Postcolonial Interventions
Call for Papers
Vol. I, Issue 2 (June 2016)
DEADLINE EXTENDED till 15th April 2016
2016 marks the quartercentenary of
Shakespeare’s death and the upcoming issue of Postcolonial Interventions
will focus on the continued relevance of multiple Shakespeares in the
culture-scape of the postcolonial world. Not only were Shakespearean
plays shaped in many ways by colonial discourses, especially discourses
of racial difference, but Shakespearean plays also initially functioned
as those “signs taken for wonders” through which the colonial
administrators sought to consolidate imperial hegemony, as evident from
such critical works as Post-Colonial Shakespeares (1999).
However, subsequent ages witnessed translation and localization as well
as adaptation and transformation which contributed to manifold forms of
appropriation, conditioned by differing contextual pressures and
shifting equations of power, as illustrated by later works like Re-playing Shakespeare in Asia (2010). Quite naturally therefore, from Aimé Césaire’s adaptation of The Tempest, to Kalyan Ray’s novel Eastwords
to Vishal Bhardwaj’s trilogy of films based on Shakespearean tragedies,
the realm of postcolonial cultures has witnessed a variety of
Shakespearean representations across several genres and media which have
functioned as multifaceted interventions, endowed with diverse
connotations. As Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia inform us in the
introduction to Native Shakespeares,
… every spring, groups of women on the
Caribbean island of Carriacou prepare elaborate costumes for their
boyfriends, husbands, and sons, who will wear the regalia in the long-
standing annual ritual known as the Carriacou Mas, a contest in which
local men dance and deliver famous passages from Shakespeare’s Julius
Caesar. The contemporary Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih pauses over page
while writing Season of Migration to the North to consider the vexed
experience of expressing an Arab nationalism, and what comes to mind is
the face of Shakespeare’s Othello, the Sudanese experience of expressing
an Arab identity fixed and localized through the tragic hero’s story of
betrayal. The Maori broadcasting agency Te Mangai Paho chooses its
first film to promote the New Zealand language te reo, Te Tangata Whai
Rawa O Weneti [The Maori Merchant of Venice] using Shakespeare’s
romantic comedy to resurrect a native language.
Moving away from a rather unhealthy obsession with Shakespeare’s
biography in various academic quarters, such global appropriations have
created opportunities of multicultural negotiations, anti-colonial
critiques, political contestations based on class, gender or race,
formal experiments of diverse kinds and even critical discourses of
varied theoretical orientations. In the process, the postcolonial world
has testified, with a thousand different voices, to the veracity of the
Bard’s own prophetic pronouncements on his dramatic art:
How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted over
In states unborn and accents yet unknown!
The next issue of Postcolonial Interventions invites scholarly
articles which would analyse the continued and seemingly inexhaustible
significances of Shakespeare in postcolonial cultures, not just in terms
of rewriting or dramatic performances or cinematic adaptations but also
by focusing on the continued presence of Shakespeare in other forms of
popular culture, education and iconography. Topics may include but are
not limited to:
• Political Shakespeares: critiques of race, class and gender
• Anti-colonial Shakespeares: marshalling the Bard against Empire
• Multicultural and Multilingual Shakespeares
• Shakespeare in Education
• Postcolonial Shakespearean Criticism
• Shakespeare in other media: from films to graphic novels
• Shakespearean Theatre Festivals and the Politics of Representation
• Shakespeare in Non-Western performance traditions
• Translations, Adaptations and Transcreations of Shakespeare
Submissions should be sent to the postcolonialinterventions@gmail.com by 15th March, 2016.
Submissions Guidelines:
1. Articles must be original and unpublished. Submission will imply that it is not being considered for publication elsewhere.
2. Written in Times New Roman 12, double spaced with 1″ margin on all sides
3. Between 4000-7000 words, inclusive of all citations.
4. With parenthetic citations and a Works Cited list complying with MLA format
5. Without footnotes; endnotes only if absolutely unavoidable
6. A separate cover page should include the author’s name, designation and an abstract of 250 words with a maximum of 5 keywords
7. The main article should not in any way contain the author’s name. Otherwise the article will not be considered.
8. The contributors are responsible for obtaining permission to
reproduce any material, including photographs and illustrations for
which they do not hold copyright.
Postcolonial Interventions
Call for Papers
Vol. 1, Issue 1 (January 2016)
For more than a decade, discussions about
the purported death of postcolonialism as a discipline have been rife
(see, for example Hamid Dabashi’s The Arab Spring: The End of
Postcolonialism; E. San Juan Jr’s After Postcolonialism). Such
declarations of the discipline’s demise suggest that it has outlived its
utility and that ongoing global socio-economic and politico-military
changes require a newer intellectual paradigm which would be capable of
grasping the ever-growing complexities of our contemporary world with
its divergent and often chaotic changes. However, alongside this
cacophony of naysayers there has also existed an equally potent strand
of academic discourse which has continuously sought to proclaim the
abiding relevance of postcolonial thought, especially in the face of the
dominance of neocolonial and neoliberal practices on the one hand and
various episodes of imperialist, military intrusions on the other. More
importantly, in spite of such debates, scholars in various fields have
been relentlessly applying the insights of postcolonial studies to newer
fields of study (life narratives, Biblical readings, queer narratives,
medieval romances, Foucault’s Biopolitics, the icon of the ‘pirate’ to
name a few) and have also been seeking to consolidate the theoretical
paradigm of postcolonial studies by fusing it with various emerging
theoretical insights. Many of these developments have been governed by
the belief that although empires and colonies have ceased to exist in
the sense they used to before, the former colonies are still suffering
from various lingering effects of the past and are troubled by new-born
internal hierarchies, inequalities and global politico-economic forces
which continue to thwart their quest for dreams which anti-colonial
movements had once generated.
Such theoretical developments are testament
to the persistent relevance of postcolonial studies for the present and
the future. Postcolonialism is an emancipatory discourse – a discourse
focused on “strategic interventions in the name of our future” (Young:
2001), a discourse marked by its “intention towards [a] possibility that
has still not become” (Bloch: 1986) a discourse marked by its
articulation of multidimensional forms of resistance – and it is as
necessary as ever. The need for such an emancipatory discourse is
evident in light of the growing imbalance of resources between the
global North and the global South, or between national elites and
impoverished multitudes, in light of rising forms of xenophobia and
anti-immigration rhetoric across the West, specters of religious
fundamentalism and terrorism in different parts of Asia and Africa,
fissures within nation-states owing to victimization of minorities, weak
democratic structures incapable of ensuring basic rights or access to
fundamental amenities, and the imbrication of cultural
representations/apparatuses within these processes. Taking the Indian
subcontinent as a case in point, the necessity of an evolving and
multifaceted theory to address the complex political scenario is
evident, when faced with ongoing conflicts in Kashmir that remain a
constant reminder of colonial rule and Partition, successive murders of
secular bloggers in Bangladesh and rationalists in India, the precarious
existence of the Rohingyas in Myanmar, the terror modules operating
across Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan, ever-growing reports of
rise in crimes against women, honour killings and ‘khap’ diktats, the
continued criminalization of homosexuality in India, marginalization of
minorities of different ethnicity or religion, predicaments of migrant
labourers in the Middle-East, impoverishment of small farmers and
industrial workers under the aegis of neo-liberal policies and so on.
Therefore the maiden issue of Postcolonial
Interventions invites scholarly articles that would highlight not only
the ways in which postcolonial studies have been evolving to create
theoretical frameworks suited to the multiple challenges of the present,
but also the ways in which cultural representations are responding both
to the discontents of the present and the resistances that are
simultaneously taking shape. Topics may include but are not limited to:
Neocolonial/neoliberal practices and resultant subalternization
Fissures in nation states
Utopian imaginings in times of despair
Transnational flows and emergent subjectivities
Islamophobia in the post 9/11 world
Democracies in crisis
Evolving configurations of race, class, caste and gender
Rising fundamentalism and the threat of ISIS
Reconstituting canons for the 21st century
Postcolonial aesthetics
Comprador elites and global capital
Insurgent movements: past and present
Submissions should be sent to postcolonialinterventions@gmail.com within 10th November, 2015.
Submission Guidelines:
1. Articles must be original and unpublished. Submission will imply that it is not being considered for publication elsewhere.
2. Written in Times New Roman 12, double spaced with 1″ margin on all sides
3. Between 4000-7000 words, inclusive of all citations.
4. With parenthetic citations and a Works Cited list complying with MLA format
5. Without footnotes; endnotes only if absolutely unavoidable
6. A separate cover page should include the author’s name, designation and an abstract of 250 words with a maximum of 5 keywords
7. The main article should not in any way contain the author’s name. Otherwise the article will not be considered.
8. The contributors are responsible for obtaining permission to
reproduce any material, including photographs and illustrations for
which they do not hold copyright.
For further details, refer to
