CFP: Edited Volume on Deconstructing the #Gender-Based #Violence in #South #Asian #Literature and #Popular #Culture

Gender-based violence is a worldwide issue with an extended past that is predominantly an outcome of social norms and power disparities. In countries as different as Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Nicaragua, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe, studies find that violence is frequently viewed as physical chastisement—the husband’s right to ‘correct’ an erring wife (Heise 1999). Unfortunately, it is one of many societal concerns that literature has long addressed. According to the analysis of a report by CARE and International Rescue, gender-based violence has arisen amid the pandemic and quarantines (Haneef and Kalyanpur 2020). Authors from different corners of the world have examined the complexities of violence and its effects on individuals and society in everything from classic works to modern novels. Some worth mentioning examples would be Lolita (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) by Maya Angelou, Kindred (1979) by Octavia E. Butler, Milk and Honey (2014) by Rupi Kaur, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017) by Roxane Gay, Speak: The Graphic Novel (2018) by Laurie Halse Anderson, My Dark Vanessa (2020) by Kate Elizabeth Russell, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands (2022) by Kate Beaton, When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife by Meena Kandasamy. Reading literature offers readers an opportunity to empathise with characters’ experiences and gain a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the emotional and psychological aspects of gender-based violence often in the forms of ‘slow violence’ (Nixon 2011). Literature can aid readers in developing empathy for survivors through fictional narratives and in understanding the value of services and support for victims. Additionally, literature frequently offers a voice to marginalised people, highlighting their experiences and encouraging societal change. Gavey’s study Just Sex? The Cultural Scaffolding of Rape (2005) argues that cultural scaffolding continues to make rape not only possible but probable and that this support provides an alibi for minimalizing rape and creating a norm for masculine sex. (Zare 3). Hence, in a way, the intertwined relationship between violence and its impacts passes through lopsided twists and turns.

 

Apart from literature, popular culture has also played a pivotal role in necessitating the trajectories of violence and perpetrations. Through films, television shows, and online media, gender-based violence is frequently portrayed in popular culture. A recent graphic anthology Drawing the Line: Indian Women Fight Back! (2014) depicts the various ways of violence in fourteen provocative sketch-stories. Scenes of sexual, emotional, and physical abuse might be shown, feeding false narratives and diminishing viewers' awareness of how severe these behaviours are.

 

This edited collection will examine how gender-based violence has been portrayed in literature and popular culture in the South Asian Context, emphasising the adverse impacts on society as well as its possibility to be changed. We are looking for chapters that deepen our understanding of different dimensions of Gender-based Violence.

 

Possible topics may include, but not are not limited to:

• Violence in South Asian Autobiographies

• Trauma Narratives in South Asian Narratives

• Domestic Violence in South Asian Comics

• Trafficking, Trauma, and Torment in South Asian Web-series

• Physical and Psychological Abuse in South Asian Popular Culture

• Pain, Paranoia, and Partner Violence in South Asian Movies

• Film and Fiction: Perpetrators and Victims

• Mini-narratives on Facebook and Instagram

Last Date of Submission of Full Manuscript: 31st December 2023

Decision on Submission: 1st March 2024

Scan the QR Code or Click on the Submission Portal: https://forms.gle/mcGbygpvaXTqhknN7

Full papers should be no longer than 8000 words.

Authors are requested to follow MLA 8th Edition. All submissions will be peer-reviewed.

We will publish the Edited Volume with a reputed publication house.

contact email: 

partha.bhattacharjee1990@gmail.com

CFP: Graduate Conference: Remembering Histories: Memory, Transmission and Identities-Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi

 The discursive nature of history has been exposed through multiple theoretical lenses, subjectivities, and socio-political positions that have expressed its polylogic dimensions. The post-structuralist turn of humanities with the advent of fields such as trauma and memory studies also brought to the fore the role and politics of remembering as a mode of narrating and understanding claims to history. Understood both as an individual and collective-social practice, history is dynamic and open to contestations. Understanding history is therefore an attempt to understand ongoing negotiations with a past that continues to linger beyond its assumed temporal limits. Often, this continues across generations especially when ideas of power and politics, justice and healing get inexplicably intertwined with remembering. This inheritance of a past calls forth a need to analyse the multigenerational character of individual and collective memory.

Drawing on Jan Assmann’s notion of cultural memory, and Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, this conference seeks to stir discussions on the dynamic space and relationship between history and remembering with a special focus on transmission of history, via memory, through time and generations.

The conference will explore questions such as:

How is history a mode of remembering? 

How are collective identities meshed out of experiencing the unfolding of history?

How is memory mediated at individual and collective levels?

How is remembering a clinical and ethical enterprise? In what ways do testimonies and literary texts navigate the politics of memory?

Themes:

● Transgenerational memory and history

● History and ‘counter’ history

● Modes and politics of remembering

● Literature and History

● Testimonial literature

● Trauma and memory

● Individual and collective trauma

● Remembering and forgetting

● Mass media

● Representation, language, and memory

● Material Memory

● Oral history

● History of emotions

Submission Guidelines:

We invite abstracts of maximum 250 words related to the theme along with a short bio note. 

All papers must be original to the best of their knowledge and adhere to the MLA 9th edition. 

The time limit for each presentation is 10 minutes. Any kind of plagiarism is not allowed.

Note: Due to monetary constraints, the organizers won’t be responsible for any expenses borne by the participants. Participants would have to look after their own transportation and accommodation.

Important Dates:

Submission of Abstracts: 25th November, 2023

Intimation of Accepted Abstracts: 5th December, 2023

Submission of Full Length Papers: 10th January, 2023

Intimation of Accepted Full Length Papers: 20th January, 2023

Paper presentation and Panel Discussion: 29th January, 2024

 

Submission form:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeOLQpyLrFvHyVYLTHPRpjYQ3PfvR_e...

 

For further queries, contact:

englitassociation.svc@gmail.com

Aswathi Alappat (President)- aswathisalappat@gmail.com

Harsha (President)- harshasin641@gmail.com

Himangi Patnaik (General Secretary)- himangipatnaik04@gmail.com

Narjis Bint Islam (Joint Secretary)- narjis22bintislam@gmail.com

INTERNATIONAL #CONFERENCE ON #MEMORY #STUDIES -DEPARTMENTS OF ENGLISH AND HISTORY LORETO COLLEGE, #KOLKATA- February, 2024)

 

CONCEPT NOTE:

Memory studies is a multidisciplinary field which combines intellectual strands from literature, history, philosophy, psychology and sociology, among others. Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory (1896), Paul Ricœur’s Memory, History and Forgetting (2004), French historian Pierre Nora’s Realms of Memory (1996) and Jacques Le Goff’s History and Memory (1992) have inspired much research in the area of memory studies. Memory can be both an individual phenomenon as well as societal and collective. Forms of remembering operate as individual and collective representations of the past and they constitute a range of cultural resources for personal, social and historical identities, privileging particular readings of the past and subordinating others. Collective memory can serve as a therapeutic practice for a community and its members, as it comprises an active constructive process during which the members of a community participate in interpreting and processing shared past experiences (particularly traumas) into eventual memory representations, often in such forms as narratives, dramatizations, art, and ritual. Literature thus forms an important medium of cultural memory. The mass media plays a key role in the constitution of memory – and the politics of remembering is intrinsically connected to power.  The act of remembering, whether involving individual, socio-historical or cultural representations of the past, is a process which involves selections, absences and multiple, potentially conflicting accounts. Memories are part of a larger process of dynamic cultural negotiation involving history and literature, which defines memories as narratives, and as fluid and mediated cultural and personal traces of the past. In the modern world, then, memory is an important means of establishing authority or destabilising grand narratives of history and power, of evoking nostalgia and helping to forge personal and national identity.

The conference will seek to address issues such as the following:

How do we represent the past to ourselves and to others? Which of our many pasts do we represent, and when, where, and why do we change those representations? How do those representations shape our actions, identities, and understandings? How do individual-level processes interact with collective ones, and vice versa? What does it mean to think about “memory” in these broad ways? In what ways are we ethically and politically obligated to remember, and what are the consequences of forgetting or failing to meet these obligations?

Keynote Speakers:

Prof. Stef Craps (University of Ghent, Belgium)

Dr. Abhishek Parui (IIT Madras)

Special Plenary Sessions:

Dr. Itay Lotem (University of Westminster, London)

Ms. Roberta Bacic (Founder of Conflict Textiles, Northern Ireland)

We invite paper submissions of 15-20 minutes duration from scholars whose work addresses topics including, but not limited to the following fields:

• Memory and oral history
• Contested histories and memory
• Memory, memorials, the visual arts, archives, installations
• Landscape and memory
• Memory and trauma (slavery, Partition, World Wars, Holocaust, Irish conflict, genocide, apartheid, 9/11, pandemic etc)
• Literature and nostalgia
• Memory and the diaspora
• Memory and the Media
• Collective Memory
• Cultural Memory

 

To submit a proposal, please send abstracts to conferencememorystudies@gmail.com 

Please include the following in one PDF:

• Paper title

• Paper abstract (250-word maximum)

• CV with your full name, institutional affiliation (if applicable), title, and email address

 

Paper presenters will be informed by 15 November, 2023.

 

Conference Convenor: Sukanya Dasgupta

Co-Convenor: Suparna Ghosh

Head of the Organizing Committee: Srijita Chakravarty

 

Following the conference, a selection of papers will be chosen by the organizers for inclusion in a proposed edited volume.