CHOTRO THREE
Local Knowledge - Global Translations

The Imagination & the Images of Indigenous Communities in the Twenty-First Century 

Bhasha Research and Publications Centre,
Vadodara, India in association with Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS) announces a conference to be held from 11 to 16 September 2010
 at Delhi & Shimla

This conference, as the Bhili tribal term ‘chotro’ implies, aims to ‘bring toghether’ writers, artists and scholars from all over the world interested in languages, literatures, cultures, histories and movements of the indigenous peoples of the post-colonial world. Two Chotro Conferences were held in India in 2008 and 2009, respectively, and the conference being announced will be the third and the final conference in the series.

Chotro-Three will be held for the first two days, 11-12 September, at Delhi, which is the capital of India, and for the next two days, 13.14 at Shimla, which was the summer capital during the colonial era. A special Symposium on ‘The Indigenous and the Visual Culture’ will be held on the 16th September at Keylang, situated at an altitude of 12000 feet in the Himalayas. A number of eminent Indian writers, artists and media persons will address the conference.

The Bhasha Research and Publication Centre has since its inception worked specifically with and on behalf of the Adivasi or tribal people of India, recognized in India as janajatis, whose cultural expression remains little known both in India and abroad. Bhasha has undertaken to document the linguistic, literary and artistic heritge of these communities. It has collaborated with national academies of art and literature and research institutes to encourage research in culture studies. It has pioneered the publication of literary and educational materials in tribal languages and has set up the Adivasi Academy at Tejgadh (Gujarat) as an institute of formal education for the promotion of tribal languages, literature, arts and culture. In recent years, Bhasha has initiated setting up of another institution for Himalayan Studies under the name ‘Himlok: Institute of Himalayan Studies’.
Together with its co-sponsors, Bhasha now seeks to initiate discussion of the experience of indigenous people on a global scale and in a comparative, cross-cultural perspective. The proposed conference will provide an opportunity for an international exchange of ideas between indigenous people and those interested in their cultural expression, for there are indeed close parallels between, for example, the Aborigines of Australia, the First Nations of Canada and the Adivasis of India. It is hoped that the conference will explore the existence and the future of the knowledge traditions of the indigenous communities in the rapidly changing context of economies and expressions. It is hoped that in drawing attention to the cultural traditions and the response of indigenous people to their marginalization the world over, the conference will at the same time provide new orientation and inspiration for post-colonial studies.

Contributions are sought on the following topics:

Oral traditions; Orature /  indigenous world-views; knowledge systems/ storytelling; folk tales; poetry; drama and performance/ aesthetics / threatened languages / language death; language development / scripts/ subaltern history/ cultural and human rights/ publishing in aboriginal languages/ translation from aboriginal languages/ marginalization of aboriginal / tribal cultural expression/ imagery of the indigenous in theatre, cinema, media.

Bhasha would be happy to receive audio visual material, slides, photographs, calligraphy, handwritten and illustrated poetry, stories and samples of literature poetry, stories and samples of calligraphy by, for, and, on indigenous communities, in order to set up a display and an exhibition, as a backdrop to the proposed gathering, to enlarge its archive, and, to further fortify and spread awareness about the indigenous knowledge system and their modern transformations.
 

PRACTICAL ARRANGEMENTS
Registration: The registration form can be downloaded from
http://www.bhasharesearch.org.in or www.aclals.ulg.ac.be and
should be returned as an attachment by email to
Ganesh Devy (Bhasha) at ganesh.devy@gmail.com

Conference Fee: 

There will be several categories of conference fee:

A) For the participants who wish to participate in the conference for the first two days in Delhi, that is the 11-12 September:
Overseas participants from Australia, Western Europe and North America –
GBP 80/ EUR100 / USD 120
Participants from African and Eastern European Countries –
USD 60
Participants from India
INR 2000

B) For the participants who wish to participate in the conference for the first four days in Delhi and Shimla, that is from the 11th to the 14th September
Overseas participants from Australia, Western Europe and North America –
GBP 130/ EUR160 / USD 200
Participants from African and Eastern European Countries –
USD 100
Participants from India
INR 3500

C) For the participants who wish to participate in the Conference as well as the Special Symposium, from the 11th to the 16th September.
Overseas participants from Australia, Western Europe and North America –
GBP 180/ EUR200 / USD 250
Participants from African and Eastern European Countries –
USD 120
Participants from India
INR 5000
Registration fee will be accepted not before 1st April 2010, and not after 30 June 2010
There will be no further charge for accommodation, meals and local transport nor the transport for Delhi-Shimla-Keylang and Keylang-Shimla-Delhi / or Delhi-Shimla and Shimla-Delhi, as the case may be.
The organizers will not be able to provide travel support to Indian participants for their travel between their home-town and Delhi. Similarly, no travel support will be available to any overseas participants for the international travel.

Abstracts:

Abstracts of presentations in approximately 200 words should be sent by email before the 31st November 2009 to Professor Geoffrey V. Davis, University of Aachen, Germany. Abstracts should not be sent directly to Bhasha Research Centre, India.  
email Address: davis@anglistik.rwth-aachen.de
Acceptance of contributions:
Notification of acceptance of papers will be sent to the participants by Prof. Geoffrey Davis by 31st January 2010.

A formal letter of acceptance of paper will be sent by Prof. G. N. Devy, Bhasha Research and Publication Centre, India, by 15th February 2010 at the latest. A second letter confirming a scholar’s participation in the conference will be sent to the Indian Embassy/Consulate in the participant’s country on receiving the registration fee between April and June 2010.

Visa Requirements:

Foreign nationals requiring visas can download Indian visa forms from the website of the Indian embassy in their country of residence.

Publication:

One volume of the proceedings of the Chotro Conference- 2008 was published in January 2009 by Orient BlackSwan under the title Indigeneity: Culture and Representation, ed. G.N. Devy, Geoffrey V. Davis and K. K. Chakravarty. The second volume Ethnographies: Society and Interpretation will be published in early 2010 (Orient BlackSwan). The proceedings of the Chotro-2009 conference are getting ready for publication.

The organizers will be keen on having a selection of papers presented in Chotro-2010 published. The conference proceedings will be published jointly by Rodopi, Amsterdam & New York in their Cross/Cultures: Readings in the Post/Colonial Literatures in English series and by an Indian publisher.

Submission of finalized papers for publication: 

Participants interested in having their papers considered for publication will be expected to submit the final text by 10th December 2010 at the latest.

CHOTRO
Local Knowledge - Global Translations

The Imagination and Images of Indigenous Communities in the twenty-first Century
=======================================================================
Bhasha Research and Publications Centre,
Vadodara, India
in association with
the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS)
announces a conference to be held from 11 to 16 September 2010
at Delhi & Shimla
========================================================
REGISTRATION FORM

Name:
Institutional Affiliation:
Institutional Contact details ( Fax/ E-mail/ Telephone/ Address) :
Dates on which You wish to Participate:
11-12 September
11-14 September
11-16 September

Country Category:

Australia, western Europe, America, Africa, Eastern Europe, India

Title of Presentation:

Synopsis in approximately 200 words:

Special Medical Needs ( particularly for high altitude travel) :

Date on which Registration Form is submitted:

Additional person(s) accompanying you:

NOTE: Registration form containing the synopsis of your presentation is to be submitted through e-mail to Prof. Geoffrey V Davis, Aachen, at: davis@anglistik.rwth-aachen.de

To print this page, click here.

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CALL FOR PAPERS

11th Annual South Asian Literary Association (SALA) Conference
Los Angeles, January 2011

Transnational Realisms and Post Realisms in South Asian Literature and Culture

This conference examines ways in which South Asian realist and postrealist writers unsettle and rework realist codes. South Asian cultural and narrative forms are erased or occluded in the realism/anti-realism debate. The normative account in literary histories posits realism as the precursor to modernism. South Asian literary realisms diverge from, and are discontinuous with, the long history of debate about Platonic and neo-Platonic art as copying a copy of the real. Neither the philosophic-scientific development of the doctrine of the real, nor 19th century realism as the objective expression of the world view of the European bourgeoisie, can be fully claimed by South Asian realisms except in indirect, synoptic, and belated ways as the travel of ideas through Empire. How might we account for the ways in which colonial and post-colonial South Asian writers dismantle the opposition between realism and modernism? Categories troubled by the South Asian writer include conventional oppositions between realism and myth: realist versus non-realist art: written realisms as distinct from realism in oral storytelling: novel versus petit récit (short tale): realism in frame narratives in relation to realism in episodic or cyclic narratives: social realism as a contrast to magical realism.

Once these binaries are exploded, new paradigms are made available to us: planetary and transnational realisms. Space, time and identity in South Asian realisms are not always situated within the frameworks of nationalism. Transnational, or planetary realisms, suggest that the South Asian writer need not be an apologist for the nation state and he/she does not have to be tied to or encumbered by strictly mimetic conventions of representation. We invite papers on literature, criticism, film, cultural, and social activism that explore any aspect of South Asian realisms and/or post(-)realisms within both national and diasporic contexts. Papers may explore, but are not restricted to, the following ideas and questions:

Realism’s narrative forms and migratory routes. How can we theorize verbal,
discursive, characterological, digressive, as well as truth telling realist conventions in South Asian narrative forms (such as the qissa, dastaan, kathasagar, Puranic tale, folktale, or epic recitation)?

Whose reality does realism narrate? Which classes, communities, genders and
castes constitute the privileged subject of South Asian literary realisms? In what ways have new reading publics among South Asian, diaspora, and non-South Asian communities generated local and global markets for writers of fresh and unexpected South Asian literary realisms?

Affective Realisms. Realism seduces by producing an essential reality and unity
of affect. How might new wave or neo-realist literature, music, and film construct an essentialism of affect? How is the local and the global imagined in such constructions?

The Language of Realism. Is realism language-neutral or are there distinct
formations of realisms in each South Asian vernacular literature? Is it possible to trace a non-Western history of metaphysics that attends to the material, the social, and the everyday, and moves fluidly between realist registers and the unseen?

Activist Realisms. The author/playwright/filmmaker-activist who deploys realist and neo-realist modes often aims to make social and physical reality the basis for consciousness raising. How might Dalit literature, women’s writing, and queer cultural texts re-read and rework the historical significance of realism, or speak to current political issues requiring activism? What are the narrative modes for representing the empirical realities of violence and/or movements for social change?

Socialist or Liberal Realisms. New narratives and narrative technologies in Bollywood essay global neo-realisms, such as the investigative documentary, films themed around terrorism and/or police brutality, and films that document the immigrant’s return home. In post-liberalized India, can we speak of right wing statist appropriations and co-opting of literary and cinematic realisms?

Subaltern Realisms. Subaltern realisms emerge from lower classes and castes that critique dominant religious practices and modes of domination. For example, how has Bhakti realism invented and reinvented itself in the cinematic and literary-cultural consciousness of South Asian cultural production?

Realism and Reality: reassessments, influences, updates

Please send, in an email, a 250-word abstract of your paper and a 5-6 line bio-note listing your institutional affiliation and current email address to the conference co-chairs at the email addresses given below. The subject line of your email should contain the words “SALA 2011.”

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 25 August 2010

Co-chairs and Email addresses:

Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar, University of Pittsburgh, rashmi@pitt.edu

Rajender Kaur, William Paterson University, kaurr@wpunj.edu

2011 CONFERENCE CALL FOR PAPERS


25th Annual MELUS/USACLALS Joint Conference

April 7 – 10, 2011

Florida Atlantic University

Boca Raton, FL



THEME: Ethnic Canons in Global Contexts


As an ongoing and vital process through which societies and cultures have become integrated through a globe-spanning network of communications, economics, and politics, globalization addresses the transnational circulation of ideas and languages. Its impact on literature is manifold, with both positive and negative associations, wherein cultures receiving outside influences ignore some, adopt others as they are, and then immediately start to transform others. Certain aspects of globalization – such as hybridity and multi-rootedness – are increasingly present in literary texts as we witness ways in which they shape new literary forms, interrogate existing canons, and explore the emergence of ethnic canons.



We invite paper abstracts and complete panels, workshops, and roundtable proposals on all aspects of the multi-ethnic literatures of the United States and elsewhere. We are particularly interested in proposals that explore globalization in terms of its influence on ethnic canons, and vice versa, and encourage presentations on all global frameworks of analysis, such as Atlantic studies, global feminisms, pan-Africanism, postcolonialism, transnationalism, global indigenous studies, etc. Submissions should detail requests for specific audiovisual equipment, if needed. We also ask that a proposal for a complete panel, roundtable, or workshop include a short description of the central topic, supplemented by brief abstracts of individual speakers’ contributions.

Deadline for abstracts and proposals (250 words in Word or rtf format): NOVEMBER 15, 2010



PLEASE NOTE: e-mail abstracts to: John Hawley at jhawley@scu.edu AND to Prof. Nora Erro Peralta and Prof. Taylor Hagood at melus2011@gmail.com

Hotel rooms have been 
set aside at the:

Renaissance
 Boca Raton Hotel
($99/night)

2000 NW 19th Street
Boca Raton, FL 33431

(561) 368-5252

All presenters, chairs, and respondents must be members of a chapter of ACLALS (preferably USACLALS). Membership information can be found on the USACLALS website at:

http://www.usaclals.org/?q=node/23&PHPSESSID=692aa421a51c430ceba9b78331d8e4e0

It remains to be determined whether or not participants will also need to become MELUS members at half the regular charge.


Postcolonialism and Labour

EACLALS Postgraduate Conference
Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany

26 - 27 March 2011

Keynote by Professor Frank Schulze-Engler (Goethe University, Frankfurt)

The conference is mainly for those who are currently working on their postgraduate/doctoral thesis. However, early career researchers (who are usually defined as up to five years after obtaining a PhD) are invited to present as well.

This inaugural postgraduate conference aims to provide a space for debate and discussion on reconfiguring the category of ‘Labour’ within Postcolonial Studies. Historically speaking, given its Marxist affiliations and the tropes of eurocentrism in universalising ‘Labour’ as a normative category against the local and particular, Postcolonial Studies has not engaged critically with the notion of ‘Labour’. However, the concept is now gaining purchase in the field owing largely to globalisation, international division of labour, immigration and the radical restructuring of work and professions both within and outside the West. Yet, despite these recent developments, Postcolonial Studies can be criticised for effectively abandoning the economic essence of cultures by ceaselessly reworking ‘difference’, ‘hybridity’ and ‘disjunctures’ as the cultural markers of historical and persisting inequalities. In the last twenty-five years we have witnessed the emergence of a wide range of literary and filmic productions that reconfigure the notion of ‘Labour’, including Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things (2003), Hari Kunzru’s Transmission (2004), Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger (2008).

This conference seeks papers that address, but are not limited to, the following questions:

How, and in what ways, can the concept of ‘Labour’ be redressed from a culturally contingent perspective (as opposed to totalising Marxist approaches)?
How does the recent surge of immigrant and diasporic literature and film reflect the workings of ‘Labour’ in their narratives?
In light of globalisation – the increasing global division of labour, shifts and uncertainties of financial markets – is there a need for Postcolonial Studies to embrace the Marxist concepts of labour without categorically abandoning its culturalist project?

We invite papers from postgraduates working in the disciplines of literature, history, cultural studies, sociology, film and media studies, human geography, linguistics, politics, religious studies and communication among others. Proposals reflecting an interdisciplinary approach are particularly welcome. Some suggested themes are:

Labour and its Cultural Constructions
The aesthetics of writing labour
The visual aesthetics of labour

Labour and Power Relations
Restructuring labour in the Post-Imperial era
Neo-imperialism and labour

Labour and Globalisation
New technologies and new forms of labour
New technologies and old forms of labour

Labour and Capitalism
Revisiting Marx in the global economic crisis
Transformations in the working class

Labour and Gender
New Feminism in the age of globalisation
Deconstructing the gender divide in the job market

Labour and Identity
New Ethnicities for a new labour market
Crossing national identities

Labour and Exploitation
Legitimising the exploitation of illegal immigrants
Illegal exploitation of immigrants

Labour and Exile
Reflections on exile as survival
Refugees, migrant workers and exile

We also welcome presentations in the form of workshops where postgraduate students can share and discuss their work in progress. In addition to the paper presentations, postgraduate students are encouraged to present early findings of their research in the form of posters.

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words for individual presentations (20 minutes), workshop presentations or poster presentations to eaclals.pg.conference@googlemail.com. Include your name, affiliation, email address, a brief biography and indicate whether you will present in a PANEL, WORKSHOP or with a POSTER.

Abstracts: Deadline for abstracts is: 01 November 2010

For further information about the conference, please see the website at www.eaclals.ulg.ac.be/pg-conference

Participants must be EACLALS members. Please see the EACLALS website at http://www.eaclals.org for subscription rates and further information.

A special issue of JPW on Pakistan is being edited by Muneeza Shamsie, This will be issue JPW 47.2 which will be published in April 2011 (copy due at publishers in February 2011).

The theme is 'Beyond Geography: Literature, Politics and Violence in Pakistan" and the issue will look at the the thin dividing line between diaspora and non-diaspora in Pakistani English writing, as well as the literary response to the current events - and other aspect of politics and turmoil in Pakistan. She would like to make the issue as comprehensive as possible by including other dimensions of Pakistani English Literature - identity, nation, gender, social disparity etc. Her aim is to compile an issue which will examine the dynamics of current event sin Pakistan, and in particular the literary response

Muneeza Shamsie would also like to include an article discussing the works of both Mohsin Hamid and Mohammed Hanif (on a comparative basis). This should be no longer than 7000 words and should follow the JPW style-guide (which is essentially the same as MLA) . Alternatively she would also consider TWO separate articles one on each author, if you were able to write on only one of them.

If you are interested in contributing to this special issue an article which covers the work of both or alternatively one of these authors please contact her on mshamsie@gmail.com.

The deadline for abstracts and expressions of interest is 15th June and for final submission to her is 30th November.

Biopolitics and Postcolonial Literature: a Special Issue of Australian Literary Studies.

In The History of Sexuality Michel Foucault describes the emergence of a modern form of power-knowledge, built around the administration of bodies and the management of life, and distinguishes it from an older form of sovereign power: “the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death.” It is a formula that has subsequently informed work on everything from health care to genocide. Partly through the influence of Giorgio Agamben’s work on “bare life” and Achille Mbembe’s work on “necropolitics,” it also plays an increasingly important role in redescriptions of colonialism and its legacies, even as the relationship between sovereignty and biopolitics has been sharply debated.

What is the historical relationship between literary discourse and biopolitical practice? How useful is the notion of biopolitics for a general sense of literary history, and for work in specific colonial and postcolonial contexts? How might it change our sense of the archive, or question prevailing modes of periodization? How might it help us connect the colonial past to the global present?

Topics might include (but certainly aren’t limited to) narratives of invasion and extinction, regimes of protection and assimilation, fictions of hybridity and miscegenation, the relationship between sexuality and sovereignty, the nation as a biopolitical category, and broader discourses on race, citizenship, public health, immigration, security and border control.

Final submissions would be due by February 1, 2011. Please send papers and inquiries to Andrew McCann at Andrew.McCann@Dartmouth.Edu

*REGISTRATION NOW OPEN*

Bharat Britain: South Asians Making Britain, 1870-1950
13-14 September 2010
British Library Conference Centre, St Pancras, London

Invited keynote speakers include:
Humayun Ansari
Elleke Boehmer
Antoinette Burton
Mukti Jain Campion
Dominiek Dendooven
Hanif Kureishi
Chandani Lokuge
Susheila Nasta
Nayantara Sahgal
Rozina Visram

Held in partnership with the British Library, this major international conference marks the culmination of the AHRC-funded research project ‘Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad, 1870-1950’, led by the Open University in collaboration with the University of Oxford and King’s College, London. Inter-disciplinary in approach, the project explores the manifold ways in which South Asians impacted on the formation of Britain’s cultural and political life prior to Independence and Partition in 1947. It adds historical depth and breadth to our present-day readings of ‘diaspora’ and ‘migration’, and counters the common perception that a British monoculture only began to diversify after the Second World War.

Showcasing new research from an impressive range of distinguished scholars, curators and writers worldwide, ‘Bharat Britain’ will map the various networks and affiliations South Asians and Britons formed across boundaries of ‘race’, ‘nation’, ‘culture’ and ‘class’, setting up connections which were to anticipate the shapes of things to come. These are evident in different areas of British cultural and political life, from the elitist literary and artistic circles of Bloomsbury where friendships were forged between poets and painters; to the anticolonial organisations which brought South Asian and British activists together in the lead up to Independence; to the battlefields of the two world wars where Indian sepoys and volunteers fought alongside British soldiers. Yet these interactions were also, at times, marked by hierarchies and dissent. Whether through riot, strike or petition, South Asians struggled for their rights as imperial citizens, shifting ideas of ‘Britishness’ in the process.

The conference will open the project exhibition ‘South Asians Making Britain: 1858-1950’ which will then tour across the UK. It will also launch and make available for the first time a unique interactive database comprising several hundred entries on South Asians in Britain.

To register and for further details, please go to: www.open.ac.uk/arts/south-asians-making-britain/conference.htm

Empire and Me: Personal Recollections of
Imperialism in Reality and Imagination
16th - 18th June 2010

Is imperialism really dead? What did people close up to colonialism or affected by its immediate aftermath make of it in their personal writings and remembrances?

This conference marks the Centenary of The Round Table, which came in to being to promote the British Empire but which has evolved into a forward-looking organisation facilitating robust discussion of international affairs, especially as they pertain to the modern Commonwealth. In Empire and Me Cumberland Lodge and the Round Table combine to talk about imperialism in literature. There will be a particular focus on colonial and post-colonial diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, blogs and other kinds of recollections conceived or written against a colonial or post-colonial background. The conference brings together writers, scholars and enthusiastic readers to ask whether imperialism is truly a thing of the past or alive and kicking in today's world, but expressing itself in a different vocabulary and in other circumstances.

Click here for registration information:

http://www.cumberlandlodge.ac.uk/our_conferences/forthcoming_conference_pages/Empire+and+Me

Amongst others, speakers include:

For all registration enquiries please contact Janis Reeves on 01784 497794 or

janis@cumberlandlodge.ac.uk

Cumberland Lodge | The Great Park | Windsor | Berkshire | SL4 2HP | United Kingdom

The call for papers for the 2011 EACLALS conference in Istanbul closed on 31 March and received an enthusiastic response, but several colleagues have recently contacted us to enquire whether it was still possible to submit an abstract. In agreement with conference convenor Isil Bas and her team, we have decided to extend the deadline for the submission of proposals until 31 May 2010.
 
Please submit abstracts of about 200 words for individual presentations (20 minutes) or panel proposals for three speakers (90 minutes) to EACLALS2011@googlemail.com. Include your name, affiliation, email address and a brief biography (for attachments include your name as part of the file name). Add 5-6 key words and an indication of the most appropriate subtheme for your paper.
-------------

CALL FOR PAPERS: EACLALS TRIENNIAL CONFERENCE 2011

AT: Bogazici (Bosphorus) University, Istanbul, Turkey, from 26 to 30 April 2011

THEME: ‘Under Construction: Gateways and Walls’

This conference proposes to examine the state of postcolonial studies using the concepts of (re)building, transition and change, process and construction, in order to discuss the social and political crises and dilemmas of the contemporary moment which urgently need addressing.

The Gateway, the Wall: these conceptual figures suggest the practical and piecemeal yet also provisional nature of our discipline and scholarly explorations, and the way that knowledge may be constructed to function as both barrier and pathway to further modes of enquiry. Delegates might like to reflect on the current state of postcolonial theory, which is increasingly used alongside new models taken from migration studies or globalisation theory. This expansion offers a ‘gateway’ to new discourses and disciplines, but correspondingly traditional postcolonial frameworks are also inevitably in danger of losing their critical purchase. Questions to be posed might include: Can postcolonial studies act as ‘gateways’ to the understanding of the contemporary world by intersecting with other theoretical models? Or do postcolonial models act as ‘walls’ that block perspectives currently only available if used in conjunction with other discourses and disciplines? Can earlier postcolonial discourses still be confidently applied to current economic and political conditions (e.g. the rise of the BRIC countries, especially China and India)? What new challenges do postcolonial modes of thought face today (the Middle East, for instance, is one amongst other complex areas of inquiry)? Such questions can be explored either from a theoretical angle or through particular case studies in the fields of literature, language, cinema and visual arts.

The theme ‘Under Construction’ also reflects the conference location in Istanbul, a city of ‘border-zones’ that straddles East and West, Europe and Asia, but which historically has also been a gateway between North and South, between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, between ‘wild Scythia’ and the ‘civilised’ Roman Empire, between orthodox Russia and the Byzantine metropolis of Constantinople. It hints at the layered political status of Turkey, a complex multicultural nation which was once the centre of an empire and currently seeks a ‘gateway’ into a larger community of nations through entry into the European Union. Turkey also images the geopolitical shifts currently occurring due to globalisation, and suggests that remappings of older notions of how the world is divided up, such as empires, colonies, nation-states and regions, are now required. How adequate in the global/glocal third millennium are current conceptual frameworks constructed around terms like cosmopolitanism, the transnational and the transcultural? What new terms and frameworks can we use to address the provisionality of contemporary life: terrorism, global warming, migration, multilingualism, diasporic subjects and groups who lack a definitive homeland?

Subthemes offering pathways towards and around the theme of ‘Under Construction’, and images of gateways, walls and border-zones:

Interactions with the Orient as the ‘Other’
Revisiting Edward Said’s Orientalism and Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis
Worlding the Text and the Critic

Interdisciplinarity and Postcolonial Studies
The ‘post-postcolonial’ and the globalised world
Is world literature postcolonial?
Postcolonialism and transnationalism

Nation-states and Nationalisms
The nation’s gateways and walls
Global networks versus the nation-state?
Governmentality and its discontents
Global English and language choices
Geopolitics of East and West
Revisiting empires, colonies, and commonwealths
Dying and reviving states
China, the new empire

History and Memory
After Gallipoli: reconstructions and representations
National myths and identity
Trauma, mourning and memory

Postcolonial Aesthetics
To write life or not to write life
Is there a postcolonial genre?
Electronic gateways: the death of the book?

Bosphorus – Interfaces under Four Winds
North-South/East-West ambiguities and divergences
Myths of ‘wilderness’ and ‘civilisation’
Postcolonial romanticisms

Minority Subjects and Communities
Debating the ‘Other’ inside
Minority versus majority identitarian discourses

Ocean Flows and Networks
The Black Aegean, the African Mediterranean
Islands, archipelagos, and isthmuses
The sea as history

Postcolonial Migration and Cosmopolitanism
The neo-liberal subject and globalisation
Constructing utopias, the ‘shock of the new’
Where is the new cosmo/polis?
Diasporas, exile and migration as crossings

Ethics as Boundary and Marker
An environmental ethics under construction
Terrorism, the subject and globalisation
What is a postcolonial ethics?

Gender as Threshold and Border
Geographies of gender
Trans/gendering the subject
Globalising the queer

Abstracts: Deadline for abstracts is 31 May 2010.

Please submit abstracts of about 200 words for individual presentations (20 minutes) or panel proposals for three speakers (90 minutes) to "EACLALS2011@googlemail.com". Include your name, affiliation, email address and a brief biography (for attachments include your name as part of the file name). Add 5-6 key words and an indication of the most appropriate subtheme for your paper.

Delegates must be members of an ACLALS chapter. To renew your subscription to the US chapter, follow this link: http://www.usaclals.org

The 2010 Creative Writing Issue of the South Asian Review 

"Pakistani Creative Writing in English:  Tracing the Tradition"



South Asian Review, the referred journal of the South Asian Literary Association, invites submissions for the 2010 Creative Writing Issue, Volume 31, Number 3.  The issue will foreground original creative writing in English in all genres by well-established and emerging Pakistani writers, with a focus on contemporary living writers, including those of the Pakistani Diaspora.  The overall goal of this issue is to trace the tradition of Pakistani creative writing in English that represents diversity through connectivity in terms of such themes and concerns as:  authorship, language and identity, dis/location, formal innovation, ethnic/national (un)belonging, sexual politics, desire and sexuality, gender and religion, intergenerational conflicts, the country and the city, and globalization.
All submissions must be received by July 31, 2010.  A completed manuscript prepared either in Microsoft Word in 12 point Helvetica or in Rich Text Format (RTF) and not exceeding 6,000 words should be transmitted electronically.  Manuscripts should be personally edited and polished before submitting.  The submission should be accompanied by:  (1) a statement that the work has not appeared elsewhere in parts or as a whole (or if it has, permission to reprint must accompany the submission); (2) a biographical note of about 50 words; and (3) a complete mailing address.  Manuscripts, in any form, will not be returned.
 
Please send inquiries and manuscripts to:


Dr. Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Dr. Waseem Anwar, Co-Guest Editors

Dr.Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Director, Women and Gender Studies
Room 121, Dickson Hall
Montclair State University
Upper Montclair, NJ  07043
USA
khanf@mail.montclair.edu

Dr. Waseem Anwar
Dean, Faculty of Humanities
Professor and Chairperson, Department of English
Forman Christian College (A Chartered University)
Ferozepur Road, Lahore 54600, Pakistan
miaaon@hotmail.com 

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The 2010 Regular Issue of SAR
South Asian Review, the refereed journal of the South Asian Literary Association, invites submissions for the 2010 issue, Volume 31, Number 2 (October/November). SAR  is a representative scholarly forum for the examination of South Asian languages and literatures in a broad cultural context. The journal invites healthy and constructive dialog on issues pertaining to South Asia, but the thrust of the dialog must be literature and the sister arts. The journal welcomes critical and analytical essays on any aspect or period of South Asian literature (ancient, precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial). SAR is open to all ideas, positions, and critical and theoretical approaches. Recognizing the linguistic and cultural diversity of the subcontinent, the journal particularly welcomes essays in intercultural, comparative, and interdisciplinary studies in the humanities. The journal is also interested in essays on music, painting, sculpture, architecture, and other related fields. The following areas are of special interest to the journal:

 South Asian Literatures                 Cultural Studies
 South Asian Languages     Colonial Studies
 South Asian Studies     Postcolonial Studies
 South Asian Culture    Comparative Literature
 South Asian Diaspora    Women’s Studies
 Comparative Aesthetic     Film Studies
 Literary Theory     Transcultural Studies


Critical articles of 15–25 pages, prepared in accordance with the MLA style and accompanied by an abstract of 8–10 lines and a biographical note, must be received by June 30, 2010. Articles can be sent by mail or transmitted electronically. All correspondence pertaining to the 2010 issue should be addressed to:

K. D. Verma, Editor, South Asian Review
Department of English

University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown

Johnstown, PA 15904

Phone: 814-269-7143

Fax: 814-269-7196

kverma@pitt.edu

Inquiries regarding book reviews should be addressed directly to:

Professor P. S. Chauhan

Department of English

Arcadia University

450 South Easton Road

Glenside, PA 19038-3295

Phone: 215-572-2106

chauhanp@arcadia.edu

International Conference on Multiculturalism and Global Community, 24-27 July 2010, Tehran, Iran

The deadline for submission of abstracts is April 10th.

For more information please visit: http://www.icmgi.info/

For queries please contact: conference@mcgc.ir

Call for Papers
10th Conference of the European Society for the Study of English / ESSE 10
24-28 August 2010
University of Turin, Italy

British Asian Culture in the Post-Millennium

Proceeding from the burgeoning interest in various aspects of South Asian cultures in Britain as well as their commodification since the late 1990s and acknowledging that Muslim British Asian identities have increasingly been seen as problematic in the aftermath of the Rushdie affair (1989) and in the post-9/11 and post-7/7 era, this seminar invites contributions that focus on critical negotiations with these processes in British Asian literature, film, music and the performing arts. The seminar particularly welcomes papers that engage with shifts of theoretical paradigms, from Stuart Hall’s “New Ethnicities” and Homi Bhabha’s “Third Space” that helped to shape the critical debate on British minority cultures in the 1990s to more recent conceptualisations of British Asian identity politics and inter- and intra-ethnic encounters and conflicts such as Avtar Brah’s ‘Diaspora Space’ and studies of South Asian popular culture, all of which may be tested against the challenges British Asian cultural productions both face in and pose to the post-millennium, globalized world.

Procedure for submitting proposals for papers:

Those wishing to participate in the Conference are invited to submit 200-word abstracts of their proposed papers directly to both convenors of the seminar before 31 January 2010:

Giovanna Buonanno (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia)
giovanna.buonanno@unimore.it

Christiane Schlote (University of Cambridge)
cs621@cam.ac.uk / schlote@ens.unibe.ch

The convenors will let the proponents know whether their proposals have been accepted no later than 28 February 2010.

Please note that authors of seminar papers will be expected to give an oral presentation of not more than 15 minutes duration, rather than simply reading their papers aloud. Reduced versions of the papers are circulated among all speakers in advance of the seminar.
Please don’t hesitate to contact us for more information. As this seminar is part of the ESSE 10 conference programme, we invite you to visit the ESSE website for more detailed information on ESSE and the Turin conference: www.unito.it/esse2010

Stanford University Press is pleased to announce the publication of *Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing*, by Vilashini Cooppan.

* * *

Worlds Within* tracks the changing forms of novels and nations against along, postcolonial twentieth century. While globalization has sometimes been understood to supersede national borders, this book distances itself from before-and-after sequences in order to trace the intersection between national and global politics.

Drawing from psychoanalytic and deconstructive accounts of identity, difference, and desire, *Worlds Within* explores the making and unmaking of ideas of nation, globe, race, and gender in the late imperialism of Joseph Conrad, the anticolonial nationalism and nascent Third-Worldism of W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, and the decolonizing nationalisms and postcolonial cosmopolitanisms of novelistic descendants, such as the Indian and Indo-Caribbean writers Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, V.S. Naipaul, and David Dabydeen, the anglophone and francophone African writers Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Assia Djebar, and Tsitsi Dangarembga, and the Cuban postmodern novelist and theorist Severo Sarduy. Across this global field, national identity is subtended by transnational affiliations and expressed through diverse and intersecting literary forms.

More information about this book can be found at http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=8961.

Call for Papers

An Interdisciplinary Humanities and Social Sciences Conference

TEXTING OBAMA: politics/poetics/popular culture

7-10 September 2010
Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.

Hosted by English Research Institute, the MMU Writing School and
The Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences Research

Confirmed keynote speakers:
Simon Gikandi, David Theo Goldberg, Bonnie Greer, Ato Quayson.
Readings from Carol Ann Duffy, Jackie Kay and others

Barack Obama’s presidency is widely seen as the beginning of a new era, not only in world politics but also in global culture, with the present increasingly glossed as the ‘Age of Obama’. Our conference will ask what the terms of this naming might mean by addressing the diverse range of representational forms attached to Obama in contemporary world culture – as a person, icon and phenomenon. The conference will map and explore the specific historical, political and cultural climates in which Obama(’s) texts operate. It will interrogate the signifiers, signs and processes that circulate around Barack Obama, and explore his own contributions and interventions across diverse media.

Proposals are invited for papers or panels that engage with these diverse textualities. Questions might include: In what ways do Obama texts ‘travel’ and under what conditions? How might travelling theory or diaspora theory engage with Obama texts? In what ways might attention to Obama texts interrogate or develop extant or emerging frameworks at work in postcolonial, globalisation, media and cultural studies? How might a focus on transnational Obamas include or obscure local or national politics and expressions of black activism? How ought we to theorise pronouncements of a ‘post-racial’ America or/and a ‘post-Katrina’ America?

Possible streams might include: Postcolonial Obama: Kenya and Indonesia, Globalisation and Cosmopolitanism, Aloha Obama! Negotiating Hawaii, Obama and African-America, Rhetoric/Orature /Life writing, The Obama Families, Screening Obama, Obama and Hospitality, Black and Bi-Racial Masculinities, Race & Racial Politics, Obama in Europe, Publishing/Merchandising Obama, Ghosting Kennedy, Race and Fatherhood, Obama’s 100 days, Obama in the Academy, Law and Civil Rights, Black Activism, Obama’s Blackberry: New Technologies/Media and Race, Obama and Popular Culture: Watching The Wire, Obama and pedagogy.

Proposals should be emailed to textingobama@mmu.ac.uk by no later than 26 March 2010.

Organising Committee: Dr. Ellie Byrne, Dr. Julie Mullaney, Prof. Berthold Schoene, Department of English, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.

International conference
After Writing Back.
Present and Future Perspectives in Postcolonial Studies.www.unibg.it/AWBconference09

University of Bergamo, Italy 13-15 October 2009

Hosted by:
University of Bergamo
Faculty of Modern Languages and Literatures
PhD in Euro-American Literatures/Doctoral School of Humanities
(Partner of the European PhDNet "Literary and Cultural Studies")

Twenty years ago Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffith and Hellen Tiffen published their groundbreaking The Empire Strikes Back. The conference purpose is not to celebrate a contribution whose significance is beyond discussion, or simply to upgrade its re-assessment, but to follow up the lines that have been opened by this seminal work. We would like to rethink the possibilities and problems now facing the field of Postcolonial studies. Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin themselves ahve broadened their focus to fruitful areas such as Globalization, the Environment, the Sacred, or the 'Human.'

Postcolonial societies (both colonizer and colonized) have transformed cultures and languages. The negotiation of power relationships engaged by first and Third World cultures has shaped new identities, at the same time suggested a compelling revision of Modernity.

The conference will explore the relevance of the Postcolonial perspective in engaging with these and more issues. Papers may focus on these and other related topics:

• relations between postcolonialism and globalization, modernity, environment, ecocriticism
• postcolonial literature and new forms of resistance
• literary language, English(es), native languages, linguistic identities

Confirmed Keynote speakers: Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffith, Helen Tiffin

20-30 minute papers are welcome
300-400 word proposals may be submitted by 30 June 2009 to:

flaminia.nicora@unibg.it

Please include yoru name and affilitation, a short bio and e-mail address.

Convener: Flaminia Nicora - University of Bergamo Italy

Dear USACLALS Members,

Here are the results of the recent election. Some of you may not have received ballots. If that was the case, then the reason was that we do not have your most current mailing address. Please email the new membership secretary, Kamal D. Verma (kverma@pitt.edu) and give him the updated address.

Finally, if you have any recent publication to announce, please forward me that information ASAP; I am putting together the text of the newsletter for which I am responsible (Seodial Deena takes over as the newsletter editor).

President: John Hawley, Department of English
                   St. Joseph's Hall 321
                   Santa Clara University 
                   500 El Camino Real
                   Santa Clara, CA 95053
                   JHawley@scu.edu

John C. Hawley is Associate Professor of English at Santa Clara University.  He writes on Africa and South Asian literature, most recently having published "Amitav Ghosh: An Introduction."  He is the editor of ten books, and is working on two others.

Secretary: Cynthia Leenerts
                   East Stroudsburg University
                   srcyn@aol.com

Treasurer: Daniel M. Scott III, Department of English
                   Craig Lee Hall 263                   
                   Rhode Island College
                   600 Mt. Pleasant Ave.
                   Providence, RI 02908 
                   dscott@ric.edu

Membership Secretary: K.D. Verma, Department of English
                   University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown
                   Johnstown, PA 15904 
                   Fax: (814) 269-7196
                   verma@upitt.edu

Newsletter Editor: Seodial Deena, Department of English 
                    Bate 2130
                    East Carolina University
                    Greenville, NC 27858-4353
                    deenas@mail.ecu.edu

Members at Large:

(1) Terri Hassler, Bryant College, thassele@bryant.edu; (2) Pradyumna S. Chauhan, Arcadia University, chauhanp@comcast.net; (4) Barbara Silliman, University of Rhode Island, putty@cox.net; (5) Karen Chow, Foothill-De Anza Community College, chowkaren@fhda.edu; (6) Revathi Krishnaswamy, San Jose State University, rkrishna@email.sjsu.edu

Graduate Student Representatives:

(1) Katy Howe, Rhode Island College, kahowe@comcast.net; (2) Alice D'Amore, Purdue University, adamore@purdue.edu; (3) Robin Field, University of Virginia, ref4u@cms.mail.virginia.edu; (4) Weihsin Gui, Brown University, wgui@brown.edu; (5) Ubaldimir Guerra, East Carolina University

Best Regards,
Rajini Srikanth

Recent Publications of USCLALS members

·         Meena Alexander, Raw Silk. Triquarterly, 2004.

Alexander's cross-cultural perspective and sense of global identity (gained from her childhood in India and the Sudan, and her adult life in New York City) infuses her poems. She writes about violence and civil strife, love, despair, and a hard-won hope in the midst of a post-September 11 world.

·         John Hawley. Amitav Ghosh: An Introduction. Foundation Books, 2004.

This introduction to Ghosh's major writings, including all his novels and the collections of his various essays, develops the notion of the author as seeking to find a voice for the voiceless in history, and to define himself in his own terms rather than in those of the British Commonwealth.

·         Brinda J. Mehta, Diasporic (Dis)locations: Indo-Caribbean Women Writers Negotiate the Kala Pani. Kingstown, Jamaica: University Press of the West Indies. 2004.

Indo-Caribbean women writers are virtually invisible in the literary landscape because of cultural and social inhibitions and literary chauvinism. Until recently, the richness and particularities of the experiences of these writers in the field of literature and literary studies were compromised by stereotypical representations of the Indo-Caribbean women that were narrated from a purely masculine or an Afrocentric point of view. Mehta’s book features the Indian women who braved the treacherous crossing of the Atlantic, or the kala pani, to Trinidad and Guyana and provided courage, determination, self-reliance and sexual independence to their literary granddaughters. These granddaughters in turn used the kala pani as the necessary language and frame of reference to position Indo-Caribbean female subjectivity, equating writing as a pubic declaration of one's identity and right to claim creative agency.

·         Uma Parameswaran, Ed., At the Gates. Larkuma Press, 2004. 

A collection of stories by 6 students in a creative writing course, as well as one by their teacher and editor, Uma Parameswaran. The stories are about death, darkness, drugs, violence and idealism.

• Amritjit Singh and Daniel M. Scott III, eds.  The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman. Rutgers University Press, 2003.

This book is the definitive collection of the writings of Wallace Thurman (1902–1934), providing a comprehensive anthology of both the published and unpublished works of this bohemian, bisexual writer. Widely regarded as the enfant terrible of the Harlem Renaissance, Thurman was a leader among a group of young artists and intellectuals that included Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Aaron Douglas. Through the publication of magazines such as Fire!! and Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life, Thurman tried to organize the younger generation against the ideologies of the older generation of black leaders and intellectuals such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Benjamin Brawley. Thurman also left a permanent mark on the period through his prolific work as a novelist, playwright, short story writer, and literary critic.

·         Amritjit Singh and Bruce G. Johnson, Eds. Interviews with Edward W. Said. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004. (hardcover and paperback).

In Interviews with Edward W. Said, the first collection of interviews with this powerful intellectual, Said reveals the displacements and conflicts in his Palestinian background, and the energies and concerns that have made him a shaper of public discourse. Covering encounters from 1972 to 2000, the book provides, for both the specialist and the general reader, an engaging introduction to Said's wide and disparate oeuvre and his insights that have made a considerable impact on the practices of many disciplines, including literature, anthropology, political science, international studies, peace studies, history, sociology, and music.

·         Rajini Srikanth, The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America. Temple University Press, 2004.

Drawing on the cosmopolitan sensibility of scholars like Anthony Appiah, Vinay Dharwadker, Martha Nussbaum, Bruce Robbins, and Amartya Sen, this book argues that to read the body of South Asian American writing justly, one must engage with the urgencies of places as diverse as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India, Burma, Pakistan, and Trinidad. Poets, novelists, and playwrights like Indran Amirthanayagam, Meena Alexander, Amitav Ghosh, Michael Ondaatje, Shani Mootoo, Amitava Kumar, Tahira Naqvi, and Sharbari Ahmed exhort North American residents to envision connectedness with inhabitants of other lands. These writers’ significant contribution to American literature and to the American imagination is to depict the nation as simultaneously discrete and entwined within the fold of other nations. The world out there arrives next door.

·         Mark Stein, Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, December 2004.
 

SAACLALS International Conference, July 10-13, 2005, at the University of Cape Town, South Africa

Rush 150-word abstracts for papers or panels.  Deadline soon!!

For further information, immediately contact Prof. Rosemary Gray at rgray@postino.up.ac.za.

Our aim is to bring together people who use English as a primary means of communication and ask them to concentrate on the theme AFRICA IN LITERATURE.  Communicating ideas, mythologies and dreams remains one of our most empowering human activities.  In bringing people together from different cultures, generations, nationalities, perspectives and disciplines to concentrate on a theme like this one, we believe we encourage conversation, mutual exchange and hope in a time of global conflict. The exploration of ideas of Africa represented in many literatures is a rich topic for consideration.  There is another powerful view of Africa as representing the writer’s very blood, bones and cells.

We hope such radically different understandings of Africa as represented in literature will stir up vigorous discussion.  But Okri rightly concludes that “beneath the strife of our age, internecine warfare, tribal antagonisms, religious intolerance, racial violence, the disharmony of the sexes, beneath all these lurks the most ordinary discovery that we are human, and that life is holy.”

Papers addressing such topics as the following are invited: colonialism and post colonialism; History and its literary representations; prison experiences; civil war in Africa; Writing the nation; Gendered representations; representing Africa in letters/diaries/personalia/ biographical ways; Hegemonic narratives; Religious perspectives in the representations of Africa; diaspora; literary criticism: Africa in literary theory; Landscape: Land as motif; oral literature and storytelling.

USACLALS

2010 MEMBERSHIP FORM

This form is for new USACLALS members, as well for those who need to renew their membership. (See directions below).

The long-term goal of USACLALS is to study postcolonial literatures (including those of Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Canada, New Zealand and Australia) in relationship to the varied and vital cultural contexts of the Americas.  We encourage studies which reach beyond the literatures of the British Commonwealth to use comparative frameworks in relation to francophone literatures, ethnic American literatures, and African-American literature.

Name: _______________________________________________________________

Institutional Affiliation (if any):___________________________________________

Office Address: __________________________________________________________

Home Address: ________________________________________________________

To which address should we send

USACLALS newsletter/materials? Home: _________; Office: ____________

Email: _________________________________________________________

Phone: _____________________; Fax:________________________________

Membership Dues (one year):

____ $30.00 (Regular, Full time Faculty)

____ $20.00 (Students, Retirees, Part-time Faculty)

Please return this form with appropriate fees to: Daniel M. Scott III, English Department, Rhode Island College, CL-263, 600 Mt. Pleasant Ave., RI 02908, dscott@ric.edu. Make checks payable to: USACLALS.

Indo-Caribbean Literature and Culture 2010

Centre for Caribbean Studies


University of Warwick



1st-2nd of July 2010



To mark the foundation of the Indo-Caribbean Studies Association, the Centre for Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick is hosting its second interdisciplinary conference on Indo-Caribbean Literature and Culture.



Indentureship propelled over half-a-million Indians across the kala pani to take root all over the world, negotiating new physical and figurative spaces for themselves and their descendants. The contribution of this widely-distributed Indian population to global culture and literature is substantial, and is particularly pronounced in the case of the Caribbean. Encompassing art, music, cuisine, religion, and more, the Indian presence is indelibly inscribed on the social, cultural, political and physical landscape of the region; emerging from their fascinating history is a wealth of creative writing and scholarly works.



The flourishing of Indo-Caribbean literature and creativity over the past twenty years, exemplified by the renown of V. S. Naipaul and reinforced by the work of critically acclaimed authors such as Cyril Dabydeen, Mahadai Das, Ramabai Espinet, Roy Heath, Ismith Khan, Shiva Naipaul, Sam Selvon, and many more, has served to draw critical focus towards the unique and diverse elements of Indian life in the Caribbean and elsewhere. The postcolonial intersections of Indo-Caribbean experience provide a generative platform for critical and theoretical discourses, incorporating hybridity, hyphenated identities, neo-colonialism, eco-criticism, coolitude, cross-cultural transfer, gender construction and beyond.



This event welcomes papers across the theoretical spectrum of Indo-Caribbean studies, and aims to investigate new avenues of research in the field. What impact have recent developments in postcolonial cultural theory had on our understanding of Indo-Caribbean experience? Conversely, what distinctive contribution does Indo-Caribbean literature make to a broader understanding of postcolonial cultures?



Topics for consideration might include but are not limited to:



Negotiation of Indo-Caribbean identities


Memory, migration and exile


Indian women in the Caribbean


Politics and labour


Gender and sexuality


Religion and ritual


Ecology and environment


Language


Survival and revival of visual arts



Submissions: Proposals are invited from established and new scholars, including postgraduate researchers. 300-word abstracts should be sent to L.Gramaglia@warwick.ac.uk and should arrive by 21st December 2009.

Acceptance will be notified by 1st February 2010.



To register for the conference please contact M.R.Tumbridge@warwick.ac.uk or Joseph.Jackson@warwick.ac.uk.

Dr Letizia Gramaglia

University of Warwick


Indo-Caribbean Studies Association http://go.warwick.ac.uk/icsa

AFRICAN LITERATURE ASSOCIATION
36th Annual African Literature Association Conference
March 10-14, 2010
UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
Tucson, Arizona

CALL FOR PANELS, ROUNDTABLES AND PAPERS

GENERAL THEME: ECO-IMAGINATION: AFRICAN AND DIASPORAN LITERATURES AND SUSTAINABILITY

In the recent past, sustainability referred more to development, environment, and economics, and some scholars did not think that the humanities and the arts could be included in this intellectual inquiry. There are now several centers of sustainability and the humanities, and courses such as “The literature of sustainability as literature of life” are being offered across the nation. Defining sustainability in broad terms, the 36th annual ALA conference will focus on how the environment and environmental issues are addressed in the literature of Africa and other areas where African peoples have settled, particularly the Americas. The conference will explore subtopics on matters including globalization and immigration and their connection to environmental questions. One objective of the conference will be to foster inter-disciplinary dialog about topics such as climate change or desertification, in the context of languages, literature and cinema.

SUBTHEMES
-Literature and the environment
-Eco-criticism and Literature
-Literature, Land and Landscape
-New Trends in Fiction
-Literature and Cinema
-African Language Literatures
-Women’s Literature and Cinema
-Literature and Globalization
-Literature and Children’s Rights
-Immigration in Literature and Film
-Translation Issues
-Teaching African and Diasporan Literatures

To follow the ALA tradition, papers and panels on all aspects of African/Diasporan literature are invited, but particular focus on the conference themes is encouraged.

Please send panel proposals including names of presenters and titles of topics by November 30, 2009 or individual paper abstracts by December 15, 2009 to the convener, Irène d’Almeida at ala2010tucson@gmail.com.

CFP: American Studies as Transnational Practice (4/9-4/10/10)

April 9-10, 2010 at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, the United States of America

Texas Tech University houses the internationally known Southwest Collections and the Vietnam Archives. Spring in Lubbock is mild and sunny.

Keynote Speakers:
Eva Cherniavsky, Department of English, University of Washington
Colleen Lye, Department of English, University of California at Berkeley
Walter Mignolo, Department of Literature, Duke University
Donald Pease, Department of English, Dartmouth College

Art Exhibition:
Wang Qingsong, photographer based in Shanghai, “Photography and the Consumerist Invasion
of China”
Margarita Cabrera, Mexican artist living in El Paso, “US Immigration Policy and Maquiladora
Practices"
Joomi Chung, Korean artist resident in Miami, Ohio, “Installation Art about Korean-U.S.
Relations”
Scott Townsend, American visual artist in Raleigh, North Carolina, “Interactive Installation and
Film on 'Border relations'”

Proposal Submission Deadline: January 18, 2010

With the rise and fall of U.S. political and economic powers around the globe in recent decades, American Studies as transnational practice has demonstrated new critical vigor and intellectual dynamics. Not only has American Studies self-reflexively reexamined its own premises such as U.S. exceptionalism and developed new critical paradigms that reconsider U.S. cultural production in terms of planetary consciousness, but it has also redefined its disciplinarity in relation to Area Studies and Comparative Literature. From Trans-Atlantic to Trans-Pacific Studies, from Hemispheric to Global South Studies, American Studies has integrated and engaged recent paradigm shifts in transnational studies as well as negotiated and reconfigured its own field imaginary and boundary.

This symposium looks for presentations that investigate American Studies as a discipline at both theoretical and practical levels and papers that focus on specific cases of U.S. historical, literary, and cultural production. We encourage proposals that examine American Studies from U.S. regional and global sites and projects that reconsider U.S. cultural production from new transnational frameworks.

Possible topics may include but are not restricted to the following:
-- Rethinking the boundaries among American Studies, Area Studies, and Comparative
Literature
-- Empire, Race, and Trans-Atlantic Studies
-- Race, Gender, and Class in Transnational American Studies
-- The local and the global in Trans-Pacific Studies
-- Borderland, natural environment, and planetary consciousness
-- Border crossing and critical cosmopolitanism
-- Border literature, Chicano/a theory, and Hemispheric Studies
-- American Studies and Post-socialism in China, Russia, and Eastern European countries
-- The Trans-Pacific movement of Chinese in diaspora
-- Wall Street and the future of “market democracy”
-- Westward movement and U.S. southwestern literature
-- Colonialism and neocolonialism in Asia, Africa, and Latin America
-- Global and local wars: displacement, migration, and expulsion
-- The Vietnam War and Vietnamese in diaspora
-- Transnational feminist and queer studies
-- Postcolonial studies and beyond
-- Transnational Cinema
Please send your one-page proposal and one-page C.V. by January 18, 2010:

Dr. Yuan Shu
Department of English
P.O. Box 43091
Texas Tech University
Lubbock, TX 79409-3091

You may email your inquiry, proposal, and C.V. to Dr. Yuan Shu at (yuan.shu@ttu.edu). The symposium information will be available on our website: http://english.ttu.edu/complit/.

The 19th Annual British Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies Conference
February 26 - 27, 2010
Coastal Georgia Center
Savannah, Georgia

Dear Friends,

You are invited to submit a proposal for The 19th Annual British Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies Conference. All submissions must be made through the online submission form on the website. NOVEMBER 2, 2009 is the deadline for electronic submission of abstract papers and panel proposals.

We invite proposals in the following areas:
o Bioethics, Ecology, Ecocriticism
o Migration, Diaspora, Hybridity, and Borders
o Region/ Religion/Politics and Culture
o Literature & the Arts
o History
o Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Class and Sex
o Pedagogy & the Disciplines
o Or any other aspect of the British Commonwealth of nations, and of countries formerly colonized by other European powers

For more information about the conference please visit the website at:

http://ceps.georgiasouthern.edu/conted/bcpspapers.html

Please help us spread the word about this conference by forwarding the website to your colleagues. We look forward to seeing you in Savannah!

The 2009 USACLALS and Texas Tech University Comparative Literature Symposia Joint Conference on "Migration, Border and Nation-State" was held at Texas Tech in Lubbock, TX, from April 9th-11th. Images and summaries from the conference can be found at: http://english.ttu.edu/complit/09-conference..htm.

From left to right: Sukanta Das (P.D. Women's College, West Bengal); Dr. Robin Field (King's College); Dr. John Hawley (President, USACLALS; Santa Clara University)

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Dr. John Hawley and Ms. Risa Shoup (M.A. student, Brooklyn College)

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Dr. Amritjit Singh (Ohio University)

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Dr. Revathi Krishnaswamy (San Jose State University) presenting “Reading across Borders: Ethics, Aesthetics, and World Literature”

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From left to right: Dr. John Hawley, Dr. Amritjit Singh, and Dr. Kirpal Singh (Singapore Management University) holding round table discussion on the "Postcolonial and the Global"

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Dr. Sudhi Rajiv (Jai Narain Vyas University, India) and Dr. Robin Field

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CALL FOR PAPERS
The Special Topic Issue of the 2009 South Asian Review
Theorizing Religion in a Postmodern Context

Despite western onslaughts from Richard Dawkins, Bill Maher, Christopher Hitchens, and others, and regardless of scandals and outrages carried out in its name over the centuries, religion continues to shape lives, create nations, and inspire imaginations. Arguably, for South Asians in particular, a totally secular world is unimaginable. Hinduism began in India about 5,000 years ago and is still adhered to by 82% of the Indian population; Buddhism and Jainism began there around 500 BC, but today less than 2% of the population follows either. Sikhism began in the fifteenth century, and 2% identifies with it. Other religious traditions present in India include Judaism (0.0005%), Zoroastrianism (0.01%), Christianity (2.5%), and Islam (12%). In Pakistan, 97% of the population is Muslim, with 77% being Sunni and 20% Shia. Sri Lankans are 69.1% Buddhist, 7.6% Muslim, 7.1% Hindu, and 6.2% Christian. Bangladeshis are 83% Muslim and 16% Hindu. In Nepal, 80% is Hindu, 11% Buddhist, 4% Muslim, 4% Kirat, and 0.5% Christian.

In this issue, we will explore the impact that religion has had ”and, more importantly, continues to have” on South Asian society and culture, both at home and in the diaspora. This exploration will consider the role of holy men and women, the influence of the myths on contemporary imaginations, the intolerance that leads to violence, the connection of religion to national identities, and so on. For the Special Topic Issue, interdisciplinary approaches and topics are especially encouraged; thus, essays exploring art, film, gender studies, geography, politics, as well as literature, will be welcome. Interviews of particular relevance will be considered. How does religion exercise its influence, and upon whom, and to what effect? How regressive is it and why or, conversely, what new directions is it inspiring in societies? What would be lost or gained in its demise? Has globalized business, by default, taken the place of transcendence?

This issue will be guest-edited by John C. Hawley of Santa Clara University. Essays should be 15-25 pages (3750-6250 words) prepared in accordance with the latest edition of the MLA style and accompanied by
an abstract of 75-100 words and a biographical note of 50-75 words. The deadline for the receipt of complete manuscripts is March 30, 2009. Early inquiries are encouraged. Manuscripts should be submitted electronically to jhawley@scu.edu either in rich text format (RTF) or, preferably, as a Microsoft Word document.

Books on related topics, for possible review, should be called to the attention of:

Professor P. S. Chauhan
Reviews Editor
Department of English
Arcadia University
450 South Easton Road
Glenside, PA
19038-3295
(e-mail: chauhanp@comcast.net)

CFP: Post-Colonial Transformations in the New Literatures in English (Slovakia) (6/05/07; 6/8/07-6/9/07)

Department of English Language and Literature
Faculty of Humanities and Natural Sciences
University of Pre¹ov at Pre¹ov, Slovakia

European Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (EACLALS)

 Keynote Lectures:  Pétér Szaffkó, University of Debrecen, Hungary
                                David Callahan, University of Aveiro, Portugal

In his study entitled Post-Colonial Transformation (Routledge, 2001), Bill Ashcroft argues that "the imaginative and the creative are integral aspects
of that process by which identity itself has come into being. Cultural identity does not exist outside representation. But the transformative
nature of cultural identity leads directly to the transformation of those strategies by which it is represented." Despite the fact that this book
deals mostly with ideological, sociological and political topics related to the development of post-colonial societies, the author is also addressing
the issue of the changing nature and the transformation of post-colonial cultural identity as manifested in the literary and artistic work of
post-colonial writers. Indeed the latter have tried to find a symbolic way for expressing the changing nature of cultural identity in their countries,
taking into account the difficult transformation of former patterns of colonialism and authoritarianism, but also the new freedom brought by
emerging regimes or by modern means of technology and globalization such as the media (TV, video, computers, internet), popular culture and consumerism. This conference seeks contributions on authors associated with the new literatures in English which will deal with but are not limited to:

1) the  symbolic expression of post-colonial transformation as manifested in literature (including drama);

2) the volatile nature of post-colonial cultural identity;

3) the opposition between traditional (oral and mimetic) literature and new and experimental forms of representation (written, modern, postmodern,
media) as the expression of a tension or conflict between tradition and innovation, colonialism and resistance, traditional and modern life;

4) "the translation among cultures" and the linguistic and literary expression of different kinds of cultural identities within post-colonial societies;

5) postmodern, metafictional and hypertextual narrative techniques, postmodern parody, play, irony, generic and stylistic hybridity as literary,
aesthetic and cultural alternatives to the dominant literary, cultural and national(istic) discourse as manifested in post-colonial literary texts;

6) essentialist versus non-esssentialist concepts of cultural identity (Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha) as expressed in literary works written by post-colonial authors;

7) local and regional, versus national and global, relationships as the expression of specificity on the one hand, and universality and generalization on the other.

One of the aims of the conference is to attract doctorate scholars from Central and Eastern Europe to exchange views on the discipline of
post-colonial studies and to discuss further co-operation under the aegis of EACLALS (European Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language
Studies). The conference programme will include a post-graduate students seminar which will be run by Professor David Callahan, University of Aveiro,
Portugal. This seminar will be based on lecturing and the discussion of set literary texts. These doctorate and other scholars from Central and Eastern Europe can be sponsored by means of an EACLALS grant. Doctoral students are encouraged to present their papers at the conference (these presentations will not coincide with the seminar programme which will be conceived as a separate activity).

Contributions are not restricted to the themes oulined above. We prefer papers which deal with the aesthetic, artistic and literary aspects of
individual works, rather than those tackling ideological, political and societal aspects. The conference is organized jointly by Department of
English Language and Literature, Faculty of Humanities and Natural Sciences, University of Pre¹ov, Slovakia,  and the European Association for
Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (EACLALS), and will take place on the University of Pre¹ov's main campus. The city of Pre¹ov is easily
accessible by train, bus, and car from neighbouring countries and by air from other countries (Ko¹ice airport is only 40 kilometers from Pre¹ov). The
papers should be presented in English. The conference is part of the research projects KEGA 3-3136-05 and VEGA 1-3710-06. Short abstracts of no more than 200 words should be sent by electronic mail to Jaroslav Ku¹nír at

Jaroslav Ku¹nír

Katedra anglického jazyka a literatúry FHPV

Pre¹ovskej univerzity, 17. novembra 1

081 16 Pre¹ov, Slovakia

by May 6, 2007. A selection of papers will be published in the conference proceedings. The conference fee is 700 Sk (or equivalent in Euro, which is 25 Euros).

Dear USACLALS Members,

Here are the results of the recent election. Some of you may not have received ballots. If that was the case, then the reason was that we do not have your most current mailing address. Please email the new membership secretary, Kamal D. Verma (kverma@pitt.edu) and give him the updated address.

Finally, if you have any recent publication to announce, please forward me that information ASAP; I am putting together the text of the newsletter for which I am responsible (Seodial Deena takes over as the newsletter editor).

President: John Hawley, Department of English
                   St. Joseph's Hall 321
                   Santa Clara University 
                   500 El Camino Real
                   Santa Clara, CA 95053
                   JHawley@scu.edu

John C. Hawley is Associate Professor of English at Santa Clara University.  He writes on Africa and South Asian literature, most recently having published "Amitav Ghosh: An Introduction."  He is the editor of ten books, and is working on two others.

Secretary: Cynthia Leenerts
                   East Stroudsburg University
                   srcyn@aol.com

Treasurer: Daniel M. Scott III, Department of English
                   Craig Lee Hall 263                   
                   Rhode Island College
                   600 Mt. Pleasant Ave.
                   Providence, RI 02908 
                   dscott@ric.edu

Membership Secretary: K.D. Verma, Department of English
                   University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown
                   Johnstown, PA 15904 
                   Fax: (814) 269-7196
                   verma@upitt.edu

Newsletter Editor: Seodial Deena, Department of English 
                    Bate 2130
                    East Carolina University
                    Greenville, NC 27858-4353
                    deenas@mail.ecu.edu

Members at Large:

(1) Terri Hassler, Bryant College, thassele@bryant.edu; (2) Pradyumna S. Chauhan, Arcadia University, chauhanp@comcast.net; (4) Barbara Silliman, University of Rhode Island, putty@cox.net; (5) Karen Chow, Foothill-De Anza Community College, chowkaren@fhda.edu; (6) Revathi Krishnaswamy, San Jose State University, rkrishna@email.sjsu.edu

Graduate Student Representatives:

(1) Katy Howe, Rhode Island College, kahowe@comcast.net; (2) Alice D'Amore, Purdue University, adamore@purdue.edu; (3) Robin Field, University of Virginia, ref4u@cms.mail.virginia.edu; (4) Weihsin Gui, Brown University, wgui@brown.edu; (5) Ubaldimir Guerra, East Carolina University

Best Regards,
Rajini Srikanth

USACLALS

2010 MEMBERSHIP FORM

This form is for new USACLALS members, as well for those who need to renew their membership. (See directions below).

The long-term goal of USACLALS is to study postcolonial literatures (including those of Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Canada, New Zealand and Australia) in relationship to the varied and vital cultural contexts of the Americas.  We encourage studies which reach beyond the literatures of the British Commonwealth to use comparative frameworks in relation to francophone literatures, ethnic American literatures, and African-American literature.

Name: _______________________________________________________________

Institutional Affiliation (if any):___________________________________________

Office Address: __________________________________________________________

Home Address: ________________________________________________________

To which address should we send

USACLALS newsletter/materials? Home: _________; Office: ____________

Email: _________________________________________________________

Phone: _____________________; Fax:________________________________

Membership Dues (one year):

____ $30.00 (Regular, Full time Faculty)

____ $20.00 (Students, Retirees, Part-time Faculty)

Please return this form with appropriate fees to: Daniel M. Scott III, English Department, Rhode Island College, CL-263, 600 Mt. Pleasant Ave., RI 02908, dscott@ric.edu. Make checks payable to: USACLALS.

Recent Publications of USCLALS members

·         Meena Alexander, Raw Silk. Triquarterly, 2004.

Alexander's cross-cultural perspective and sense of global identity (gained from her childhood in India and the Sudan, and her adult life in New York City) infuses her poems. She writes about violence and civil strife, love, despair, and a hard-won hope in the midst of a post-September 11 world.

·         John Hawley. Amitav Ghosh: An Introduction. Foundation Books, 2004.

This introduction to Ghosh's major writings, including all his novels and the collections of his various essays, develops the notion of the author as seeking to find a voice for the voiceless in history, and to define himself in his own terms rather than in those of the British Commonwealth.

·         Brinda J. Mehta, Diasporic (Dis)locations: Indo-Caribbean Women Writers Negotiate the Kala Pani. Kingstown, Jamaica: University Press of the West Indies. 2004.

Indo-Caribbean women writers are virtually invisible in the literary landscape because of cultural and social inhibitions and literary chauvinism. Until recently, the richness and particularities of the experiences of these writers in the field of literature and literary studies were compromised by stereotypical representations of the Indo-Caribbean women that were narrated from a purely masculine or an Afrocentric point of view. Mehta’s book features the Indian women who braved the treacherous crossing of the Atlantic, or the kala pani, to Trinidad and Guyana and provided courage, determination, self-reliance and sexual independence to their literary granddaughters. These granddaughters in turn used the kala pani as the necessary language and frame of reference to position Indo-Caribbean female subjectivity, equating writing as a pubic declaration of one's identity and right to claim creative agency.

·         Uma Parameswaran, Ed., At the Gates. Larkuma Press, 2004. 

A collection of stories by 6 students in a creative writing course, as well as one by their teacher and editor, Uma Parameswaran. The stories are about death, darkness, drugs, violence and idealism.

• Amritjit Singh and Daniel M. Scott III, eds.  The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman. Rutgers University Press, 2003.

This book is the definitive collection of the writings of Wallace Thurman (1902–1934), providing a comprehensive anthology of both the published and unpublished works of this bohemian, bisexual writer. Widely regarded as the enfant terrible of the Harlem Renaissance, Thurman was a leader among a group of young artists and intellectuals that included Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Aaron Douglas. Through the publication of magazines such as Fire!! and Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life, Thurman tried to organize the younger generation against the ideologies of the older generation of black leaders and intellectuals such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Benjamin Brawley. Thurman also left a permanent mark on the period through his prolific work as a novelist, playwright, short story writer, and literary critic.

·         Amritjit Singh and Bruce G. Johnson, Eds. Interviews with Edward W. Said. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004. (hardcover and paperback).

In Interviews with Edward W. Said, the first collection of interviews with this powerful intellectual, Said reveals the displacements and conflicts in his Palestinian background, and the energies and concerns that have made him a shaper of public discourse. Covering encounters from 1972 to 2000, the book provides, for both the specialist and the general reader, an engaging introduction to Said's wide and disparate oeuvre and his insights that have made a considerable impact on the practices of many disciplines, including literature, anthropology, political science, international studies, peace studies, history, sociology, and music.

·         Rajini Srikanth, The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America. Temple University Press, 2004.

Drawing on the cosmopolitan sensibility of scholars like Anthony Appiah, Vinay Dharwadker, Martha Nussbaum, Bruce Robbins, and Amartya Sen, this book argues that to read the body of South Asian American writing justly, one must engage with the urgencies of places as diverse as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India, Burma, Pakistan, and Trinidad. Poets, novelists, and playwrights like Indran Amirthanayagam, Meena Alexander, Amitav Ghosh, Michael Ondaatje, Shani Mootoo, Amitava Kumar, Tahira Naqvi, and Sharbari Ahmed exhort North American residents to envision connectedness with inhabitants of other lands. These writers’ significant contribution to American literature and to the American imagination is to depict the nation as simultaneously discrete and entwined within the fold of other nations. The world out there arrives next door.

·         Mark Stein, Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, December 2004.
 

SAACLALS International Conference, July 10-13, 2005, at the University of Cape Town, South Africa

Rush 150-word abstracts for papers or panels.  Deadline soon!!

For further information, immediately contact Prof. Rosemary Gray at rgray@postino.up.ac.za.

Our aim is to bring together people who use English as a primary means of communication and ask them to concentrate on the theme AFRICA IN LITERATURE.  Communicating ideas, mythologies and dreams remains one of our most empowering human activities.  In bringing people together from different cultures, generations, nationalities, perspectives and disciplines to concentrate on a theme like this one, we believe we encourage conversation, mutual exchange and hope in a time of global conflict. The exploration of ideas of Africa represented in many literatures is a rich topic for consideration.  There is another powerful view of Africa as representing the writer’s very blood, bones and cells.

We hope such radically different understandings of Africa as represented in literature will stir up vigorous discussion.  But Okri rightly concludes that “beneath the strife of our age, internecine warfare, tribal antagonisms, religious intolerance, racial violence, the disharmony of the sexes, beneath all these lurks the most ordinary discovery that we are human, and that life is holy.”

Papers addressing such topics as the following are invited: colonialism and post colonialism; History and its literary representations; prison experiences; civil war in Africa; Writing the nation; Gendered representations; representing Africa in letters/diaries/personalia/ biographical ways; Hegemonic narratives; Religious perspectives in the representations of Africa; diaspora; literary criticism: Africa in literary theory; Landscape: Land as motif; oral literature and storytelling.

CACLALS - Canadian Chapter 

IACLALS - Indian Chapter

EACLALS - European Chapter

MACLALS - Malaysian Chapter - contact: f4rohai@um.edu.my 

SAACLALS - South African Chapter - contact: daymond@nu.ac.za

SLACLALS - Sri Lankan Chapter - contact: ashleyhalpe?@hotmail.com

SPACLALS - South Pacific Chapter - contact: smtvaai@yahoo.com

WIACLALS - West Indian Chapter - contact: vchang@uwimona.edu.jm 

Fissures and Sutures:

Sources of Division and Mutual Aid

in Postcolonial Reflections

on History and Literature

Oct. 27-29 2006

United States Association for Commonwealth Literature

and Language Studies

4^th International Conference

Santa Clara University

Sponsored by the Dean of the College of Arts &Sciences at Santa Clara University, the Provost’s office at Santa Clara University, a Multicultural Advancement Grant from the Center for Multicultural Leaning at SCU, SCU’s departments of English, Theatre and Dance, Modern Languages, Ethnic Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies; the English departments of UC Davis, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, Stanford, Cal State Fresno, Loyola Marymout, Bryant College, DeAnza College; the ethnic studies department of UC San Diego; the South and Southeast Asian Languages department at UC Berkeley; the Feminist Studies department at UC Santa Cruz. 

Thank you, one and all, for your generosity and spirit of collegiality!

FRIDAY Oct. 27

11:00-noon  Executive Committee Meeting

St. Joseph’s hall, Canterbury library, Rm 309

noon – 5 PM  Registration, Benson Center first floor

1:00-2:30  Paper Session I

A) National Identity and Subalternities

Benson Center, Conference Room 21 (basement level)

Moderator:  David Skinner, Santa Clara University

Kasibhatla, Bharati, University of Florida -- Erasures in the Production of the Nation State: A Reading of  Mahasweta Devi's Douloti the Bountiful

Masmoudi, Ikram, Princeton University -- Exile and Memory in Hadiyya Hussein’s After Love

Gill, Jaspreet,  York University -- Difficult Daughters: The Question of Independence

B) The Kite Runner

Benson Center, Williman Room (first floor)

Moderator: Robin Field, King’s College

Chow, Balance,  San Jose State University -- Operation Kite-Running: The Outsourcing of Redemption To Afghanistan Now That “The World Is Flat”

Stampfl, Tanja,  Louisiana State University -- Colonial Encounters in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner

Zahiri, Abdollah, Seneca College, Toronto -- Diasporic Consciousness in The House of Sand and Fog

C)  Negotiations of Memory and Futures

Benson Center, Parlor B (first floor)

Moderator:  Amrita Bhalla, Jesus and Mary College, Univ. of Delhi

Adisasmito-Smith, Steve,  California State University, Fresno -- Forging Bonds: Translating the Bhagavad-Gita in the Colonial Context

Martinsen, Eric L.,  University of California, Santa Barbara -- Global Futures and Haunted Histories in Alejandro Morales and Amitav Ghosh

Hoover, Sara, University of Virginia -- Paying Tribute to the Past?  Yasukuni Jinja and the Politics of Social Memory

2:45-4:15  Paper Session II

A)   Postcolonial Aesthetics in a Transpacific Frame: Reconstructing Race, Culture, and Community

Benson Center, Parlor A

Moderator:  Balance Chow, San Jose State University

Nguyen, Marguerite,  UC-Berkeley -- Recovering History through Race in Le Minh Khue and Michael Herr’s Vietnams

Martinez, Ouimette,  European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland -- The Political and Poetical Imagination: Brazilian Candomblé in Intercontinental and Historical Context

Sohn, Stephen Hong,  University of California, Santa Barbara -- After The Plague in the City of Angels:  Queer Artistic Diasporas in Russell Leong’s Phoenix Eyes and Other Stories

B) Selling Trauma: Post-Apartheid (?) and Tourism

Benson Center, Conference Room 21 (basement level)

Moderator:  Alice D’Amore, Purdue University

D’Amore, Alice,  Purdue University -- Strange Repetitions: A Query into Soweto’s Dual Promotion of National Trauma and the Tourism Industry

Handlarski, Denise,  York University -- Women’s Speaking and Silencing: Gender at South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Kapstein, Helen, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY -- Tourist Attractions

Yun, Paul,  Loyola Marymount University -- Locating Tourism: Zakes Mda's Heart of Redness and the Business of Trauma

C) Globalization

Benson Center, Parlor B (first floor)

Moderator:  Kamal Verma, Univ. of Pittsburgh at Johnstown

Brouillette, Sarah,  MIT -- Consumer as Tourist in Graham Huggan’s The Postcolonial Exotic

Simms, Lindsey, Univ. of Minnesota -- The Mercedes and the Baobab: Commodity Envy in the Postcolony

Kain, Geoffrey,  Embry-Riddle University -- Global Mindshare: US-driven Globalization in an Age of Rising Anti-Americanism

Forman, Ross G., Skidmore College -- When We Were Organs:  Bodies of Empire in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

D)  French Postcolonial Inflections

Benson Center, Parlor E (first floor)

Moderator:  Abdollah Zahiri, Seneca College, Toronto

Baddar, Maha -- Napoleon as Gaul, Pharoah, and Turk; Egypt as Hathour, Isis, and a Palm Tree: Representational Practices in the Description de L’ Egypte

Montfort, Catherine, Santa Clara University – Poetry of Victoire Lasseni-Duboze

Perez, Graciela, Biola University -- The History of Spain in the French literature: A Fascination Expressed in the Fantastic Literary World of Inès de Las Sierras by Charles Nodier

4:45-6:00  PLENARY SESSION I  (Benson Center, Williman Rm, first floor)

            Introduction and Response: Revathi Krishnaswamy, Dept. of English, San Jose State University

            Amritjit Singh, Langston Hughes Professor, Ohio University

             “To Market, to Market, to Buy a Plum Bun: The Conflicts and                                         Challenges of Being a South Asian in the 21st Century”

6:00-7:45  Dinner   (on your own)

8:00-9  PLENARY SESSION II     (Center for Performing Arts auditorium)

                        Greeting: John C. Hawley, SCU Chair, Dept of English,      President of USACLALS

                        Introduction: Teresia Hinga, SCU Religious Studies

                        Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Director, International Center for Writing & Translation, University of California at Irvine

                                    Wizard of the Crow

Book Signing following, in lobby

SATURDAY OCT. 28

8:00-4:00 registration

8:00-8:30 general business meeting

8:30-10:00  Paper Session III

A) Partition and Indian Literatures: Variations on a Theme

Alumni Science, Rm 120

Moderator: Pradyumna S. Chauhan, Arcadia University

Rajender Kaur, William Paterson University -- Reconstructing Genealogy: Narrating Partition in Manju Kapur's Difficult Daughters

Pradyumna S. Chauhan, Arcadia University -- Ved Mehta: Partition as History, and Autobiography

K.D. Verma, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown -- Balachandra Rajan and Partition: Representation of History and Ideology

Sukrita Paul Kumar, Delhi University  -- Translating India Across Borders

B) South Africa

Daly Science Room 201

Moderator: Rajeev Patke, National Univ. of Singapore

Ghosh, Arpa, Vivekananda College for Women, Barisha, Kolkata -- Corpses, Bodies, Fissures and Sutures in the Novels of Nadine Gordimer, Andre Brink and J. M. Coetzee

Graham, Shane, Utah State University -- Words That Look Like Acts: Mapping Loss in Ingrid de Kok’s Transfer and Terrestrial Things

                        Weaver-Hightower, Rebecca, Univ. of North Dakota -- Tricked, Robbed, and                                 Beaten: Life Lessons, Representation and Ideology in Three South                           African English Textbooks  [

C) Globalization  II

Daly Science Room 202

Moderator: Eric Martinsen, UC Santa Barbara

Burton, Robert,  California State University-Chico --  The Spirit of Bandung and Artists of the Floating World

Anjaria, Ulka, Stanford University -- Making His Way Across the Black Waters: Colonialism, the Realist Protagonist, and World War I

Naji, Ammar, Univ. of North Dakota -- The Politics of the Postcolonial Canon in Academia

Lee, Mihra, Dankook University, Korea (Eric Martinsen)-- (Re)Thinking of Cosmopolitanism and “Home”

D)  Indian Identity

Alumni Science Room 220

Moderator:  Amritjit Singh, Ohio University

Gopaul, Sooshilla, Mauritius College of the Air -- Fissures and Sutures as Seen in Vikram Seth’s Two Lives

Jha, Priya,  University of Redlands -- The Bluest Indian:  Race and the Ambivalence of Postcoloniality

Satpathy, Sumanyu, Delhi University -- Beyond Hybridity: The Case of the Oriya Diaspora in the Americas

Bhalla, Tamara, University of Michigan -- Necessary Omissions: Authenticity and Gender in South Asian Diasporic Fiction

E)  Religion and Nation, I

Daly Science Room 203

Moderator:  Barbara Molony, Santa Clara University

Karim, Persis,  San Jose State University --  On a Mission from God or the Emerging Imperial Power? : Presbyterian Missionaries in Iran During the Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1911

Moukhlis, Salah M., Calif. State Univ. at San Marcos -- The Postcolonial Muslim Subject and the (Con)text of Globalism

10:15-11:45  Paper Session IV

A) Partition(s), II

Alumni Science Room 120

Moderator:  Leslie Gray, Santa Clara University

Gupta, Sukanya, Louisiana State Univ. – Train to Pakistan, a 'Bloody' Partition

Bayer, Jogamaya, University of Konstanz -- Partition Stories and the Voice of Insanity

Bhalla, Amrita, Jesus and Mary College, Univ. of Delhi – India Represented? Readings of Divided and Undivided India.

Patke, Rajeev, National University of Singapore -- Partition and its Aftermaths: Poetry & History in Modern Ireland

B) South Africa

Daly Science Room 201

Moderator: Persis Karim, San Jose State University

Papayanis, Marilyn, Berkeley College, NJ -- Black Houseboys and White Homelessness: Shame and Succor in the African Bush

Popescu, Monica,  McGill University -- Exiles in Paradise?: South Africa Seen from the Eastern Bloc

Rastogi, Pallavi (Shane Graham),  Louisiana State University -- Where do Muslims Fit In? : Religious Unbelonging and the Failure of South African Democracy in Ahmed Essop’s The Third Prophecy

C)  Religion and Nation, II

Alumni Science Room 220

Moderator:  Priya Jha, University of Redlands

Edwin, Shirin E., Sam Houston State Univ. -- Sadly Sidelined and Morally Misunderstood: Representations of Religion in Indian Writing in English

Schultheis, Alexandra, Univ. of North Carolina -- International Human Rights, Modernity, and Anti-Colonial Discourse: A Look at Contemporary Tibet

Gray, David B., Santa Clara University -- Religious Fault Lines: Buddhism, Peacemaking, and Violence in Contemporary South Asia

D)  Gender and Politics

Daly Science Room 202

Moderator:  Marilyn Edelstein, Santa Clara University

Nanda, Aparajita, Santa Clara University & UC Berkeley -- Of Power, Politics and the “Undoing” of Gender in Octavia Butler’s Adulthood Rites

Schleiner, Winfried,  UC Davis and Bordeaux and Toulouse  -- Early Modern Recovery: Harvey's Gendered Response to an Earthquake in Essex, England, on 7 April 1580

Hinga, Teresia, Santa Clara University – Colonial Fissures and Feminist Sutures

E)  Citizenship

Daly Science Room 203

Moderator: Rajender Kaur, William Patterson University

Robbins, Wendy and Jessie Sagawa, University of New Brunswick -- Books / To Set It Right:  Slave Narratives by and/or about Women Connected to Canada

Najita, Susan, University of Michigan -- Sexual Politics and Decolonization in Keri Hulme’s The Bone People

Lang, Anouk,  University of Birmingham -- Critical Sutures: Conversations Across Indigenous/Settler Literary Divides

F)  The Role of Women

Daly Science Room 310

Moderator:  Cynthia Mahamdi, Santa Clara University

Purkayastha, T.D.,  Vidyasagar University, West Bengal,  -- Themes of Orality and Silence in Karnad’s Nagamandala: Play with a Cobra

Davis, Emily,  UC Santa Barbara -- Rewriting the Colonial Romance: Ahdaf Soueif and the Global Politics of Art

Sarafa, Farrah -- Re-writing Algerian Nationalism through the Discourse of the Woman in Assia Djebar’s Fantasia

Noon-2:00  Luncheon and Presidential Forum in Adobe Lodge

(Faculty Club)

                        Greetings:  John C. Hawley

                                    Lucia Gilbert, Provost, Santa Clara University

                        Introduction: John C. Hawley

                        Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, Chair, Dept. of Asian American                                          Studies, University of California at Irvine,                                                                   "Edward Said's Literary Humanism”

                        Respondent:  Neil Larsen, Dept. of Comparative Literature,          University of California at Davis

2:15-3:45  Paper Session V

A) Africa

Daly Science Room 201

Moderator: Monica Popescu, McGill University

Goyal, Yogita, UCLA -- Nation Time: Redeeming History in Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy

Bady, Aaron, UC Berkeley  -- Mau Mau as Trauma: Imagining the Community by Mourning its Absence

Ndigirigi, Gichingiri, Univ. of Tennessee -- The Exile Writes Back: Ngugi wa Thiong'o’s Wizard of the Crow

B) The Caribbean

Alumni Science Room 220

Moderator:  Aparajita Nanda, Santa Clara University and Univ. of California at Berkeley

Boutros, Fatim,  Germany – Imagined Homelands: The Identificatory Power of African Spatiality for the Global Afro-Caribbean Diaspora

Shemak, April, Sam Houston State Univ. --  Rights of Passage: The Refugee Narratives of Kamau Brathwaite and Edwidge Danticat

Barua, Krishna, Indian Institute Of Technology Guwahat -- The  Experiments of Truth : Restructuring of  Gandhian Experiences  in Naipaul’s Half a Life and Magic Seeds

C) Film and Television

Alumni Science Room 120

Moderator:  Yahia Mahamdi, Santa Clara University

Mandal, Somdatta,  Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan – Constructing the Post-Partition Indian Cultural Identity Through Bengali Film