The Metaphysical Poets - Lesson Summary

“The Metaphysical Poets” by T. S. Eliot

Eliot's Appreciation for Professor Grierson

By collecting these poems from the work of a generation more often named than read, and more often read than profitably studied, Professor Grierson has rendered a service of some importance.

Metaphysical School: Are they A Digression from the Main Current, Or?

The phrase ‘Metaphysical School’ has long done duty as a term of abuse, or as the label of a quaint and pleasant taste. The question is to what extent the so-called metaphysicals formed a school (in our own times we should say a “movement”), and how far this so-called school or movement is a digression from the main current.

The Elaboration of A Figure Of Speech To The Farthest Stage Of Ingenuity

Donne, and often Cowley, employ a device which is sometimes considered characteristically “metaphysical”: the elaboration (contrasted with the condensation) of a figure of speech to the farthest stage to which ingenuity can carry it. Thus Cowley develops the commonplace comparison of the world to a chess-board through long stanzas (“To Destiny”), and Donne, with more grace, in “A Valediction,” the comparison of two lovers to a pair of compasses.

Telescoping of Images: Brief words and Sudden Contrasts

Some of Donne’s most successful and characteristic effects are secured by brief words and sudden contrasts: A bracelet of bright hair about the bone, where the most powerful effect is produced by the sudden contrast of associations of “bright hair” and of “bone.” This telescoping of images and multiplied association is characteristic of the phrase of some of the dramatists of the period which Donne knew: not to mention Shakespeare, it is frequent in Middleton, Webster, and Tourneur, and is one of the sources of the vitality of their language.

The Most Heterogeneous Ideas Are Yoked By Violence Together

Johnson, who employed the term “metaphysical poets,” apparently having Donne, Cleveland, and Cowley chiefly in mind, remarks of them that “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.

Re-birth of a dying language!

I was quite fascinated to read a wonderful article on the revival of a delightful language (through its script) in Sunday’s ‘The Hindu’ dated 24 September 2017.

Something unique, quite ‘the rarest of rare’ types, and a revelation of sorts for language enthusiasts of every nation, age, and clime.

The article by Iboyaima Laithangbam titled, ‘Banished Manipuri script stages a comeback,’ was by all means, a ray of hope to linguaphiles all over.

Indeed, one of the main premises of postcolonial studies situates language at the heart of the colonial enterprise and power.

And yes! there’s more to it than meets the eye.

Language is more than simply a means of communication. It conditions our reality and our world-view by ‘cutting up and ordering reality into meaningful units.’

Interestingly, Ngugi wa Thiong’o echoes this sentiment, when he says,

“a specific culture is not transmitted through language in its universality but in its particularity as the language of a specific community with a specific history. Written literature and orature are the main means by which a particular language transmits the images of the world contained in the culture it carries. Language as communication and as culture are then products of each other. Communication creates culture: culture is a means of communication. Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world. How people perceive themselves affects how they look at their culture, at their politics and at the social production of wealth, at their entire relationship to nature and to other beings. Language is thus inseparable from ourselves as a community of human beings with a specific form and character, a specific history, a specific relationship to the world” (Decolonising the Mind 15, 16).

He adds on to say that, language does not just passively reflect reality; it also goes a long way towards creating a person’s understanding of their world! Indeed, “the British Empire did not rule by military and physical force alone. It endured by getting both colonising and colonised people to see their world and themselves in a particular way, internalising the language of Empire as representing the natural, true order of life.” (McLeod 19)

In 1992, linguists attending the International Linguistics Congress in Quebec agreed the following statement:

As the disappearance of any one language constitutes an irretrievable loss to mankind, it is for UNESCO a task of great urgency to respond to this situation by promoting and, if possible, sponsoring programs of linguistic organizations for the description in the form of grammars, dictionaries and texts, including the recording of oral literatures, of hitherto unstudied or inadequately documented endangered and dying languages.

UNESCO did respond. At a conference in November 1993, the General Assembly adopted the ‘Endangered Languages Project’ – including the ‘Red Book of Endangered Languages’ – and a few months later a progress report observed:

Although its exact scope is not yet known, it is certain that the extinction of languages is progressing rapidly in many parts of the world, and it is of the highest importance that the linguistic profession realize that it has to step up its descriptive efforts.

Hence, internalising another language due to, ‘colonial indoctrination,’ results in adverse psychological damage suffered by the people in question.

In 1995 an International Clearing House for Endangered Languages was inaugurated at the University of Tokyo. The same year, an Endangered Language Fund was instituted in the USA. The opening statement by the Fund’s committee pulled no punches:

Languages have died off throughout history, but never have we faced the massive extinction that is threatening the world right now. As language professionals, we are faced with a stark reality: Much of what we study will not be available to future generations. The cultural heritage of many peoples is crumbling while we look on. Are we willing to shoulder the blame for having stood by and done nothing?

Confy @ O. P. Jindal Global University, Haryana

English Literary Society

O. P. Jindal Global University

invites you to the

4th JGU INTERNATIONAL LITERARY CONFERENCE

24, 25 January 2018

For the fourth consecutive year, the English Literary Society of O. P. Jindal Global University is organizing an international literary conference. This time, the conference is not dedicated to a single theme. It is felt that for far too long, single-theme conferences have ruled the roost. It's time we threw the conference open to multiple themes. With this end in view, we invite you to be a part of this literary endeavor and enjoy the exchange of views with and fellowship of fellow academics and scholars in the field of literature. The aim of the present international conference is, therefore, to encourage academics, scholars and practitioners representing an exciting diversity of countries, cultures and languages to meet and exchange views and gain from one another's experience.

Literature has been talked of as mirroring the society. In that sense, the social, political and cultural aspects of society have found expression in it. Somewhere down the line, the individual psyche too became the prime focus in literature. If moral and philosophical messages were deduced from anecdotes and literary compositions at one time, we now see the reversal with the ideologies guiding the production of literature, as for example, the belief that it is the language that writes and not the author. The high tide of globalization has further impacted the outlook and methodology of literature. The present scenario identifies multiple concerns in literature produced in a mélange of styles, and the diversity is only growing with each passing day.

The following are some of the sub-themes giving orientation to literature today, though the list is far from being exhaustive:

Feminist literature today

Protest literature: Subaltern, Women, Queer, Dalit

Migrant and Studies: Effacing or perpetuating divisions?

Immigrant literature

New approaches

Comparative literature: National, Cultural, Temporal, to portrayal of psyche

Linguistic, etc. Digital humanities

Multiculturalism

Stylistic innovations in literature

Creative writing: process and problems

Postcolonial literature

Changes in language use

Reflection of postmodern society in literature

Developments in the fields of semantics and semiotics

Eco-criticism

Translated works

Concept of Nation: Postmodern vs. post 9/11

Call for papers

Confy on Ecocriticism @ Sikkim Government College

The Foundation for the Study of Literature and Environment

&

Sikkim Government College, Tadong

jointly organize an

International Conference

on

Why Ecocriticism!

November 21-23, 2017

at

Sikkim Government College, Tadong, NH-10, East District,

Gangtok - Sikkim

About FSLE-India

FSLE-India (nѐe ASLE-Delhi) is as an open academic forum for creative interaction among intellectuals, academicians, environmental activists, naturalists, nature-lovers, and those involved and earnestly dedicated to these issues and who are receptive and undogmatic to one another’s standpoints. It intends to amalgamate two relevant issues Gender and Human Rights with Literature and Environment primarily initiated by the Zonal Joint Secretary of ASLE-India, Rishikesh Kumar Singh, a researcher and counselor based in New Delhi, what he calls it the LEGH Movement (Literature, Environment, Gender and Human Rights). This is the first venture of its kind where all the four issues are juxtaposed together. This specialty makes this movement relevant. The head office of FSLE-India is in New Delhi and it operates in all the states of India.

About Sikkim Government College

The Sikkim Government College was established in 1977 as a small institution offering limited courses. Originally begun in rented rooms, it was later expanded and shifted to the present campus during 1984-85 and was, until recently, affiliated to the North Bengal University. The affiliation was shifted to Sikkim University in 2007. The college is governed by the Directorate of Higher Education, Human Resource Development Department, and Government of Sikkim.

The college has an enrolment of 3000 plus students, many of whom come from underprivileged backgrounds.

Why Ecocriticism!

The term ecocriticism, in general, is defined as the study of literature and the physical environment together. However, in its larger context, it could be seen as incorporating with

Workshop @ Tripura University

Six-day Workshop

On

Secularism, Identity, and the Enlightenment: India and the West

at

Tripura University

18 – 23 December 2017

Overview

The overall purpose of the course is to explore the basic issues of secularism and identity and political rationality by situating them in a framework of basic concepts of the Enlightenment such as liberty and equality and in the institutional setting of a democratic society, such as India is committed to being. The idea is to explore the extent to which we need to reconfigure this framework of concepts and provide thereby a better sense of the intellectual foundations of the form of polity and society that was adopted as an ideal and a goal in the Indian constitution. Not only will there be a focus on the historical background of our political framework in the ideas and ideals that can be traced back to the European Enlightenment but also via a critical examination of some of the elements of that European inheritance, drawing from the work of Gandhi and others, we will seek to transform that framework within the context of India’s own historical past and present.

The expected participants will learn these topics through lectures and tutorials. In order to make the participants fully conversant with the topics, there will also be full-length discussions on the topic in question. Number of participants for the course will be limited to fifty (50).

Modules A: The basic issues of secularism and identity in a broader conceptual framework of Enlightenment.

B: The importance of the concept of secularism for a democratic society.

C: Critically examine the basic difference between India’s and West’s idea of Secularism and Identity.

D: Understand the historical background of West’s and India’s political framework.

E: Understand how Gandhi and others had challenged the West’s idea of Enlightenment.

Dates: December 18th to 23nd December, 2017, (6 days), Venue: Tripura University.

You Should Attend If…

1. Post graduate (MA, M.Phil. and Ph.D.) students

2. Faculty from reputed academic institutions

3. From the industry with similar interests

4. Independent researchers and Intellectuals with similar interests

Confy @ St. Andrew's College, Mumbai

National Conference 

on

‘Re-working, Re-imagining, Re-inventing:

The Changing Faces of Adaptation Studies’

17, 18 November 2017

Department of English

St. Andrew’s College, Mumbai

Adaptation studies was originally established with the intent to study  the manner in which cinematic texts altered their literary sources. However, this concept has since expanded to engage with broader ideas of  how adaptation functions and the manner in which it has come to  interface with not only specific genres of literature, film, theatre,  media, and the digital, but also the narratives that underlie these in a  broader social, political, and historical sense (Raw and Gurr, 2013). In fact, it is now maintained that the field is broad enough to be  conceptualised as an active determining process that affects almost  every aspect of our lives as we engage with the world around us. As a  field of enquiry, adaptation studies has had a sustained interest in how  transcultural, intracultural, and postcolonial contexts have interfaced  with, interrogated, and sometimes destabilised their canonical ‘origin’  texts. In India, theatre and film productions have historically been  deeply involved in this dialogue by re-imagining literary narratives.  Famous examples include the multiple adaptations of Devdas (1917), including its most recent and disruptive modern retelling by Anurag Kashyap as Dev D (2009).

Indian directors have also taken up canonical Western texts to update  them to include local cultural issues such as caste, class, region,  religion, languages etc. Vishal Bharadwaj’s trilogy – Maqbool (2003), Omkara (2006), and Haider  (2014) – are perhaps the most notable recent examples of this trend. As  Poonam Trivedi notes, while Shakespeare may have been brought to India  as a colonial import within narratives of cultural hierarchies, such  productions of Shakespeare’s works have engaged with and adapted this  historicity to produce localised versions of these texts, indigenous and  postcolonial productions in a space of intercultural exchange. The  updating of these texts to allow for modernised retellings, or the  creation and contextualisation of spaces for those traditionally  under-represented in media, suggests that adaptation, far from simply  repetitive fidelity to a source text is also a space of transgression,  of ethics, and of new engagement. Adaptation has also expanded the scope  of scholarly engagement with different mediums including not just  literary narrative and film but also the digital realm including new  media, and transmedia adaptations have increasingly begun to take centre  stage with films leading to television series or vice versa,  merchandise ranging from novel or comic expansions, games for consoles  or mobiles, websites with additional in-world context and information,  amusement parks based around popular narratives, and more.

The Long and Patient Wait: Tribals Wait in Wayanad for the Promised Land!

Landless communities revive agitation 

to settle conflict of livelihoods and laws

E. M. Manoj

A tribal couple before their newly hut covered with plastic sheets at inside a piece of forest land

Balakrishnan, 70, is the head of the Annapara ‘Kattunayakka’, a particularly vulnerable tribal group (PVTG). As a boy, his parents told him that his grandfather possessed nearly 60 acres of land. “We do not own a single cent now, not even to cremate our dead,” he says. A dilapidated single-room hut situated on encroached forest land at Irulam, near Pulpally in Kerala’s Wayanad district, has been his home for five years now.

Mr. Balakrishnan’s grandfather was illiterate. When settler farmers began migrating to Wayanad in the 1960s, a few of them introduced alcohol and tobacco to tribals, who had no proper title deeds, and soon found their land usurped. Two hundred such tribal families have been living on the slopes of Irulam and Cheeyambam in the South Wayanad forest division since May 2012.

The politically sensitive issue of tribals with no lands in this part of the Western Ghats has hit the headlines again, after 54 families entered the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary and took over land last week, marking a fresh phase of the agitation.

Years ago, on January 5, 2003, over 3,000 tribals from 800 families of the Adivasi Gothra Mahasabha began encroaching upon forest land and building huts at Thakarappadi in the Wayanad Sanctuary. About 725 tribal members from different parts of the district were arrested under the Wildlife (Protection) Act.

An old age tribal couple before their thatched hut with wild hay erected on a piece of forest land

They were acquitted in two cases by a magistrate’s court in Sulthan Bathery on August 2, 2011. Later, the government cancelled all related cases against them.

A few months later, a group of tribals under the aegis of the Adivasi Kshema Samiti, a tribal feeder organisation of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), encroached on and built huts in the forest under the South and North Wayanad Forest Divisions.

Students' Confy @ Ramakrishna Mission College, Kolkata

Inter-University Students’ and Researchers’ Conference 2017

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

Ramakrishna Mission Residential College (Autonomous)

                                                           Narendrapur, Kolkata             

Limits of Laughter in Cultural Discourse and Practice

November 10-11, 2017

This conference seeks to engage with the rationale of laughter in literature and other cultural texts. Laughter in this context does not merely refer to a physiological stimulus but its broadest possible application incorporating terms such as black humour and carnivalesque. The oldest theory of laughter goes back to Aristotle, as stated in De anima: “Of all living creatures only man is endowed with laughter.’’ In the Indian classical text Nāṭyaśāstra, laughter or ‘hasya’ comes second in the aesthetic hierarchy of the eight rasas, only after ‘shringara’. The field of humour studies beginning from Aristotle through Kant, Bergson, Freud and Bakhtin among its contributors on the one hand and numerous cross-disciplinary hypotheses on the other have attempted to explain human laughter offering psychological, physiological and sociological accounts. But the discourse remains cheerfully unstable.

MIDS @ Chennai

THE INSTITUTE SEMINAR SERIES - September 2017

Topic

A Magic System?: Consumption and Print Advertising

in Colonial Tamilnadu

Speaker

A.R. Venkatachalapathy

Professor, MIDS

Chair

Bhavani Raman

Associate Professor of History, University of Toronto

Date & Time

September 27, 2017     Wednesday     3:30 p.m.

Venue

Adiseshiah Auditorium, MIDS

All are cordially invited

NET/JRF Revision Classes @ National College, Trichy

Certificate Course on 'Critical Philosophy of Race' @ IIT Delhi

Five-Day GIAN Certificate Course

on

CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF RACE

[GIAN Certificate Course]

13 – 17 November 2017

IIT Delhi

OVERVIEW

The modern world was formed to a significant extent by slave trade and colonialism which were accompanied by the ideologies of race and racist practices, and resulted in genocides, and enforced migration and segregation of people. These atrocities and racism in many forms continue in the contemporary world, and in many parts racial tensions are on the rise. Critical philosophy of race, a new sub-discipline within philosophy, has developed in an effort to try to understand the persistence of racism and to investigate the relative success of the different strategies deployed to combat it. Drawing on the resources of a variety of disciplines from history and sociology to legal theory and psychotherapy, critical philosophy of race shows that racism is often defined too narrowly.

Workshop on Scholarly Writing @ Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi

Author Workshop on Scholarly Writing & Intellectual Ethics 2017

Tuesday, 26 September 2017

2:30 PM – 4:00 PM IST

at

Auditorium of Faculty of Engineering & Technology

Jamia Millia Islamia

New Delhi, Delhi 110025

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

This workshop would be an opportunity to interact with the Librarians, researchers & faculty members and sharing information with them about the book publishing process of Elsevier.

The workshop will assist the researchers in enhancing their skills of writing books content and to interact with experts in the field of publishing and get their queries answered.

It's also a great platform to interact and understand about the value of eBook content and usage in research and also understand about Elsevier's world-class platform "ScienceDirect".

Workshop Topics:

How to get published

Peer Review

Get Noticed

Lay summary

Plagirism

Elsevier Publishing Campus

ADMISSION IS FREE!

Confy on ELT @ Sathyabama University, Chennai

International Conference on

Teaching and Assessing English Language and Literature (TAELL'18)

Department of English, School of Science and Humanities

Sathyabama University, Chennai

in association with

Regional English Language Office

US Embassy, New Delhi

29 – 31 January 2018

Conference Sub Themes

English Language Education - Methods, Materials and Principles

Digital literacy for the Learners and the Teachers

Technology for Teaching and Testing English Language

Artificial Intelligence, Multimedia and ICT in ELT

Cognitive Processes and Critical Thinking in Language Learning and Acquisition

Multi Language Learning  and Life-long Language Learning

Applied Linguistics and Language Education

Culture and Literature in English Education

Early English Education

English for Academic Purposes

English for Specific Purposes

Intercultural Communication

Language and Peace Education

Course on Translation Studies @ Assam University

Translation Studies:

Global Practices in Interpretation and Representation

07-11-2017 to 12-11-2017

Course Area: Humanities & Liberal Arts 
Foreign Faculty :David Johnston, School of Arts, English and Languages, 

Queen's University, UK 
Host Faculty : Sib Sankar Majumder, English

Overview

From exegesis to philosophical hermeneutics, the interpretation of social and cultural phenomena has arguably been the definitive act of humanistic scholarship. At the heart of such activities is an awareness of the complexities of representation, whether textual, visual, scientific or ideological. As an intellectual method and a writing practice, it is precisely upon such acts of interpretation and representation that translation is centered. Although the history of translation as both theory and practice offers a range of strategies as to how texts might be both interpreted and, in turn, represented, two approaches have recurred so frequently as to be considered dominant models (cf. Venuti): one is the instrumental method, by which texts are treated as being characterized by invariance of meaning, so that their representation is rooted in metonymical practice; the other (following on from Steiner), is the hermeneutic model that treats texts as being open to multiple acts of interpretation, and translation as a representational practice whose methods are metaphorical, concerned with establishing patterns of relatedness between text and receiving context. In that way, translation refuses the discursive authority of source text and target context alike, achieving this by both establishing and working within the provisionality of the different spatial and temporal domains inhabited by text and reader / spectator alike. In other words, translation is much less about the establishment of meaning than it is about the promotion of understanding.

In the  multilingual/multicultural space, that is India, an understanding of translation practices, both linguistic and socio-cultural, is crucial since such a practice does not merely promote understanding, but promotes understanding of differences across cultures and linguistic groups. Additionally, in this increasingly globalized world, translation is a survival tool rather than an academic pursuit. The course, therefore, intends to delve into the fundamentals of this process and engage with the dominant practices of Interpretation and Representation involved in the same.

Confy @ Mohanlal Sukhadia University, Udaipur

IASA Bienniel Conference

On

Planetary Futures and the Global South

At

Mohanlal Sukhadia University

Udaipur, Rajasthan

16-18 January 2018

In association with

DAAD-Global South Network, University of Tuebingen

JNU-UPE-II Project “Asian Crossroads: Indic Neighbourhoods, Global Connections,”

Project on Science and Spirituality, JNU

Samvad India Foundation, New Delhi

CALL FOR PAPERS

India has been called the “cross-roads” of the entire region of the Indian ocean oecumene, literally on the “road to everywhere.”1 For almost every important intellectual, political, and cultural current from East to the West and from West to the East, India became the point of transition, mediation, or even fruition. This is as true of the evolution of British colonialism in Asia and Australia as it is of prior times. The question, however, is how these connections might play out in the future, but also in terms of how futures are to be imagined, designed, and executed from hereon. It is this exciting discursive terrain of future studies that this conference fouces on, with special referene to India, Australia, and the Global South.

The aim of this conference is to study some of these cross currents of Global Futures, to document available knowledge about them, explore alternative futures for Indic-Australian inter-relationships, and to create new paradigms for understanding the globalisation of both India and Australia in this light. Our main objective, then, would be to try to explore Indic-Australian connections from colonialism to global futures and begin to explore the range of ideas and processes implicit to these processes. With this view we plan to engage with the history, politics, and cultural formations of cross-connections between India, Australia, and the Global South, giving primacy to oceanic and cross-continental intellectual and cultural traffic. In addition, the conference will focus on issues such as traditional knowledge systems, spiritual and sacred practices, Indo-Australasian nationalisms, transfers of science, technology, and culture, and relations in social practices, arts, and media in the region, especially as they impact our thinking on Global Futures.

At its most ambitious, this project is about “re-presenting” India, Australia, and the Global South not just in a post-imperialistic, increasingly globalized world-system, but beyond these into systematic thinking and planning of planetary futures. The word “represent” is used here in both its commonly understood senses, as likeness, bringing to life or going back to its Latin root esse or presence, represent as making present. But every description is, necessarily, also an interpretation. So to represent Indo-Australian connections in their oceanic, global, and futures contexts would also be to reinterpret them. The other meaning of represent is to stand or speak for; to resisting others’ definitions of us, so that we, in India, Australia, and others in the Global South, speak for ourselves, taking charge of how we represent ourselves.2 Indeed, both ways of looking at Indic-Australian connections are relevant to our conference.

Call for Papers

Postcolonial Interventions (ISSN 2455-6564)

Call for Papers

Vol. III, Issue 1, January 2018

In her recently published book, Postcolonialism and Postsocialism in Fiction and Art: Resistance and Re-existence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) Madina Tlostanova proposes an intersection between postcolonialism and postsocialism by foregrounding how the subjects of the former Soviet Bloc, exposed to the vicissitudes of a neo-liberal capitalist world order, are experiencing a sense of pervasive socio-economic deprivation that is accompanied by racial and ethnic fundamentalisms, growing gender-inequalities and a certain invisibility in the dominant narratives of the global order where they continue to be subjected to derogatory stereotyping and systemic erasure – an experience that resembles that of many subjects in postcolonial states. She argues that “Tricked into believing that the only legitimate modernity is the neoliberal capitalist one, we have doomed ourselves to the next twenty-five years of stagnation, catching up and forever emerging” (7). She therefore echoes the thoughts of Romanian social theorist Ovidiu Tichindeleanu, who claims that “the post-1989 civilizational promise of Europe and Occidentalism has currently reached a critical point of saturation in Eastern Europe… Consequently, one is faced today with the historical task of decolonizing the imaginary and rebuilding alliances, against the dissemination of cynicism, ethnocentric nationalism, and postcommunist racism”.

Considering the fact that the problems of neo-liberal capitalist deprivation, racism and ethnocentric nationalism continue to be major concerns for postcolonial studies, especially in the wake of growing xenophobia and Islamophobia in large parts of the world, a proposed intersection between postcolonialism and postsocialism certainly seems promising and may even be tied to Ngugi wa Thiongo’s calls for globalism and globalist social consciousness. Such a consciousness is also seen by Ngugi as a critique of neo-liberal capitalism and religious fundamentalism at once because he asserts, “Capitalist fundamentalism generates religious fundamentalisms in alliance with it or in opposition to it.  But such religious fundamentalism, to the extent that it divides labor into religious camps, objectively works for and in concert with capitalist fundamentalism in its Financial Robes”. Exposing these networks is crucial for understanding either the growth of Hindutva in India or the ISIS in Philippines or the Christian extremists in Russia. This concerted enterprise, based on the task of “decolonizing the imaginary and rebuilding alliances” seems particularly significant in 2017 which marks a hundred years of the Bolshevik Revolution is Russia which of course had a significant influence on anti-colonial liberation movements around the world. Raja Rao’s Kanthapura offers a brief glimpse of this appeal as the text glowingly speaks of ‘the country of hammer and sickle and electricity’. The eventual disintegration of those ideals and the role of Soviet Russia as an imperial force in various parts of Asia, most notably Afghanistan, of constitutes one of the great ironies of history. The conjunction of postcolonialism and postsocialism might investigate these ironies as well while being mindful of both resistance and co-existence.

Vol. III, Issue 1 of Postcolonial Interventions invites scholarly papers that would investigate such possibilities and more in an effort to expand critical horizons while remaining open to the nuances of multi-spatial hermeneutics within a pluriversal critique.

Confy @ Derozio Memorial College, Kolkata

Call for Papers

International and Interdisciplinary Conference

Kolkata, India

7 – 9 January 2018

Topic: Person, Culture and Identity

Derozio Memorial College

Kolkata, India

Directed and organized by the Institute of Cross Cultural Studies and Academic Exchange, Society for Indian Philosophy and Religion Elon, NC, USA in collaboration with Derozio Memorial College, Kolkata, India.

Acceptance of proposal will be mailed within 2 weeks or earlier to participants

Email your abstract: chandanachak@gmail.com

Copy to: Iccsaexchange@gmail.com

Subtopics: Concept of Person and Personal Identity, Society and Media, Society and Women Empowerment, Language and Cultural Identity, E-Culture, Sociology of Culture, Semiotics of Culture, Cultural Relativism, Culture and Ethnology, Cultural Diplomacy, Folk Culture, Material Culture, Culture of War, Transfer of Culture, Morality: Nature or Culture, Culture and Morals, Culture and Global Ethics, Theology of Culture, Globalization of Culture, etc.

Web pages:

http://iccsa.wordpress.com/upcoming-events/

https://sites.google.com/a/lclark.edu/fritzman/

Advisory Board: Yolanda Espina (Portugal), Tommi Lehtonen (Finland), Debkumar Mukhopadhyya (India), Deven Patel (USA), Nina Petek (Slovenia), Rizwan Rahman (India) Ming Shao (China), Dibyendu Talapatra (India), Richard Vulich (USA) Su Chen Wu (Taiwan), Yanling Xu (China)

Confy @ Aligarh Muslim University

Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies

[​Officially recognised Indian chapter of the International ACLALS]

ANNUAL CONFERENCE -  2018

8 – 10 February 2018

CO-HOSTED BY

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

ALIGARH MUSLIM UNIVERSITY

"Tolerance and Bigotry: Contestations in Indian Literatures in English"

Long after the shadow of the ‘postcolonial’ stayed its course in the history of literature’s encounter with the political, the question of reception has still remained a thorny one. Placed against the red-hot outrage surrounding a Santhal writer’s place within his own community at the ‘margins’, it is important that we re-open the spaces of cultural consumption to a more searching scrutiny – beyond markers of political certitude and rehearsed idioms of correctness. Insofar as this latest controversy traces its origin to debates around the textuality of tribal languages, it is important to mark this moment as unsettling a self-assured postcoloniality at the peripheries. The latter are no longer unproblematic sites for resurgence and mimicry. Structures of epistemological violence are imported from the sovereign fetish of the ‘canon’ and re-enacted with vengeance, till the excluded participate in their own expropriation. While the empire was writing back its own fantasies of ‘tolerance’, the subaltern performed to a script of ‘bigotry’ that has long been its historical destiny. However, the marks of injury that establish parallels between a Perumal Murugan and a Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar – or a Wendy Doniger and a Taslima Nasreen – are equivalent, but not identical. The effects of their violence are utterly unequal. But, might an apolitical humanism of ‘tolerance’ be enough to tame a national culture into foregone templates of ‘diversity’ – or, to civilize the subaltern into this culture? Must the ‘centre’ and the ‘margins’ dance to the same anthem of ‘tolerance’ – or, must their difference be recognized in an other script, an other text, an other history and an other nation?