Call for Papers on #South #Asian #Crime #Fiction since the 1950s -#FilmStudies #Cinema #Regionalcinema, #Vernacular -June 2024

Crime Fiction has been one of the popular genres for the South Asian reading public since colonial times. The simultaneous emergence of murder mysteries, detective fiction, thrillers in the metropolis as well as the colonies has been richly documented by the brilliant work done in Urdu, Hindi and Bangla by Naim (2023), Brueck and Orsini (2022), Roy (2020, 2017), Oesterheld (2009), Daeschel (2003) and others. Moving beyond arguments of imitative models into debates on the postcolonial in crime fiction, world crime fiction, gender in twentieth century crime writings, espionage narratives during the Cold War and more, this edited volume proposes to launch into broader yet interconnected themes of crime fiction in the regional languages and cartographies in South Asia. We broadly define the region as that of India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The proposed volume will shift the focus away from anglocentric studies of crime fiction to explore the production, reception, and scholarship of crime fiction in the indigenous languages of South Asia since the 1950s. We seek chapters that address the following themes but are not necessarily restricted to them:  

 

1. Vernacular crime fiction in the shadow of the Cold War
2. Crime fiction published in the early days of the young nations of India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka  
3. Women as actors, writers, and publishers in South Asian crime fiction
4. Configurations of gender: women criminals, vamps, molls, and women detectives
5. Urban crime or the city as the centre of crime and detection. How does the character of a metropolis interact with the mechanics of crime fiction?
6. Migration and crime fiction in the late twentieth century 
7. Film and crime fiction (our primary interest is fiction)
8. Translations, adaptations, and imitations 
9. Vernacular print cultures such as magazines and newspapers and crime fiction
10. Readership and vernacular crime fiction
11. Pulp fiction/Lowbrow fiction and crime fiction in regional languages
12. Gothic and crime fiction in South Asia 

 

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Submission guidelines:

Please send your abstracts (500 words) and a short bio-note (50 words) by March 15th to southasiancriminality@gmail.com. We will get back to you with our responses promptly by 1st April. If selected, full chapters (4,000 - 6,000 words) are to be submitted no later than 30th June, 2024. In case of any query do not hesitate to contact us on the email address provided. 

 Editors:

 Shweta Sachdeva Jha (Associate Professor, Department of English, Miranda House, University of Delhi), 

Garima Yadav (Assistant Professor, Department of English, Shaheed Bhagat Singh College, University of Delhi)

 

Contact Email

southasiancriminality@gmail.com

Call for Abstracts: “WHO’S IN, WHO’S OUT”: #COMMUNITY AND #DIVERSITY IN #SHAKESPEARE- Annual #Conference #German #Shakespeare Society 2024

 Time and again, Shakespeare demonstrates the frailty and contingency of the many historical and “imagined” communities (Anderson) that feature in his works. Many of his plays revolve around the conflict between individuals and society, depicting the bonds between friends, lovers, family members or even whole nations being put to the test by desire, jealousy, and ambition. If Shakespeare’s communities are unstable to begin with, then discussions of diversity bring to light that very instability even further. His works have been both hailed for showcasing the universality of human nature and critiqued for implicitly reinforcing a Western, Eurocentric world view. Shakespearean drama walks a fine line between incorporating diverse facets of early modern life – including gender and sexuality, race, and religion – and perpetuating insidious mechanisms of marginalisation and othering, as the fates of some of the figureheads of Shakespearean diversity, such as Shylock, Othello and Caliban, show. On Shakespeare’s stage, community and diversity are intimately but uneasily paired and expose the various ways in which “difference”, as Goran Stanivukovic writes in Queer Shakespeare: Desire and Sexuality (2017), is “based on suppression, occlusion and semantic difference of allied vocabulary” (24). Shakespeare thus makes us ponder the question “who’s in, who’s out” (King Lear 5.3.16) both in early modern times and in ours. While the dramatic representations of these conflicts are inevitably bound to the historical contexts that helped produce them, the theatre itself always had and still has the potential to renegotiate them and to newly create communities, just as it is capable of diversifying Shakespeare, and making his works more inclusive for 21st century audiences.

In light of this complex nexus, we invite short papers on how Shakespeare’s works, their performance, and reception engage with community, diversity, and the difficult dynamics between them. Topics may include, but are in no way limited to:

- Representations of inclusion and exclusion in Shakespeare’s works

- Community and diversity in the early modern period

- Shakespeare’s treatment of marriage, friendship, family, and kinship

- Intersectional Shakespeare

- Shakespeare and (trans)national communities

- Diversifying the Shakespearean canon through ‘non-canonical’ readings

- Adapting and appropriating Shakespeare’s works to build more inclusive communities

- Institutional (lack of) diversity and community in Shakespeare studies

- Teaching Shakespeare more ‘diversely’

- Accessible Shakespeare

Our seminar will address these issues with a panel of six papers during the annual conference of the German Shakespeare Association, Shakespeare-Tage, which will take place from 19–21 April 2024 in Bochum, Germany. As critical input for the discussion, we invite papers of no more than 15 minutes that present concrete case studies, concise examples and strong views on the topic. Please send your proposals (abstracts of 300 words) by 01 December 2023 to the seminar convenors:

Dr. Marlene Dirschauer, University of Hamburg: marlene.dirschauer@uni-hamburg.de

Dr. Jonas Kellermann, University of Konstanz: jonas.kellermann@uni-konstanz.de

The Seminar provides a forum for established as well as young scholars to discuss texts and contexts. Participants of the seminar will subsequently be invited to submit extended versions of their papers for publication in Shakespeare Seminar Online (SSO). While we cannot offer travel bursaries, the association will arrange for the accommodation of all participants in a hotel close to the main venues. For more information, please contact Marlene Dirschauer and Jonas Kellermann. For more information about the events and publications also see: https://shakespeare-gesellschaft.de/.