Cities are sites of profound paradoxes, and this is currently nowhere more apparent than in South Asia where they simultaneously represent both the frontiers of globalization as well as the deeply troubling social and political inequalities of the global south. We argue that South Asian cities operate as what Rashmi Verma in her analysis of…[Read more]

Dear Colleagues,

I’m writing to invite you to submit abstracts to a conference we are organizing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on “Existentialism and Postcolonialism” to be held on October 10-11, 2014.

Postcolonial theory and existentialism have long shared a relationship of reciprocity—perhaps most famously in the case of…[Read more]

John Hawley and I are editing a volume on Approaches to Teaching the Works of Amitav Ghosh. If you teach Ghosh’s works and haven’t done so already, please do consider filling the survey below. We also welcome proposals for contributions to the volume.

Link to survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/mlasurvey_ghosh

Regards,

Gaurav Desai

Dear Friends,

If you teach the works of Amitav Ghosh, please consider filling the survey below and proposing a chapter for the MLA volume that is being edited by John Hawley and me.

Regards,

Gaurav Desai

Link to survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/mlasurvey_ghosh

XVII International Conference
(A Silver Jubilee Event of the Forum on Contemporary Theory)

Jointly Organized by
The Forum on Contemporary Theory, Baroda
&
The International Lincoln Centre for American Studies
Louisiana State University, Shreveport, USA

Re-Imagining Theory:
Towards New…[Read more]

Dear colleagues,

I’m writing to invite you to submit proposals for a collection of essays that is tentatively titled The Good Life and the Greater Good in a Global Context. The essays need to focus on the discourses and practices of the good life, understood in all of its dimensions—material, psychological, ethical, spiritual, etc. –and appro…[Read more]

Dear colleagues,

I’m writing to invite you to submit proposals for a collection of essays that is tentatively titled The Good Life and the Greater Good in a Global Context. The essays need to focus on the discourses and practices of the good life, understood in all of its dimensions—material, psychological, ethical, spiritual, etc. –and appro…[Read more]

CFP: Giving Voice, Appropriating Voices: Representing the Singularity of Suffering (NeMLA 2015)

Efforts to give voice to the silenced are central to postcolonial and feminist thought. Yet scholars in both disciplines, following Gayatri Spivak and Chandra Mohanty, have insisted that recuperating silenced voices always risks re-appropriating those…[Read more]

Hi, Everybody!

A Rich Field for Rhetorical Analysis

I know you are all familiar with the Orwell novel 1984, with its permanently at war nations of Oceania,
Eurasia, and Eastasia.  The Newsspeak and media coverage were something that Orwell gave some time
and attention to in that novel. Oceania is always right, tells the truth, the other two…[Read more]

Dear colleagues,

I wonder if those of you who are interested in Arab American literature and culture can take a couple of minutes of your time to endorse the new MLA forum on Global Arab and Arab American Literature and Culture. All you have to do is follow the four steps I listed below.

You don’t need to be working on Global Arab or Arab…[Read more]

Dear Colleagues,

Please remember to cast your vote concerning Resolution 2014-1. Regardless of how you intend to cast your vote, please vote.

You can read the  MLA Executive Director’s letter, Rosemary G. Feal, here: http://t.e2ma.net/message/mx8ig/yum5sh

Please click on http://t.e2ma.net/click/mx8ig/yum5sh/6c2vcc (you need to log into your…[Read more]

How do cultural texts address, in our times, the limits and achievements of South Asian nationalisms? The essays invited for South Asian Review’s 2014 Special Issue, “Nation and Its Discontents,” will examine this central question from various perspectives. Despite a long history of the critique of nationalism in and through South Asian cultu…[Read more]

We’re seeking proposals for a panel at MLA 2015 (Vancouver, Jan. 8-11) and for a special issue of the journal The Global South (published by Indiana UP, available via JSTOR and Project Muse) on the topic “Narrating Global South Cities.” Even though the “global South” has emerged as a “new and powerful ordering system for academic disci…[Read more]