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

Call for Proposals :Radical Histories of Decolonization

 A Call for Proposals from the Radical History Review

Issue number 153

Abstract Deadline: January 8, 2024

Co-Edited by Manan Ahmed, Marissa Moorman, Jecca Namakkal, Golnar Nikpour

Radical History Review seeks contributions for a special issue entitled “Radical Histories of Decolonization.”

Historians have tended to treat decolonization as an event that began in the 1940s and ended by the late 1970s, primarily confined to large areas of Asia and Africa, though scholars of global Indigenous histories offer a deeper and unfinished timeline. Many activists today use the term to discuss a still-present need to end colonial institutions, from settler colonial occupation in places as widespread as Turtle Island (North America), Hawai’i, Puerto Rico, Palestine, and Aotearoa (New Zealand), to the hegemony of Western thought in university curricula, to the possession of art and artifacts expropriated from the colonies and displayed in museums in major cities such as New York, London, and Paris. The term “decolonization” has come to mean many things, some limited, and others expansive.

This issue of the Radical History Review seeks to explore the genealogy of decolonization as a category of analysis and how people have dreamed and enacted decolonization in past and present. We are interested in work that reconsiders how decolonization has occurred—as both success and  failure—throughout history, including in geographic areas that fall outside of the twentieth-century paradigm including Haiti and many parts of Latin America that press into the twenty-first century. We are interested in questions of how the colonized in overseas colonies, settler colonies, and informal colonies understood decolonization across different times and spaces. While the works of individual thinkers (Fanon, Cabral, Césaire, Nehru, Ho Chi Minh) tend to dominate histories of decolonization, we ask how people on the ground who are often left out of the story—including but not limited to women, soldiers, and ethnic and linguistic minorities—challenged colonial power and the dominant parties fighting for sovereignty. This issue aims to center the work of scholars, activists, and archives that lay outside of Western institutions.

Potential topics include (but are not limited to):

• While the etymology of decolonization begins in the nineteenth century, how is it useful for historians of the ancient or medieval worlds to work with this concept?
• What happens when anti-colonial movements have interacted with and taken up imperial imaginaries of an idealized pre-colonial past?
• How have people across the political spectrum interpreted (and perhaps instrumentalized) decolonization differently?
• Where does the concept of Indigeneity fit into histories of decolonization?
• Is decolonization a concept that can be understood universally? Or does it always need to be rooted in local struggles?
• What does history tell us about the relationship between decolonization and sovereignty?
• How do we understand the rise of religious, social, and political movements in the context of decolonization?
• How does the framework of decolonization work (or not work) in contexts of informal colonial or “semi-colonial” relations?
• Does decolonization mean the end of empire and/or has decolonization meant the end of empire? Historically, how have colonized subjects imagined and attempted to enact an end to empires?
• How does decolonization work as a language outside of the context of Western European imperialism (i.e. Japanese empire, Russian empire)?

The RHR publishes material in a variety of forms. Potential contributors are encouraged to look at recent issues for examples of both conventional and non-conventional forms of scholarship. We are especially interested in submissions that use images as well as texts and encourage materials with strong visual content. In addition to monographic articles based on archival research, we encourage submissions to our various departments, including:

• Historians at Work (reflective essays by practitioners in academic and non-academic settings that engage with questions of professional practice)
• Teaching Radical History (syllabi and commentary on teaching)
• Public History (essays on historical commemoration and the politics of the past)
• Interviews (proposals for interviews with scholars, activists, and others)
• (Re)Views (review essays on history in all media—print, film, and digital)
• Reflections (Short critical commentaries)
• Forums (debates and discussions)

Procedures for submission of articles:

By January 8, 2024, please submit a 1-2 page abstract summarizing the article you wish to submit to our online journal management system, ScholarOne. To begin with ScholarOne, sign in or create an account at https://mc04.manuscriptcentral.com/dup-rhr. Next, sign in, select “Author” from the menu up top, and click “Begin Submission” or “Start New Submission.” Upload a Word or PDF document, including any images within the document. After uploading your file, select “Proposal” as the submission type and follow the on-screen instructions. Please write to contactrhr@gmail.com if you encounter any technical difficulties.

By February 29, 2024, authors will be notified whether they should submit a full version of their article for peer review. The due date for completed articles will be in June, 2024. Those articles selected for publication after the peer review process will be included in issue 153 of the Radical History Review, scheduled to appear in October, 2025.

Abstract Deadline: January 8, 2024

Contact: contactrhr@gmail.com

Contact Information

contactrhr@gmail.com

Contact Email

contactrhr@gmail.com

URL

https://www.radicalhistoryreview.org/radical-histories-of-decolonization-due-ja…

CFP: SINGULARITIES INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON FANTASY- UNIVERSITY OF CALICUT, KERALA, INDIA 2024

 Fantasy, a genre that has captivated the hearts and minds of countless individuals throughout history, invites us to embark on extraordinary adventures beyond the realm of the ordinary. A space where magic, mythical creatures and epic quests reign supreme, Fantasy offers a respite from reality and inviting us to explore realms beyond the boundaries of our imagination.

At its core, fantasy taps into the universal human desire for escape and wonder. It transports us to enchanted lands where paradigms are reversed and new orders are brought to being. Through the fantastic, the readers and viewers experience the thrill of danger, the triumph of dreams, and the intricate play between possible and extravagantly undreamable. Fantasy opens doors to delve into the depths of imagination, challenging established perceptions and stretching our understanding of the human experience.

Fantasy encompasses a multitude of forms, from literature to art, gaming to cinema, each offering a unique gateway into this fantastical realm. In literature, we are introduced to sprawling sagas and mythical worlds crafted with intricate detail, where words weave spells that ignite our imagination. Art transports us visually, capturing the essence of mythical creatures and ethereal landscapes, bringing them to life in multiple formats. Gaming immerses us in interactive adventures, granting us agency to shape the course of epic narratives and explore vast virtual realms. And in cinema, we witness the grandeur of fantasy unfold on the screen, where larger-than-life spectacles and visual marvels transport us to unimaginable realms.

Fantasy also holds a mirror to our own reality, offering a platform to explore timeless themes such as love, courage, friendship, and the eternal struggle between light and darkness. Through the lens of fantasy, we can gain new perspectives, question established truths, and ignite our creativity to envision a world unbound by the limitations of the present.

Fantasy genre has grown beyond the premodern wildernesses characterised by castles and magic. From core templates of the likes of J. R. Tolkien and C S Lewis, Harry Potter and Game of Thrones have helped turn medievalist fantasy mainstream. Escapism, which forms staple plot of fantasy, with children slipping out of the ordinary to save their extraordinary nether worlds, is being put to varied uses in political discourses and semi-quest narratives today. Fantasy continues to be a tool to express disenchantment with the establishment, to fight fascism and dream of alternatives abhorrent right spremacist ideologies.

At a time when alternative visions of fantasy continue to spread, evolve and re-enchant everyday life around the globe, the Singularities International Conference on Fantasy 2024 invites you to delve into this captivating genre, to celebrate its rich tapestry and unlock its hidden heights!

For more details please visit our website: www.singularitiesjournal.com

Or mail to us on siconfantasy2024@gmail.com

CFP: Interdisciplinary conference on iving in the Era of Neo-Orientalism: Complicating Muslim Identities in a Post-9/11 World-O.P. Jindal Global University, Delhi- NCR, India

 Mode of the conference: Online

Muslims are often portrayed as either victors or vanquished in post-9/11 literature. These narratives address the estrangement of a Muslim either by reiterating the Orientalist representations of Islam or by subscribing to Neo-Orientalist representations of an “acceptable Muslim” who chooses national identity over religious identity in Western liberal societies. Neo-Orientalism is more than ‘sue generis’ to Orientalism—it embodies newer ways of alienating Muslims in modern society. Ali Behdad and Juliet Williams describe it as a “continuity between contemporary and traditional forms of Orientalism”  that complicates everyday living in Muslim life. Popular opinion often rests on the fact that the alienation of ‘post-9/11 Muslim’ is the result of failed American diplomacy in the Middle East or the racialization of Muslims in the United States after the Twin Tower attacks. This conference attempts to bring together scholars who inquire into this Muslim alienation in varied global productions across Muslim and non-Muslim cultures in contemporary times.

 

While there is considerable scholarship on Neo-Orientalism, what remains largely undiscussed are the ways in which Muslims grapple with the effects of Neo-Orientalism in contemporary global literature. Therefore, this conference seeks to achieve two things: First, it aims to delve deep into the origins of contemporary orientalism/post-orientalism debate—the religious, political, and social constructs of liberal democracies that encourage and detest neo-Orientalism at the same time. Second, it aims to explore ways in which contemporary literature has represented Muslims and Muslimness in the neo-Oriental age. The purpose of this conference is to bring together experts (literary, political, social, and cultural) who engage with discourses that complicate the representations of Muslims in the post-9/11 world. This note seeks papers, but not limited to the following areas:

 

• Postcolonialism and Neo-Orientalism
• Liberalism and Orientalism
• Islamophobia in secular democracies
• Muslims responding to the pandemic of islamophobia worldwide
• Muslimness or everyday Islam in modern societies
• The politics of moderate Islam as a neo-colonial and neo-liberal enterprise

Keywords: Literature, Political Science, Anthropology, Terrorism Studies, and Islamic Studies

Please submit an abstract of 300-500 words and a short bio to Priyadarshini Gupta at priyadarshini@jgu.edu.in and/or to Mosarrap Hossain Khan at mhkhan@jgu.edu.in by December 15, 2023.  We also encourage prospective conference presenters to email us with any queries.

Keynote Addresses:  

Dr. Hamid Dabashi (Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, USA)

Dr. Ali Behdad (John Charles Hillis Professor of Literature, University of California, Los Angeles, USA)

Dr. Tahir Abbas (Professor of Radicalization Studies, Institute of Security and Global Affairs at Leiden University, The Hague, Netherlands)

Dr. Nadira Khatun (Assistant Professor of Mass Communications, School of Communications, XIM University, Odisha, India)

Selected papers accepted from the conference will be published as a collection of essays in an edited book by a major publisher. 

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/.

CFA: Travel and Research Grants from the Central European History Society

 The Central European History Society (CEHS) seeks applications from North American doctoral candidates (ABD) and recent PhDs (up to three years after completion of degree) in Central European history for travel and research grants up to $4,000. To be eligible, research projects must demonstrate a clear and significant connection to Central Europe and involve travel outside North America. For the purposes of this grant, “Central Europe” includes the region’s historically German-speaking lands as well as the Habsburg Empire and its successor states. All grant-related travel must be planned to take place between April 1 and December 31, 2024.

Applicants need to be members of the Central European History Society at the time of application. (Membership also includes an individual subscription to the journal Central European History: $27/print edition and $17/digital edition annually for graduate students; $42/print and $32/digital for others.) To become a member, visit https://www.cambridge.org/core/membership/cehs.

Application Procedure:

The following materials are required, and should be combined into one PDF and e-mailed to CEHSGrants@gmail.com:   

• Statement of Purpose (1000-word limit), including a project title, a succinct summary of the project and its scholarly contributions, as well as a cogent explanation of how the research to be funded by the grant fits into the larger research project. If the application is a resubmission, the narrative should indicate in which ways the project has advanced since the previous application.
• Curriculum Vitae (with a clear indication of the applicant’s preferred mail and email addresses)
• Budget Statement, totaling no more than $4,000, which should estimate and itemize costs for all planned expenditures (broken out into categories, e.g. foreign transportation, local transportation, lodging, copying, etc.), in keeping with the planned itinerary.

The application and one (1) letter of reference (which the recommender should e-mail directly to CEHSGrants@gmail.com) must be received by 15 January 2024.  Applicants are advised to give their recommender several weeks’ notice of their need for a letter.

For further information or inquiries about the grants (but not to submit applications), please contact the Executive Director of CEHS, Anthony Steinhoff, at cehsexecutivedirector@gmail.com.

Contact Information

Anthony Steinhoff

Executive Director, Central European History Society

Contact Email

CEHSExecutiveDirector@gmail.com

URL

https://www.centraleuropeanhistory.org/?page_id=122

Call for Papers: Narratives of Land: Place, Space, and Human Identity- January 2024

The land is always stalking people. The land makes people live right. The land looks after us. The land looks after people.

– Mrs Annie Peaches, a 77-year-old member of the Western Apache community of Cibecue (Basso 2000: 41)

A narrative is an orally or verbally disseminated account that captures events, attaches meanings to them, and configures the world around us. So, when we propose “Narratives of Land”, the first query that confronts us is – is it at all possible for a land to speak or communicate? Does land possess any agential faculty to affect us? Is a land always mute or it speaks through its materiality?

There is a sense of co-existential and affective interconnectivity between land and humans regarding our empirical perceptions of it. These multi-sensorial faculties shape or orient human identities, our perceptions, and our sociocultural lifeworlds and also redefine the land itself. David Manuel Navarrete and Michael Redclift, in “The Role of Place in the Margins of Space” have talked of the “human dimension of spatiality” (3). In their theorization, place or land is not static or an inert actor instead it is a living entity with a degree of dynamism, fluidity, and changeability. The materialities of any place confer a sense of belongingness, and rootedness to its people.

South Asia is a colonial cartographic construct that has its own regional diversities, histories, and memories. South Asia is a space where the interaction or ‘intra-action’ between land and human has long been the crux for critical inquiry. Land as a geographical entity has long been discussed by geographers, historians, geologists, ecologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, and so on. It has also been the subject of poets, novelists, and also literary critics for many generations. So, to talk about land is to dive into the ocean of multiplicity where there is no terminal point rather any juncture here is a point of departure. The human mind as an isolated entity distinct from its environment since, in the words of Robert Pepperell “a human cannot be separated from its supportive environment … it seems the human is a ‘fuzzy edged’ entity that is profoundly dependent into its surroundings, much as the brain is dependent on the body” (Pepperell 20).

Every human being has their own way of communicating with the land. A diasporic subject often sees the land as not only a physical entity but a ‘topophilic bond’ that transcends the physicality of land. Yi Fu Tuan has used the term “topophilia” (1990) to suggest a sense of attachment or a feeling-link between people and place. Land can be seen as an open ground of action, being and becoming. A land can be a political construct as well. During the partition of India land becomes a defining category of human existence. The sense of belonging to a land informs one’s social, political, and cultural identity. Even, in this age of Anthropocene and Capitalocene, the mutilation and commodification of South Asia has been interrogated by different environmental theorists. Even a post-apocalyptic or a post-war land also speaks a different narrative which is yet to be heard. All these implications can be made to subscribe to the idea of indigeneity.

The conference intends to engage with these multiple concerns emerging out of the land of South Asia. The conference is going to be an interdisciplinary space for scholars of all disciplines to showcase indigeneity contained within the narratives of the land. So, to convey thoughts in language, the conference is ready to set an epistemic dialogue with the land and bring forth an alternative domain of critical explorations.

Abstracts are invited but not limited to the following sub topics/themes:

· Environmental Studies

· Diaspora

· Border Studies

· Human Geography

· Posthuman Studies

· Narratives of War

· Space/Place

· Migration

· Indigenous Epistemes

Abstract Submission: On or before 16th November, 2023

Acceptance of abstract: By 30th November, 2023

Full paper submission: On or before 3rd January, 2024

Seminar dates: 10 th and 11 th January 2024

Seminar will in-person but owing to enough overseas candidates, we'll try to arrange an online session if/when necessary

Send your abstracts to narrativesofland@gmail.com

For further details contract narrativesofland@gmail.com

Send in abstracts of around 300 words along with a bio note of 150 words to the above mail id.

Registration details will be communicated in due course.