Organizer: Department of English, Sidho-Kanho-Birsha, University, Purulia
About the Conference
- When: September 11 & 12, 2024
- Registration fee needed
- Mode: Blended Mode
- Last date for submission of abstracts within 300 words and a short bio-note: July 15, 2024
- Date for acceptance of abstracts: July 22, 2024
Concept Notes
The evolution of the studying and understanding of Indian Literatures and Cultures has always accompanied the global social, political or aesthetic theories. Starting from assuming nationalist trends in determining the horizons of Indian literature rooted to ancient myths, legends or epics and creating a cultural heritage against the superiority of the colonialist culture, various theories of determining the “Indianness” of the Indian literature and culture have been invoked. They responded to the international situation of the respective time and the global trends in critical thinking but also connected them to the social and political conditions of the subcontinent. Therefore, the nationalist lens was succeeded eventually by the Marxist and the Postcolonial framework, supplementing the former through class analysis and then through an understanding of the subalternity. The postcolonial and subaltern studies framework by Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarti or Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak was heavily used since 1980s as new cultural imaginary for India. Along with it feminist and poststucturalist questions on language and ideology became new trends of reading. After the new millennium the question of coloniality could no longer be sustained only in terms of geopolitical situatedness and the questions of colonization of thinking, internal colonialism, or the ‘world of the third’ that exist in terms of what Warwick Research Collective calls “combined and uneven development” across the world gradually came into focus.
The issues of spatial abandonment, homelessness, refugee crisis and religious or ethnic jingoism started featuring as global questions employed in reading Indian situations of past and present. The literary and cultural scholarship becomes much more critically interdisciplinary as it started including themes such as the alienation of the non-human, intrusion of artificial intelligence in shaping our consciousness, the impact of New Media and the teletechnologies or the ecological crisis under the geological era of Anthropocene created by human activities threatening the extinction of life from earth. These questions nonetheless complexly relate to the earlier questions of class, gender, race, religion and ethnicity in the Indian context, but also connects to other social problems such as casteism or the existence of the gender and sexual minorities which received lesser attention before. The current seminar would try to examine how in literary and cultural studies in the contemporary period such various nascent and emergent trends of reading may contribute, connecting the local situation with global strategies of
theorizing.
- Registration fees: Rs. 2500/- (For the faculty members and employed scholars)
- Rs. 2000/- (For the research scholars, student presenters and independent scholars)
The fees would include seminar kit and tea/coffee and lunch for both the days. The participants have to arrange their own accommodation.
Abstracts for papers related to this broad theme and connected but not limited to one or more of the following sub-themes are invited for presentation in the conference.
Subthemes:
- Indian Literatures and Cultures and the Question of the Decolonial
- Indian Literatures and Cultures and the Question of the Nation State
- Refugee Crisis and Migration in Indian Literatures and Cultures
- The Caste Question in Indian Literatures and Cultures
- Gendering Indian Literatures and Cultures
- Indian Literatures and Cultures and the Sexual Minorities
- Ethnic and Religious Minorities in Indian Literatures and Cultures
- The Non-human in Indian Literatures and Cultures Indian Literatures and Cultures and Postmarxist trends of reading
- Ecology and Environment in Indian Literature and Culture
- Indian Literatures and Cultures in the age of Anthropocene
- Disaster and Catastrophe in Indian Literature and Culture
- Indian Literatures and Cultures and Digital Humanities
- Artificial Intelligence and Indian Literatures and Cultures
- The New Media and Indian Literatures and Cultures
- Globalization and Indian Literatures and Cultures
- Postsecularism and Indian Literatures and Cultures
Abstracts for the conference are to be mailed at indianlitcultskbu@gmail.com