2024. Selected paper presenters will be provided bed and board, and often train fare as well, if the budget allows.

Organizing Team: 

Asit Kumar Biswal 

Jomina C. George 

R. Lalhriatpuii