The Literary Present and the Postcolonial Condition An International Conference
Organized by
The Department of English, International Islamic University, Islamabad

Date: 14-16 November, 2012
 
Faculty members and MS/PhD students of English departments countrywide are invited to register as participants. Please contact [email protected]  OR 0519257916 (Mr. Mehmood ul Hassan)
 
Call for Papers
At the end of the World War II, the British and the French territorial control over the colonies began to crumble and a new global condition emerged in which erstwhile colonies transformed into newly independent or created nation-states. The former colonial masters, having relinquished territorial occupation, devised cultural and economic models of control that divided the world into developed and developing parts, similar to the division into the civilized and the savage parts in the colonial era. Originally literary and cultural theorists favoured violence as a necessary part of decolonization and freedom. With the demise of the Soviet Union, the emergence of a unipolar world and increased globalization, meditations on violence gave way to sophisticated theorizations of hybridity and syncretism. Novels about violent struggles began to be replaced by the narratives of immigrant families in developed countries became more acceptable forms of the literary.

After 9/11, non-state violence was seen as a serious challenge to the state’s monopoly over violence and a type of literary genre emerged: the post-9/11 novel. From Jean Baudrillard’s The Spirit of Terrorism to Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, John Updike’s Terrorist, and Anna Perera’s The Guanatanamo Boy, the liminal figure of the jihadist became the focus of theoretical and literary explorations. In other words, narrative and critical literature has always engaged with and responded to the spirit of the age. The organizers of the conference invite proposals for papers/presentations on the literary present examining its contours with a specific reference to Pakistan, a general reference to South Asia, and a broader engagement with the postcolonial condition.

The organizers of the conference welcome abstracts of papers and presentations exploring any of the following topics:

  • Hybridity/Syncretism and Postcolonial Identity
  • National and Regional Languages and the Politics of Global Translations
  • Folklore and the Disenchanted World
  • Diasporic Imagination and the Idea of Home and Location
  • Global Knowledge Circulation and Local Consequences
  • Indigeneity and Civilizational Interactions
  • Cultural Ownership and the Global Knowledge Industry
  • The Popular Imagination and the Narratives of Clashing Civilizations
  • Literary Constructions of the Jihadists/Fundamentalists
  • The Western Canon and Pedagogy in Postcolonial Locations
  • Stylistic Features of Pakistani Literature in English
  • The Politics of Gender and Postcoloniality

The conference is a three-day event that aims to examine all aspects of literature produced in English in the region.