National Seminar on Narrating Travel, Mapping Identities March 5-7, 2018 Institute of English University of Kerala

Call for Papers

Travel is simply seen as the process of getting from point A to point B. And often, in everyday practices, it may be just that. But when looked at from the intersectional vantage point of transcultural and transnational negotiations, travel indeed demands a greater engagement. With the explosion of means of travel, websites, tour groups, travel writers and bloggers, tourism promos by countries and individual states, places have moved closer and hence the need to take the road less travelled has become compelling, making the narrator an explorer seeking a uniqueness quotient, urging one to examine the rubrics of social and cultural engagement, while factoring in race, class and gender. Travels are often deeply personal and even if participatory they retain a certain degree of exclusivity of experience. Therefore, travel narratives are often presented as existential or soul searching and hence have the flavor of confessions and assume a hybrid state between fiction and ‘truth’. Travel writing thus occupies a nebulous position as a genre as its one sidedness and politics of writing the self make it fictional, while the anxiety of disseminating ‘knowledge’ mandates that it be non-fiction. 

Travel writing enjoys a rich history, extending beyond antiquity. Narratives of travel are present extensively in classical and Biblical traditions in the west and the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions in the east. Explorations of lands and cultures new continued without a break through the first millennium. Our knowledge of the period between the ninth and fourteenth centuries has been enriched by a corpus of narratives by renowned Arab and Chinese travellers. These writings coupled with the imaginative presentations of trade carried through the silk, spice and incense routes have provided an economy of knowledge of great relevance in contemporary academic discourse. The current interest in travel writing is only rivalled by the proliferation of narratives in the sixteenth century where such writings formed the basis of knowledge gathering and ultimately, the colonial enterprise. 

Travel writing is a genre which celebrates heterogeneity in its form and content. The sense of place evoked by any narrative is hinged on the dialogic nature of the self and the other. The self of the narrator / reader is a palimpsest which intensifies the subtleties of the text. Hence, where we position ourselves within these roles profoundly modifies our perception of a place. Such a politicized sense of agency requires linguistic and narrative flexibility where a field as divergent as wine writing becomes part of travel writing. 

It is this rhizomatic discourse of travel writing which we intend to explore through this seminar.

The seminar aims to

1. examine the accounts by explorers / traders / colonizers / scholars /pilgrims to better understand the cultural and geopolitical relations today
2. look into the dialectics of travel narratives as a response to the increasing need for visual, auditory and gustatory stimulations of the contemporary age and the way this has brought about a revolution in the technologies used to define the self
3. interrogate the reasons behind the increased mobility of people and how it has calcified cultural impressions 4) derive an understanding of the process of identity formation and representation in the midst of modern / postmodern configurations.

The thrust areas would be, but not limited to

1. Theorising travel writing

2. Travel narratives across history

3. Travel and the Indian subcontinent

4. Arab and Chinese travel narratives and India

5. Colonial travel narratives and India

6. Travelling lives, writing lives

7. Gendering travel writing

8. Travel and the body

9. Visual politics of travel narratives

10.Travel in the age of globalization

11.Travel and the new media

12.Reification of travel

Well researched papers are invited from academicians, teachers, research scholars and students on the areas of interest specified. Please send an abstract of 300 words with your bionote to the following email: travelseminar2018@gmail.com

Important Dates

Deadline for submitting abstracts: 16 February 2018 

Confirmation of acceptance of abstracts: 21 February 2018

Final schedule of programme: 26 February 2018

For further details contact:

Dr. B. S. Jamuna 

Professor & Head 

Institute of English Institute of English

0471 - 2386325(O)

Dr. Lakshmi Sukumar (Coordinator)

Assistant Professor

Institute of English Institute of English

Mob:9495310180 

CFP: INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE Virginia Woolf and the Writing of History 8-10 November 2018 University of Rouen (France)

CALL FOR PAPERS:
We propose to examine Virginia Woolf’s relationship to history by reflecting on her reading and writing of history,[1] be that the history of her own time, of the past, women’s history or literary history. This will involve analysing how the literary and historicity are interlinked not only in her novels, but also in the essays, letters and journals. This in turn might lead us to consider the question of anteriority and tradition, engaging both the po-ethical and political dimensions of a Woolfian writing of history and of pre-history, such as that which informs her late essay “Anon,” but is also present throughout her writing in the attention it accords to a cultural unconscious, subtending the present of language like a sometimes conscious, sometimes not yet conscious memory of the past.[2] We might also be led to see Woolfian historiography from the perspective of materialist revisionism, a feminist rewriting of the past, or an infinite working through the library of her father, Leslie Stephen. Other possible perspectives would be to consider her work as that of an archivist writing against the archives of patriarchy in search of her own arkhe,[3] or examining how she reinvents the historiographical, biographical and literary traditions. Woolf’s engagement in the history of Modernity might in turn be considered from a Benjaminian perspective, as a form of historiographical reconfiguration anticipating post-modern philosophy.

 The question of Woolf’s hermeneutics of history might lead us to define the different forms of her engagement in women’s history, in the history of class, of her queering of history, her heterodoxy. We can also read her writing as a form of archeology delving into the written and non-written traces of history, attentive to the emergence of spectres and forms of survival or survivance[4] but also as a response to what Woolf herself called, in Three Guineas, “history in the raw.” Thus addressing how Woolf arrests the kairos of historical moment, her own inscription of two world wars as if in negative, might lead us furthermore to consider her writing as a form of resistance, nonetheless steeped in the Real of history, the present and the body. We invite papers which address these questions among others from a variety of theoretical, literary and cultural approaches. 

Possible topics may include:
•    Virginia Woolf as a reader and interpreter of history
•    Virginia Woolf as an apprentice historian
•    Virginia Woolf’s revisionist historiography
•    Virginia Woolf’s counter literary histories
•    Virginia Woolf’s complex relations to past and present historiographical traditions
•    Virginia Woolf, Historicism and New Historicism
•    Virginia Woolf, historicity and the new biography
•    Virginia Woolf’s feminist take on history and literary history
•    Virginia Woolf, history and its “effect upon mind and body” (Three Guineas)
•    Virginia Woolf’s writing of history and pre-history
•    Memory, the immemorial, oral tradition
•    History, historiography and chronotopes in Virginia Woolf’s works (libraries, museums, monuments…)
•    Archeology, material artifacts and the archive 

Proposal submission deadline: February 20th, 2018 

Contact Info: 

Paper proposals (a 300-word abstract with a title plus a separate biographical statement) should be sent by February 20th 2018 to Anne Besnault-Levita (anne.besnault@gmail.com), Anne-Marie Smith-Di Biasio (amdibiasio@neuf.fr) and Marie Laniel (marie.laniel@gmail.com) 

Contact Email: 

marie.laniel@gmail.com

URL: 

http://etudes-woolfiennes.org/?p=1952

CFP:International Conference on “Performance Art and the Prospects of Folkloric Tribal Culture of Eastern India” -20 & 21 March 2018-Department of English, Vidyasagar University, Medinipur, West Bengal, India.

“The fourth world is at present incipient, not fully realized; seeds, not yet wholly grown. This fourth world of aesthetics needs to organize itself as “non-aligned,” neither capitalist, whether of the US, European, or Chinese brand, nor communist/socialist, nor fundamentalist-religious whether Islamic, Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, or whatever. The vanguard of this new fourth world are — and here I hope you won’t think me too arrogant — performance theorists and performance artists who practice collaborative performance research; persons who know that playing deeply is a way of finding and embodying new knowledge. What would be the manifesto of this Performance Fourth World? It has four axioms:

• To perform is to explore, to play, to experiment with new relationships.
• To perform is to cross borders. These borders are not only geographical, but emotional, ideological, political, and personal.
• To perform is to engage in lifelong active study. To grasp every possibility as a script — something to be played with, interpreted, and reformed/remade.
• To perform is to become someone else and yourself at the same time. To empathize, react, grow, and change.”

Richard Schechner, from “Performance in the 21st century”

Concept Note:

A group of spectators sits around an empty space. An oil lamp hangs from each of the four posts on four corners of the surrounded space. This is how folkloric tribal performances improvise their own stage and create a symbolic stockade to mark off its distance from the viewers. The Mundaris, Kurmis, Shabars et al. continue to represent their folk cultural forms in such spartan conditions. Any piece of behaviour/ doing/action that is marked off or framed can possibly be called performance. Framing contextualizes performance and enables us to comprehend it as an entity. The flexibility of space and décor realizes the community’s potential for adaptation to changing order and fosters re-contextualization of its cultural identity.

Folk memory on the one hand carries over the wisdom of the former age to newer constitutions of identity and on the other seems to be unaffected by institutional forms of inequality based on class, caste and ethnicity. It is the unique capacity of folk culture to address the universal from its vantage form of the local that makes it an indispensable part of contemporary Indian society. In spite of the distinctiveness of the specific tribal ways of life, the spirit of tribal folklore underlines global values that natural religion can offer to other faiths. From performatives of their daily social and religious life to performances of entertainment – all presentations of tribal culture express the organic interrelatedness of god, man, nature and spirit. Representations of these forms appear not to be suitable for traditional models of theatre that – a la Richard Schechner – regard the spectator merely as a customer and divide space into exclusive hierarchies of class, race, ethnicity and aesthetic forms. Folklore in eastern India is a cultural category that accommodates non-confrontational coexistence as much of cultivated and folk traditions as of Brahmanical, caste Hindu, Muslim, tribal and Christian cultural practices. Folkloric performance therefore becomes a tool of cultural intervention or a crucial site for juxtaposition of cultures. It blurs the boundary between the oral and the literary. Mahasweta Devi, for example, re-constructs the “Book of the Hunter” (“Vyaad Kaand”) of Mukundaram’s medieval Bengali epic Chandi Mangala to bring to life the lost oral tradition of the Shabar tribe. Nilakanth Ghoshal uses the folklore of Bhadu to rewrite Bhumi Kanya (Earth maiden). Some of the oral forms are inscribed, creating a gap between the word and the speaker for creative imaginations to fill. A sort of post-modern endeavour is required to ensure that folk forms can be sustained as living traditions in which collective identities are constructively affirmed.

This conference seeks to address issues related to the sustenance of tribal folk art forms of eastern India in performance. It will recognize the necessity of informing these forms with epistemological ideas born of new researches in performance art and theory as well as scour the possibility of how elements of these forms in turn can contribute to the enrichment of performance art in totality. Abstracts (250 words) for papers of 15 min duration are invited on the theme of the conference. Presenters can use the following sub-themes (not inclusive) as guidelines:

• Tribal identity, folk art and performance
• Performative, Performance and Performativity of Tribal cultural practices
• Religious equity and tribal folkloric performance
• Gender equity and tribal folkloric performance
• Globalization and tribal folklore in performance
• Colonization and tribal folk performances
• Nation, Resistance and tribal folk performances
• Borderlands and tribal folk performance
• Psychogeography and tribal folk practices
• Traditional history and tribal folklore in practice

Publication:
The Conference Proceedings will be published in the Rupkatha Journal (indexed by Scopus, EBSCO, MLA, ERIHPLUS)

Selected papers will go into an anthology to be brought out by an international publisher.

Registration Fee:

Rs 500/- per head.

Accommodation:

We cannot provide but we can suggest places to stay in like (name a few hotels etc).

Contact:

Send your abstracts for consideration to any of the following members by 15 Feb 2018:

Mr Rony Patra, M: 9434042124; Email: rony.vueng@gmail.com

Mr Mir Ahammad Ali, M: 9046425106; Email: mirahammadali1990@gmail.com

Ms Anjali Atto, M: 9064898574; Email: anjaliecute91@gmail.com

CFP: International Conference on Language, Literature & Culture “Mapping Cultural Identities: Translations and Intersections” 25-26 May 2018, Bucharest, Romania

Call for papers

This two-day International Conference brings together scholars and graduates researching the intersections of cultural studies, imagology and translations, with a focus on cultural images constructions, various ways of approaching the concept of ethnicity and translation practices in a friendly and welcoming atmosphere of “Dimitrie Cantemir” Christian University in Bucharest.

In the context of globalization, the issue of cultural identity has aroused increasing attention. Cultural Translation, as means of cultural (de)construction supports the cultural differences and enriches both cultural identities. We encourage the cultural identity approach to translation, in expectation of treating ethnic cultural identity construction from a wider perspective, measuring the literary reception, investigating different layers of cultural identities and revealing both self-images and the images of the Other.

International Conference on Language, Literature, and Culture intends to blur the limits of conventional discourses and approaches, and features densely theoretical and analytical writing that focuses on the aspects of English language and literature in any or all possible contexts, employing interdisciplinary approach to address / approach the research problems with methods of and insights borrowed from multiple disciplines. The aim of the conference is to bring together researchers, scholars and students from all areas of language, literature, culture and other related disciplines. You may participate as panel organizer, presenter of one paper, chair a session, or observer. All submissions to the conference will be reviewed by at least two independent peers for technical merit and content.

Topics of interest for submission include, but are not limited to: 

• Anthropology and ethnography in cultural studies
• Classical Literature
• Collaborations in Language Teacher Education
• Contemporary Literature
• Critical Race Theory
• Cultural identity
• Culture and the social construct of gender
• Diasporic Literature
• Drama and Dramaturgy
• Effective Teaching Methodologies in Language and Literature Classrooms
• Interdisciplinarity and multiculturalism in Translation
• Interdisciplinarity in Language Teaching and Translation
• Intersectionality and Identity Politics
• Intersections of the translations and cultural studies in literary reception
• Language and Gender
• Language and Popular Culture
• Language and Power
• Language and the New Media
• Language Varieties
• Language, Culture and Translation
• Language, Identity and Culture
• Language, Power and Ideology
• Literary Criticism
• Literature and Film
• Literature and Gender
• Literature and History
• Literature and Other Arts
• Machine learning for natural language
• Media
• Medieval and Renaissance Literature
• Memory, place and belonging, ethnic, cultural and religious minorities
• Multicultural past and present
• Multicultural Poetry and Prose
• Nation and Nationality
• Overlapping culture-areas
• Poetry and Prose
• Policies of diversity
• Practices of Language Teacher Education
• Social, Cultural, and Political Contexts of Language Teacher Education
• Teaching of Language and Literature
• Text analysis, understanding, summarization and generation
• Text mining and information extraction, summarization and retrieval
• The analysis of language and language use as providing a window into non-linguistic
• cognitive processes and structures
• The Knowledge Base of Language Teacher Education
• The transformative nature of the role of language and communication in human cognition
• Transculturalism
• Translating human values and social traditions
• Translation Studies
• Women’s Writings 

A 200-word abstract and 5 keywords for a 20-minute paper should be submitted as an email attachment to LLC2018conference@gmail.com. In your email, please include your name, affiliation, email address, phone number, title of the paper, abstract, 5 keywords and a brief bio data.

All participants are requested to submit a proposal by April 20, 2018.

The papers presented at the conference will be published in a volume.

Please register here

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfWgBOkgSNlPO7yWsljeTduR0E0rOTRvADv9A_9t-Oa8XfmOw/viewform

Should you need further information, please contact the organizers at LLC2018conference@gmail.com or visit http://limbi-straine.ucdc.ro/llc-bucharest.php or http://www.elts.cankaya.edu.tr/call-for-papers/

Funded ICSSR sponsored National Workshop on Research Methodology,20th Feb-01st March 2018, CSSRM,Ambedkar University Delhi

Aims and Objectives

The workshop aims to dwell into a set of theoretical perspectives that inspire ethnographic and qualitative research, engage with the set of sensibilities and values that underlie research in these traditions and in acquiring a collection of skills such as rapport building, knowledge on specific data collection methods, maintaining data/notes in different forms, analysing the data and writing.

The objectives of the workshop are:

(1) To make participants gain an understanding of the current theoretical basis that underlie qualitative research and ethnography

(2) To equip the participants with knowledge and skill of using one or more qualitative methods including ethnography

(3) To build the capacity of participants to analyse qualitative data, and

(4) To facilitate the participants to learn different forms of writing that involves qualitative research.

Course Contents

Introduction

Theoretical basis of qualitative research

Data collection methods in qualitative research

Ethnography

Rigour in qualitative research and ethnography

Analysis in qualitative research

Using Atlas-Ti for analysis of qualitative data

Writing Qualitative Research

Course Transaction

A combination of lecture, interaction, self-study, out-door exercise, demonstration and in-class hands-on exercises.

Eligibility Criteria

Current MPhil and PhD research scholars registered in a social science discipline/area of study. Preference will be given to applicants registered with universities in Delhi or neighboring states.

Travel

Outstation participants are eligible for sleeper class train or actual bus fare as per ICSSR norms. Reimbursement shall be made only on submission of proof of confirmed train tickets or original bus tickets.

Board and Lodging

Outstation participants would be provided modest facilities for stay (twin sharing) and food on request. Local participants would be provided only lunch and tea/snacks during the programme break.

Key dates

Last date for receipt of filled application forms: 02 Feb 2018

Date for intimation of selected applicants: 03 Feb 2018

Date for confirmation of participation by selected participants: 07 Feb 2018

Dates of workshop: 20th Feb to 01st Mar 2018.

How to Apply

(1) Send scanned copy of duly filled application form available at http://aud.ac.in by email to cssrm@aud.ac.in or by post to

The Course Director (ICSSR Research Methodology Workshop), Centre for Social Science Research Methods, Ambedkar University Delhi, Lothian Road, Kashmere Gate, Delhi, 110006 on or before 02 Feb 2018.

(2) Application has to be forwarded by competent authority

(3) Application form has to be sent along with a copy of MPhil/PhD registration certificate and

(4) A synopsis on current state of their research.

More information: Click here (pdf)

Application form: Click here (pdf)