Calls for Papers/Proposals
This board is optional for those interested in soliciting papers for pre-conferences or for panel submissions. Please contact the panel or pre-conference organizer directly with your questions or paper submissions.
II. Conference
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Partition Narratives and South Asian Diasporas
We seek papers that offer original, creative, and extensive lenses through which we can collectively survey a historical event characterized by arguably the largest and most bloody migration of peoples on earth: the Partition of British India into the sovereign dominions of India and Pakistan, which consisted of West Pakistan and East Pakistan, two “wings” of the same nation divided by 1,000 miles of Indian territory.
The questions that will drive the pre-conference include: how do the memory and trauma of Partition get passed on from generation to generation within India, Pakistan, or elsewhere, then from those at home to the diaspora, and to what effect? How do partition narratives circulate in diasporic communities? How do they shape the narratives of home, community, nation, alienhood, and citizenship? What role do cultural texts (literature, film, television, theatre, digital media, etc.) play in circulating and/ or distorting partition narratives?
Other topics of interest include analyses of individual cultural producers and/ or literary/ filmic texts in languages other than English on Partition that circulate throughout the diaspora, the creation of Partition archives in/ by diasporic communities, teaching partition narratives in North American classrooms, re-thinking the geographical and ideological meanings of the “border” in South Asia and throughout its diasporas, and how the digital turn of the 21st century shapes the ways in which we view and imagine the division of British India. We want to include scholars from different disciplines, including historians, political scientists, film and literature scholars; folks who work on one or more of the three nations involved (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh), or feel invested in the conflicting narratives within each national imaginary; the work of British writers and scholars versus those of others with South Asian backgrounds and viewpoints; readings of individual texts and writers, including Khushwant Singh; Chaman Nahal; Yash Pal; Saadat Hasan Manto; Balachandra Rajan; Kartar Singh Duggal; Qurratulain Hyder; Attia Hosain; Amrita Pritam; Intizar Husain; Bhisham Sahni; Manohar Malgonkar; Faiz Ahmed Faiz; Ahmed Ali; Salman Rushdie; Amitav Ghosh; Anita Desai; Sunil Gangopadhyay, Shauna Singh Baldwin; Bapsi Sidhwa, and many more. In addition, we seek papers that examine the representation of the Partition in films from various locations.
We welcome proposals on topics not mentioned above, provided that they challenge the existing narratives and metanarratives of Partition vis-à-vis colonialism, freedom movements, hegemony, subnationalism, religion, and resistance. The deadline for abstract submissions is Tuesday, April 30, 2013. Queries and abstracts can be emailed to: Rahul Gairola (UW-Bothell) rgairola@uw.edu.
Feminist Pre-Conference, South Asia Annual Meeting, Madison, WI, 17 October 2013
Call for Presentations: Feminist Scholarship: Genealogies and New Directions
Having completed the 10th Year of the Annual Feminist Preconference, this is an excellent time to evaluate the field and reflect on its histories. Therefore, this year--17 October 2013--we ask that participants present their current research to reflect the latest scholarship in "Feminist Studies" (broadly conceived) and, at the same time, examine the intellectual threads that have influenced it. What scholarly trajectories does this new work advance and which ones does it challenge, reject, or re-imagine?
Several overarching themes seem to be emerging in our related fields, often blurring the boundary between our respective disciplines. Feminist studies have helped to reorient the study of comparative literature and history, as well as analyses of globalization and neoliberal economics whether by recasting the historical project or focusing attention on the effects of neoliberalism on women. This in turn has led to, among numerous other issues, rethinking subject formation, relations of field research, disenfranchisement and displacement, and the shift from government-based and directed aid to non-government organizations. What is the role of feminist research in examining these issues and interrogating old concepts such as "empowerment," "civil society," "transnational," or even "feminism" itself? How are these trends being interpreted in (and perhaps led by) South Asian Studies? South Asianists in both Social Sciences and Humanities also have been at the forefront of theorizing and pushing the boundaries in fields that shape feminist studies. When scholars talk about "queering the archive," they point to a total reexamination of existing research categories. How has our research led or contributed to these discussions and debates?
There is a valuable questioning prevalent in South Asian Studies of liberal assumptions that pervade much feminist theory, human rights frameworks, and the privileging of secularism as the most central discourse of emancipation. And while earlier scholarship focused on the inclusion of women and gender issues, there now seems to be renewed attention to questions of subjugation, violence, economic disparity and real or metaphorical "dirt." What do these changes mean and how are they different from the focus on similar themes that took place in colonial or orientalist scholarship? Again what role is South Asian feminist analyses playing in this reexamination?
The Feminist Pre-Conference therefore looks to highlight new scholarship that reflects feminist approaches to your disciplines and subfields on these or other issues that you deem most important. Plus it asks you to provide an analysis of how that research fits into the history or genealogy of Feminist inquiry.
We look forward to a state-of-the-field discussion that looks ahead with attention to the past. Please submit proposals for papers (250 words in length) to both Wendy Singer singerw@kenyon.edu AND Shelley Feldman rf12@cornell.edu by 30 May 2013.
AIIS Workshop: Dissertation into Book
Participants:
Susan Wadley (Syracuse University), Convener
Geraldine Forbes, SUNY-Oswego
Ramnarayan Rawat, University of Delaware
Aseema Sinha, Claremont
This workshop is for recent PhD recipients and focuses on turning the dissertation into a book. To apply, please follow instructions below:
http://www.indiastudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/aiis-workshop-2013-madison.pdf
Applications are due June 15, 2013.
Kashmir Studies Preconference
This preconference foregrounds exciting new scholarship from the humanities and social sciences that challenges conventional models of writing and thinking about Kashmir. This shift marks a period in Kashmir Valley, calling out for fresh engagement, as the turbulent cycle of insurgency and counter-insurgency, prevalent throughout the 1990s, has transformed, and new phases of the longstanding struggle for azaadi, or freedom, have emerged. For Kashmiri communities on both sides of the LoC, these dynamics are opening some spaces for the emergence of new forms of identity and imagination, memory and aspiration, homeland and belonging, and protest and resistance.
The Kashmir Studies preconference provides a space for junior and senior scholars to come together to critically analyze the dynamics, complexities, perils, and possibilities of everyday life in Kashmir. One overarching theme of interest in this inaugural year of the Kashmir Studies preconference is what it means to practice what Ortner has defined as “enraged anthropology” in relation to the longstanding patterns of militarized governance, occupational authority, and institutionalized denial of justice and aspirations of the people at this juncture for differently-positioned communities who consider Kashmir their home. Themes of interest this year include: the normalization of militarization and its consequences; the subversive potential of Kashmiri stories and memories that challenge dominant colonial and postcolonial narratives; the need for critical scholarship; the politics of memorialization across different Kashmiri communities; questions of homeland, belonging, and Pandit-Muslim solidarities; gender, sexualities, identity, and self-determination; emasculation under occupation, the reclamation of masculinity, and the performative analysis of protests; art, culture and conflict through film and music; the institutionalization of impunity through the legal system and the utilization of law as a tool of resistance. We welcome perspectives that are interdisciplinary, transnational, and/or crosstemporal in their approach.
Please submit a 150-250 word abstract describing your area of interest by June 30 to Haley Duschinski, duschins@ohio.edu.