Call For Applications : Summer workshop on The Question of Representation in #Contemporary #Indian #Literature( Funded Accommodation)-University of Tübingen, Germany

Summer Workshop at the University of Tübingen, Germany

10-12.06.2024 (in person)

In Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, The Wife of Bath refers to the Aesopian fable of the painting of the lion. The lion complains about the painting, which demonstrates a man defeating a lion, and asserts that the painting would look very different if a lion had painted it. And so asks the Wife of Bath: ‘Who painted the lion, tell me, who?’

If the dominant narrative is shaped by the powerful and the victorious, then voice, narration, and representation become powerful tools, especially for marginalized groups.. Re-examining and interrogating these frames of reference help to find new answers to important questions: who gets to tell whose story? Who has what at stake and who is representing whom? Where does the line between fiction and authentic representation get drawn?

Who is allowed to tell whose story? If in fiction one is allowed to only tell their own privately lived experiences, how is that fiction? What does it do to representation of groups that are already endangered?

In this context, the question of authentic voice and its representation looms paramount and the writing of literature its biggest ally.

Gayatri Chakrovarty Spivak asked in her influential work ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988), and scholarly work in literary and critical studies is still attempting to satisfactorily answer the question. Are the powerless ever able to raise their voice in a world where even the medium of language is biased to favor those in power?

Postcolonial and subaltern studies have repeatedly questioned the ways in which established ideologies suppress the needs and demands of the most vulnerable sections of a society. These questions take on even more significance in literature from India where issues of caste, class, religion and gender, and the many inbuilt inequalities and discriminations, constantly determine identity and its representation. The reading of literature presents a richer understanding of this new and complex world, where capitalism disrupts and catapults lives, and a postcolonial framework seeks to define itself without its colonial past, and not simply react to it.

The workshop’s interdisciplinary approach looks at the topic and the literary frameworks that surround it from two points of view: the literature on the page and its many facets, as well as the tools employed in the writing of that literature. The two-pronged outlook will help deepen the understanding of what is perceived as literature and its production.

The workshop encompasses the wider areas of subaltern and postcolonial studies, as well as the craft employed in a work of literature. Researchers are invited to engage with the questions of representation and its nature in contemporary Indian literature, as well as in the wider postcolonial framework.

The following themes within research will be given priority for participation:

· Subaltern and marginalized voices in Indian literature

· Point of view and narrative in fiction

· Representation of the subaltern

· Identity and power in terms of religion, caste, class, gender, and sexuality

· Writing and marginalized voices

· Narrative and language

· Revisionist narratives

· Identity politics in Indian literature

· The writing of contemporary Indian fiction

· Identity in postcolonial literature

· Postcolonial subjects and identities

· Nation, nationalism and literature

· Perspective and voice in creative writing

For an interdisciplinary approach, we encourage participants who work in literary studies, creative writing, history, philosophy, anthropology, cultural studies, linguistics, psychology, political sciences, sociology, and artificial intelligence for arts to apply.

We invite researchers to present 20 minute presentations of papers and articles. Abstracts of up to 300 words, with a brief bio note, and a short academic CV, should be sent to srishti.chaudhary@uni-tuebingen.de or on the form linked here:

https://forms.gle/GBML7SoGMiFJrKmy7

Deadline: 15.03.2024

Notice of acceptance: 22.03.2024

The accommodation for the duration of the workshop for all participants is funded as a part of the Excellence Strategy of the German Federal and State Governments.

Transportation costs will have to be self-funded.

srishti.chaudhary@uni-tuebingen.de

Srishti Chaudhary

Call For Research Articles on Film Studies in Southeast Asia, China, East Asia, and India's Northeast-Rising Asia Journal

 Rising Asia Journal invites Research Articles on Film Studies in the geographical areas of Southeast Asia, East Asia (Japan, China, the Koreas, and Taiwan), and India's North-East Region, on all aspects of these Asian societies. Authors may use any thematic or theoretical discourse such as gender, race, colonialism and post-colonialism, and others.

Articles should be between 5,000 to 10,000 words in length, with footnotes, and Works Cited.

Authors are urged to visit the journal's website at www.rajraf.org to read the submission guidelines. 

Articles should be original, and should offer a new and innovative perspective.

Please send your articles to our Editorial Board Member Professor Tuan Hoang at tuan.hoang@pepperdine.edu as well as to our Editor-in-Chief Dr. Harish C. Mehta at hmehta76@yahoo.caRising Asia Journal invites Research Articles on Film Studies in the geographical areas of Southeast Asia, East Asia (Japan, China, the Koreas, and Taiwan), and India's North-East Region, on all aspects of these Asian societies. Authors may use any thematic or theoretical discourse such as gender, race, colonialism and post-colonialism, and others.

Articles should be between 5,000 to 10,000 words in length, with footnotes, and Works Cited.

Authors are urged to visit the journal's website at www.rajraf.org to read the submission guidelines. 

Articles should be original, and should offer a new and innovative perspective.

Deadline for submissions:  June 1, 2024

full name / name of organization:  Rising Asia Journal

contact email:  tuan.hoang@pepperdine.edu

Please send your articles to our Editorial Board Member Professor Tuan Hoang at tuan.hoang@pepperdine.edu as well as to our Editor-in-Chief Dr. Harish C. Mehta at hmehta76@yahoo.ca

Call For Articles : Special Issue “World Mythology and Ecocriticism: Remembering Nature as a Sacred Teacher”-Rachel McCoppin - Humanities Journal

Special Issue “World Mythology and Ecocriticism: Remembering Nature as a Sacred Teacher”

A special issue of Humanities.

This Special Issue focuses specifically on the role that nature plays within world mythology. The environment undoubtedly played a crucial role in developing the mythological narratives of many cultures throughout the globe. Many cultures regarded nature as sacred, envisioning aspects of the environment, being directly related to divine beings, sacred forces, teachers, etc. Often, cultures imagined that the representatives of nature needed to be appeased in order to gain harmony with their environments. Many cultures also used their mythology to connect nature to the lives of human beings—connecting the cycle of the seasons to the life cycle of humans for instance. Identifying humans as inextricably connected with the natural world allowed a myriad of cultures to find meaning in their own lives, as nature in myth was often portrayed as a teacher, guide, source of inspiration, etc., for the characters within the myth, as well as the audiences of the myth. As civilizations grew and developed, often the mythological references to the importance of nature as something sacred diminished, but some mythic texts still imparted messages that strove to maintain reverence for the environment. Given the contemporary environmental crisis, it is important to look back on the texts that were once sacred to a people, in order to remember the great value of finding our own reverence in the natural world.

This Special Issue is particularly interested in receiving articles that discuss global mythological texts from an ecocritical lens. Articles that examine myths that connect natural occurrences to the lives of humans—looking at age from the standpoint of seasonal change, accepting death as a natural occurrence, etc., are especially desirable. Additionally, texts that present nature as a divine being, sacred embodiment, source of inspiration, source of contention, etc., are welcomed. Articles that focus on global creation myths, myths that present nature as divine, myths of humans contending with nature, either through marriage to a natural element, battling with a natural representative, or even becoming a natural element, are all highly desirable. Additionally, myths that mark a time of transition of values in the portrayal of the environment, such as the progression from hunter/gatherer methods to agricultural methods, or the destruction of the environment as technology advanced, are desired. Finally, myths that focus upon the heroic journey, casting the protagonist as a personification of nature, or showing the protagonist as failing or succeeding upon his or her quest because of nature, are especially sought after. This Special Issue is interested in mythic texts from around the world, from any era.

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords:

World Mythology

Ecocriticism

Mythic Studies

Environmental Studies

Hero’s Journey/Quest

This special issue is now open for submission.

deadline for submissions: December 10, 2024

contact email: mccoppin@umn.edu

Call for essays for special issue of Journal of Global #Postcolonial Studies on contemporary African novelists in America

 Call for Papers for forthcoming special issue on Contemporary African Novelists in America 

Guest editor Simon Lewis is seeking manuscript submissions for a special issue on contemporary African writers who have come to prominence in the United States over the last two decades. 

When Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie burst onto the North American publishing scene in 2003, the publication of her brilliant debut novel Purple Hibiscus didn’t just signal the start of a single author’s brilliant career. It also forged a path for a whole new generation of African novelists who had come to America as immigrants or students and who have been mining that experience in their writing. Writers born in Africa who studied at American universities – Teju Cole, Taiye Selasie, Yaa Gyasi, Uzodinma Iweala, NoViolet Bulawayo and Akwaeke Emezi, to name just a few – have followed in Adichie’s footsteps. Purple Hibiscus has been to these writers what Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) was to aspiring Latin American writers during the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s and 1970s, and what Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) was to the proliferation of Indian writers in English from the 1980s on. 

In addition to articles analyzing individual authors and/or their work, we warmly invite essays on any of the following themes:

 Immigration;

 Racism;

 Diaspora; 

 Gender; 

 Sexuality; 

 History;

 Regionalism; 

 Education; 

 Publishing.

Submission Instructions: Manuscripts of c. 5,000 words and following MLA guidelines for formatting should be submitted by September 1, 2024 according to the Journal’s guidelines at https://journals.upress.ufl.edu/jgps 

Preliminary ideas and/or complete articles can be submitted to the guest editor at: Simon Lewis, English Department, College of Charleston, LewisS@cofc.edu

Contact Information

Simon Lewis, Department of English, College of Charleston

Contact Email

lewiss@cofc.edu

URL

https://journals.upress.ufl.edu/jgps/cfp

Attachments

Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies

Call for Submissions- International #Gender and #Sexuality Studies #Conference on "Recognition, Resistance, Resilience,"

 The International Gender and Sexuality Studies Conference, hosted by the University of Central Oklahoma’s Women’s Research Center and the BGLTQ+ Student Center in collaboration with the UCO chapter of the National Organization for Women, is calling for submissions for its ninth annual conference. Themed "Recognition, Resistance, Resilience," the conference aims to foster diverse perspectives on these themes.

The deadline for abstract submissions is Friday, April 19. To submit an abstract, visit go.uco.edu/igss. The conference is scheduled for Sept. 28–29, and will take place in the UCO Nigh University Center, located on Central’s campus.

The conference invites students, faculty, staff, scholars, activists and artists to propose presentations or performances in creative disciplines such as literature, theater, music, dance and visual art. All interested parties are invited to submit abstracts for papers, panels, roundtable discussions and/or poster presentations that explore issues related to women, gender and sexuality studies. Submissions from various disciplines, including social sciences, humanities, fine arts, activism and STEM fields, are encouraged. The selection committee interprets the theme broadly, embracing intersectional and interdisciplinary thinking.

This year’s keynote speaker is Anna Cox, M.F.A., author of "I Keep My Worries in My Teeth" and director of the Studio School at Oklahoma Contemporary.

Drawing from her background in photography and pedagogy, she will deliver a talk on her fiction writing practices and collaborations with artists.

Contact Information

Lindsey Churchill, Ph.D., director of the Women’s Research Center and the BGLTQ+ Student Center

Contact Email

lchurchill@uco.edu

URL

http://go.uco.edu/igss

Seeking Chapter Submissions: Going to the Movies with CS Lewis-#Cambridge Scholars Publishing

 Going to the Movies with C.S. Lewis, Call for Chapters

An edited collection tentatively titled “Going to the Movies with C.S. Lewis” is seeking chapter submissions. The book is expected to be published through Cambridge Scholars Publishing.  

Having been born many years after C.S. Lewis died I of course never had the opportunity to watch a movie with the man. However, over the years I feel, as many others probably feel as well, like Lewis accompanies me as I watch movies, read books, attend church services, and make other daily pursuits. Lewis’ works shape my thinking on many theological, educational, and cultural matters like few other authors’ works do.

This book is an attempt to take some of those insights from C.S. Lewis and apply them to film studies. It will explore the thought and theology of C.S. Lewis by connecting his work with film theory, specific films, and adaptations of his work. In many ways it is a book meant to explore how Lewis’ thought can help us view films.

The following categories are meant to act as general guidance for sections of the book:

1. Exploring Film Theory with C.S. Lewis
2. Exploring Individual Films with C.S. Lewis
3. Analyzing Lewis’ Life through Films of About Lewis
4. Analyzing Lewis’ Fiction through Adaptations of his works

Some chapter ideas that would fit into the above categories include, but are not limited to:

1. The Four Loves on film
2. Lewis’ approach to literature as a guide to approaching film
3. “On the Reading of Old Books” and On the Watching of Old Movies
4. Lewis’ idea of fantasy in relation to particular films
5. Ideas in his essays or books that relate to film studies, film theory, or individual films
6. The many different Narnia adaptations (comparisons between the versions or examinations of particular films as adaptations of the original stories)
7. Lewis’ thoughts on Christmas and Christmas movies (what would Lewis think of Hallmark Christmas movies?)
8. Lewis portrayed on film – how does this change the way he is viewed?

Again, these are only suggestions. Anything connecting Lewis’ thought with the cinema will be considered.  

Submission Procedure

Please submit a chapter proposal by March 31, 2024 which includes the following: title, abstract, and a short biography of the author(s). Proposals should be a maximum of 500 words written in English, using Microsoft Word format, Times New Roman, 12 pt. font. Please send the Word document as an attachment to the book editor (Bryan Mead, bmead@etbu.edu). Authors of accepted proposals will be notified and sent specific submission guidelines. Chapter contributions should be at least 4,000 words and will follow Chicago style (footnotes and bibliography). Submissions are welcome from early career researchers and established scholars.

If your proposal is accepted, chapter submissions will be due by September 15, 2024. Proposal acceptance does not guarantee chapter’s inclusion in the book.

Editor Information: Bryan Mead, Ph.D, is Assistant Professor of English at East Texas Baptist University where he teaches film studies, literature, and composition. He is the author of Writing in Film Studies, From Professional Practice to Practical Pedagogy (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024). Bryan has also published many essays in journals such as Journal of Religion & Film, Journal of European Popular Culture, Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture, Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal, and Film & History. His essays have also appeared in edited volumes such as J.R.R. Tolkien and the Arts: A Theology of Subcreation (Square Halo Press, 2021), Representations of Sports Coaches in Film: Looking to Win (Routledge, 2017), and The Arts of Memory and the Poetics of Remembering (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016).

Call For Papers on Verge: Studies in Global Asias Issue 11.2 Special Issue: The Asian Century: Idea, Method, and Media

 

What is the Asian Century? Are we living in it? Do its recent invocations—by writers and readers, politicians and pundits, journalists and academics—mark a return to earlier eras of relative Asian centrality on the world stage or announce a future we have yet to inhabit? Is it a paranoid, U.S.-centered discourse of Western decline or a triumphant announcement of Asian economic-semiotic arrival? Is the Asian Century an aspiration or a threat—and to whom?

The term “Asian Century” has more than one origin story. Narrators are multiple, located in both Asia and the West. In a 1988 summit, China’s Deng Xiaoping, alongside Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, may have coined the phrase by calling it into question: “In recent years, people have been saying that the next century will be the century of Asia and the Pacific, as if that were sure to be the case. I disagree with this view.” For Deng, skepticism about the inevitability of Asia’s rise was going to be crucial to the India-China partnership against the “developed” world; his skepticism hasn’t aged well. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared a “pivot to Asia” in “America’s Pacific Century.” Clinton’s emphatic recapitulation of the “Asian Century” revived Western tropes of Asian ascendancy that predated Asia’s contemporary economic rise by more than a hundred years, while betraying American anxieties about the decline of US hegemony. In fact, both Deng and Clinton were responding to a process that had been underway since at least the early-1970s: the “long downturn” or tendential decline in profitability of Western economies that ran alongside the “economic miracles” of many Asian economies, including Japan’s Cold War-era boom and India’s and China’s eventual liberalization. For some, the Asian Century was, or is, a solution. Now, in an era of mounting deglobalization, its contradictions are just as sharply felt as its curious staying power.

What distinguishes the current round of Asian Century discourse is perhaps its mutual construction by “Asians” and “Westerners” alike. When the Asian Century came into wide currency in the 1990s, replacing a then-regnant “Pacific Rim” and “Pacific Century” rhetoric, it remediated a long history of similarly totalizing visions that issued not least from the “Asians” themselves: from Japan’s monstrous pursuit of the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere and Ferdinand Marcos’s dictatorial imposition of neoliberal programs in the Philippines, to the advertisement of the “Singapore model” and even China’s “century of humiliation,” which continues to vouchsafe its nationalist ressentiment. As Wang Hui’s analysis of the politics of imagining Asia has shown, visions of the Asian Century betray contradictory regionalist and nationalist ambitions that are held in focus by the apparatuses of the state and the culture industries. Thus Asian Century discourse is typically inflected by a nation or speaker’s position vis-a-vis key market and state brokers. Given that the meaning of “Asia” looks different depending on the vantage of Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, or for that matter Saudi Arabia, what is the role of pan-Asian alliances and inter-Asian competition in constituting the Asian Century? Is Asia “one”—or only in the eyes of the West?

This special issue invites critical perspectives from scholars working in and across multiple languages and disciplines. We seek submissions that explore the Asian Century as idea, method, and media, and that examine its genealogies and itineraries from a range of contexts and histories, including of labor, empire, capital, war, technology, pandemics, dispossession, modernization, culture, and aesthetics. With “idea, method, and media,” we intend to inspire, but not circumscribe, the possible range of disciplinary approaches and primary sources that might be enlisted in responding to this call. Indeed, the idea of the Asian Century may very well be predicated on counter-articulations of its impossibility. While the Asian Century may appear at first as periodizing marker or geopolitical diagnostic, we propose that it can also be read across media and cultural forms, as an affective relation to the past, present, and future, as a structure of feeling, and as a visual and sensorial regime. Finally, in proposing the Asian Century as method, we seek to revisit and reimagine the interdisciplinary stakes of the longstanding conversation on “Asia as method.”

For example, what humanistic and social scientific methods can best track the concept’s intellectual and institutional emergence, circulation, and mediation, including well before the 21st century? How might regional Asian rivalries shape the supply chains and the capital flows of emerging trade blocs like the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)? How have cultural production and intellectual exchange furnished the cognitive and affective frameworks for these blocs, and for Asian visions of global expansion like China’s “Belt and Road” initiative, South Korea’s cultural exports, and Taiwan’s advanced semiconductor industry? Given the increasing salience of the Asian Century as a concept for periodizing the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism, how might we trace its effects and iterations in and beyond political economy? What was the Asian Century, understood as visions and projections of Asia’s rise promoted by those who stood to benefit from such characterizations? What of the legacy and future of Third World decolonization and Indigenous struggles when Asian peripheries become, or have threatened to become, global powers? Rather than take for granted the rise of Asia as such, we seek to understand how and why Asia’s ostensible ascendance has seen not a lessening but rather a retrenchment of the conditions of planetary inequality.

Essay Submissions

Essays (between 6,000–10,000 words) and abstracts (125 words) should be submitted electronically through this submission form by May 1, 2024 and prepared according to the author-date + bibliography format of the Chicago Manual of Style. See section 2.38 of the University of Minnesota Press style guide or chapter 15 of the Chicago Manual of Style Online for additional formatting information.

Authors’ names should not appear on manuscripts; instead, please include a separate document with the author’s name, address, institutional affiliations, and the title of the article with your electronic submission. Authors should not refer to themselves in the first person in the submitted text or notes if such references would identify them; any necessary references to the author’s previous work, for example, should be in the third person.

Please direct all inquiries to verge@psu.edu.

Contact Email

verge@psu.edu

URL

https://sites.psu.edu/vergeglobalasias/

Attachments

verge-112-cfp-asian-century-idea-method-and-media.pdf