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