Thursday, April 23, 2015

Sappho for Equality: National Queer Conference 2015 - Call for Abstracts

Call for Abstracts

 

 

Sappho for Equality is organizing the fourth National Queer Conference titled Femininities and Masculinities to be held between 11th to 13th September, 2015 at the H. L. Roy Auditorium, Jadavpur University, Kolkata.

 

'Femininities' and 'masculinities' are terms that are variously theorized, contested and claimed by academics as well as activists. Central to such theorizations, contests and claims are attempts to historicize the terms, (re)define their cultural parameters, and highlight multiple meanings and practices associated with them. In recent times, the Indian academia has witnessed a spate of conferences on masculinities. Yet, how do we talk of masculinities without interrogating their charged negotiation/inter-relation/friction/connection with femininities? On a different note, with the Supreme Court upholding one's right to gender expression (National Legal Services Authority v Union of India), a wide spectrum trans* subjectivities have been visibilised while many others remain invisibilised. So then, how is law enabling/disabling construction of femininities and masculinities? With these contemporary developments as backdrop, this conference seeks to bring activists and academics together to discuss and dialogue about the meanings and practices associated with femininities and masculinities. What are the roles of femininities and masculinities in the production of sex and gender? What role does sexuality play in their productions? How do 'female masculinities' and 'male femininities' (re)order and/or (re)produce power differentials? How are femininities and masculinities lived and performed through time, place, and space? How are femininities and masculinities interrogated and redefined in activist spaces? What are the exclusions and illegibilities within stereotypical as well as reordered understanding of femininities and masculinities? Within a neoliberal landscape that produces its own market friendly versions of queer lifestyles, how do femininities and masculinities negotiate the market? These are some questions we will seek to address around the following subthemes, including, but not limited to:

 

Session I - Politics of naming genders: How and why do we name our gender(s)? How is that name discursively produced? Do names have limits, foreclosures? Does the recognition of the third/trans gender influence these limits and/or foreclosures?

 

Session II - Gender and sexuality as border zones: How are borders between genders conceived? Are they rigid or porous? Are there borders to be passed to reach one's 'right' gender and what role, does sexuality play in this passage? How is one's sense of gender and sexuality contested in various spaces?

 

Session III - Fractures in hegemonic femininities and masculinities: How do we read dominant femininities and masculinities? Is it possible to read fractures, disruptions in the ways they are produced, performed? Can they be queered or is queerness in-built in them? How does power operate through them?

 

Session IV - Femininities and masculinities in the nation-making project: Is there an ideal femininity and ideal masculinity that the nation actively produces? How is it constituted? What are its constitutive others? Have there been changes in these constitution/s? How do gender queerness and different sexualities engage with such constitution/s? How does one locate neoliberal markets in these constitutions?

 

Session V - (De)constructing femininities and masculinities in popular culture: How do we read the way femininities and masculinities are constructed and produced in films, literature, theatre and other popular media? What are the continuities and disjunctions within popular culture? Are there differentials in the potential of different mediums of popular culture in queering gender binaries?

 

Session VI - Female masculinities and Male Femininities: How are female masculinities and male femininities experienced and lived? What are their everyday performances? Do their sexualities have a bearing on their gender performances? What would female masculinities and male femininities mean for the sexed body? How do they (re)order power? Does the neoliberal market also produce/co-opt/resist/reshape these femininities and masculinities?

                                                                                                                               

Session VII - Femininities and Masculinities in Activism: What roles do femininities and masculinities play in social movements? How have women's movements and queer movements interpreted/questioned/challenged different masculinities and femininities? Are there points of intersections? Are there commonalities/differences in standpoints? Has academic activist collaborations influenced these standpoints in any way?

 

Session VIII - Intersectionalities: How are femininities and masculinities experienced/negotiated through class, caste, ethnic, religious and other specificities? Do such locations and specificities by themselves and in combination influence the power of negotiation? Are these aspects somehow woven into hegemonic gender notions also, or do they signify a radical shift, a point of departure?

 

Session IX - Performing Femininities and Masculinities: Queering femininities and masculinities through live performance such as plays, dance, music and similar cultural forms.


We are inviting abstracts along with a short bio-note from students, research scholars, teachers, development architects, and activists on any of these sub themes. The abstracts should reach us by 23rd May 2015 at sapphoqueerconference@gmail.com. The abstract should be between 250 to 300 words. Papers in English and Bengali will be accepted. Selected participants who submit their papers in Bengali are requested to submit an English translation as well.  There is no registration fee. Outstation participants will be provided with AC 3-tier train fare and accommodation on twin sharing basis. Authors of selected abstracts will be communicated by 23rd June 2015. The deadline for completed papers is 15th August 2015


Please note: Papers to be presented at the conference should be unpublished before. Due to logistical constraints, Sappho for Equality can only bear costs of travel, food, and accommodation for one outstation participant per paper/performance. Sappho for Equality may publish the papers in future. In that case the authors will be informed if their papers are selected for publication. For further clarification, please contact: Poushali Basak (Ph: 9477171817 / Email:poushaly.b@gmail.com) or at 033-24419995 (Tuesday-Saturday 12-8pm & Sunday 12-6pm).

-------------------------------

Sappho for Equality

21 Jogendra Garden (South)

Ground Floor, Kolkata - 700 078

Phone : +91 33 2441 9995

Email: sappho1999@gmail.com

Website: www.sapphokolkata.in

CCL Fortnightly Meeting – 8

CENTRE FOR COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

School of Humanities, University of Hyderabad

 

 

CCL Fortnightly Meeting – 8

 

 

Student Presentations

 

Sayantan Mondal: Public Life of Religion in Early 19th Century Colonial Bengal (Work in Progress).

Vahini Billu: Yanadi in Telugu Fiction: A Comparative Study of Ennela Navvu and Chivari Gudise.

Saidul Haque: Adda and Public Sphere in Colonial Bengal.

on

 

 

Friday, 24th April 2015, 2.30 pm

 

 

at

 

 

Lecture Hall, School of Humanities, UoH

 

All are invited


--

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Programme Report: 2nd Sujit Mukherjee Memorial Lecture at University of Hyderabad


Prof. Indra Nath Choudhuri, an eminent academician, writer and cultural administrator delivered the second Sujit Mukherjee Memorial Lecture (2015) on the "The Idea of an Indian Literature" at the Auditorium, School of Humanities, University of Hyderabad. Centre for Comparative Literature organized this event for the second time; the first one was delivered by the renowned comparatist, translator and a creative writer, Nabaneeta Dev Sen on "Translations and Multilingualism" in 2014.


Sujit Mukherjee was a prolific writer, translator and comparatists. His contribution in the field of Translation Studies and in the historiography of Indian Literature is beyond excellence. Besides his academic success, he was also a good cricketer and his elegant writings on cricket were highly acclaimed. Ramachandra Guha would describe them as "the finest books ever written on cricket by an Indian". To honour his contribution and to keep alive his legacy, Centre for Comparative Literature took this initiative of organizing this memorial lecture every year by a noted academician.


The speaker, Prof. Indra Nath Choudhuri is a well-known litterateur, has engaged in academics, administration and cultural diplomacy. He has taught at many universities in the country and abroad. Prof. Choudhuri was Secretary, Sahitya Akademi and Director, The Nehru Centre, London. He was Member Secretary and Academic Director of Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi. Prof. Choudhuri has written books on Comparative Literature, Poetics and Aesthetics in Hindi, English and Bengali. He assumed the first chair of Tagore Studies at the Edinburgh Napier University in Scotland. Prof. Choudhuri is currently the President of Comparative Literature Association of India (CLAI).

Prof. Tutun Mukherjee, the Head of the Centre for Comparative Literature welcomed and introduced the Chair Prof. Panchanan Mohanty, Dean, School of Humanities and the Chief Guest Prof. Haribabu, Vice Chancellor, University of Hyderabad. She also expressed her deep respect for Sujit Mukherjee and pointed out how Sujit Mukherjee thought of practicing Comparative Literature in India with an indigenous methodology different from Western mode of reading Comparative Literature. Prof. Sachidananda Mohanty, a distinguished professor of English introduced the life and contribution of late Sujit Mukherjee both as an academician and as the Chief Publisher of Orient Longman. Dr. J. Bheemaiah introduced the speaker, Prof. Indra Nath Choudhuri. After then Prof. Hari Babu gave his remarks and the lecture followed. After the lecture by Prof. Indra Nath Choudhuri, Prof. Panchanan Mohanty gave his presidential remarks and initiated the discussion.


Prof. Indra Nath Choudhuri delivered this year's lecture on "The Idea of an Indian Literature". Prof. Choudhuri in his erudite lecture conceptualized and historicized the category called "Indian Literature". He emphasized that Indian literature should be seen in its pluralistic context or in the context of diversity because India is a multilingual country. Indian literature is then inclusive rather than logo-centric or exclusive. Unlike Western binary of unity and diversity India has cultural legacy of diversity leading to unity. Indian literature has the rich potential because of its local, regional and pan-Indian identities. He highlighted the crucial regionality-universality; kshetra-deshi, marga-deshi issues in Indian Literature. He also talked about the strong presence of orality in Indian Literature. He said that "The glory of 'mainstream' literature rests not by marginalizing oral literature but by accepting oral/folk/loka as complementary." He asserts how classical writers like Patanjali and Bharathamuni recognized the role of orality. He also spoke on role of Bhakti Movement in Indian literature. For him Indian modernism is not separated from past and future but continuity of residual and emerging era unlike Western idea of Modernism. Prof. Choudhuri raised the crucial question: "Is Indian Literature singular or pluralistic or mutually inclusive?"  He concluded his captivating speech pointing out that Indian literature is the literature of the holistic literary activities of Indian people.


The lecture was followed by scholarly responses from audiences. The crucial point of disjuncture in the inclusive idea of Indian Literature was raised. The debate surrounding the validity of the category called Indian Literature in a multilingual nation was also discussed. Dr. Sowmya Dechamma from Centre for Comparative Literature conveyed the formal vote of thanks which was followed by tea and snacks.



--

Saturday, April 18, 2015

CFP: Visual Culture in the Indian Subcontinent: The Chitrolekha Magazine

The Chitrolekha Magazine (ISSN 2231-4822, www.chitrolekha.com, a sister publication of Rupkatha) is inviting articles, essays and photo essays on the visual culture on the Indian subcontinent right from the prehistoric to the modern times. Submissions can be made on the following topics/areas (not exclusive but suggestive):

  • New Perspectives on the origin of Art in the Indian Subcontinent
  • Issues in the History of Art in the Indian Subcontinent
  • Religious Architecture and Philosophy
  • Aesthetics of Town-planning
  • Paintings in the Indian Subcontinent—history, forms and evolution
  • Sacred sculptures—interpretations of the iconographies.
  • Religious movements and the production of art objects
  • Theories of Art
  • Artisans—conditions and creations
  • Foreign influences and their incorporation
  • Ethnography, ethnicity and creation of art as a symbolic assertion
  • The science of art—technology, techniques, experiments and materials.

We cordially invite your opinions, suggestions for inclusion of other topics and contributions to the topics.

Word-limit: 2000-5000 words (including notes and references)

Style-sheet to follow: APA

Contact: Tarun Tapas Mukherjee & Sreecheta Mukherjee at editor@chitrolekha.com andttm1974@gmail.com

Submission Deadline May 30, 2015.

Expected Schedule of Publication: July 2015.

Visit http://chitrolekha.com/submission/call-for-papers.php for more details>>


--

Exploring Moral Interfaces: Private Worlds and Public Systems - An International Conference at EFLU

"Everyone deserves a private life," says the female protagonist in the 1994 movie, Three Colors: Red by Krzysztof KieÅ›lowski. The intrusive nature of the modern technologies that facilitate access—without consent or acknowledgement—to the private domains of people's lives further blurs the already hazy borderlines that separate the public from the private. The proposed conference will address some of the troubling issues relating to this phenomenon.

The conference focuses on the distinction between "private worlds" and "public systems", which however can never be separated and whose nebulous moral interfaces fade into each other. To what extent is it possible to delineate within a social and legal framework the discourse of the private, which constitutes the personal world of feeling (and which, strictly speaking, is also the nuclear space of civil society)—from the institutional demands of public systems, of which the State is a major but not necessarily a paradigmatic example? What exactly is the moral status of a person's privacy? And how do we historicize the 'private' and the "private" individual?

To what extent can a person's private life be used against him/her in the context of his/her public positions or actions? Is it alright to invoke specificities of private life to question the stand a person takes on public issues? Can there be rules in this matter? Or would it be a matter entirely for self-regulation—in which case, would there be rules in any meaningful sense? How do literary artists, filmmakers, philosophers, sociologists, legal experts, and social scientists envision the point where the 'private' ends and the 'public' begins? It is often said that those in public life should be ready to have their private lives discussed, exposed and used as ammunition in public polemics and political contestations. Is this view justified? What exactly is the moral basis of this view?

Next, how are we to conceive the politics of privacy from the point of view of class, race, gender, caste or other categories involving social power? Does the question of privacy transcend these distinctions? What is the "secret" history of privacy as a domain meant to be kept away from public limelight? Must we assume that 'privacy' is a product of certain historical developments—say humanism or individualism—and that therefore we should be prepared to abandon this 'value' when those ways of looking at human reality are no longer considered valid? Is the binary of "private-public" merely of heuristic significance? Is it susceptible to a deconstructive analysis that would reveal the private to have been always already public?

In seeking to address these questions, the fluid, relative, and situational character of the debate needs to be borne in mind. A sensitive and nuanced understanding of private worlds which gives meaning to terms such as "selfhood" and "personhood" and "public systems" in terms of how they operate to assert their power in delimiting the space of individuals, keeping institutional goals in mind, needs to be examined. In other words, should the conflicts between the private and the public be placed in a normative framework so that there is clarity as to the relative/contextual primacy of either of them?

Likewise, the ways and means through which individuals and smaller groups resist the systemic attempt to be gazed at or reduced to objects of surveillance is of extraordinary importance, given the ownership of global technologies in the hands of power elites. Must this resistance remain a matter of open contestation where the gradient of power determines the outcome, or should we raise normative questions with regard to it? The same exploration is required at the interpersonal level as well, though the values that complicate the issue here are somewhat different. But the question arises here as to how far we might be willing to prevent ourselves, as citizens (or in any performative/interventional role), from entering the space occupied by "others." What are those likely situations where it becomes important to reach out to others at the risk of violating their privacy?

Any serious question carries within it the assumption that there are possibly more answers than one that might be in conflict with each other. Moral interfaces are ambivalent zones, and the language used to address the exploration is bound to share the ambivalence of the reality itself. The construction of the argument, the narrative, and the symbolism are as important as the interface and in some sense become the interface itself. In order to appreciate the scope of the debate and widen its parameters, we must include works from art and literature to theoretical and conceptual frameworks cutting across genres and discourses, and the aim must be towards an interdisciplinary, intertextual, comparative, and cross-cultural understanding of issues.

This being the broad aim of this conference, you are invited to contribute to it from the vantage point of your discipline or field of current engagement.

 

The following are the broad themes/contexts that could be examined within the broad purview of the conference proposal:

 

•State, Citizen, Surveillance
•Civil Society and Public Order
•Public and Private Spheres of Influence
•Public as Opposed to Private Law
•Objective Condition and Subjective Imagination
•Privacy in the "Public" Domain of Internet and Telecommunications
•Depictions of Public/Private Space in Popular Culture
•Philosophical Hermeneutics and the Question of Privacy
•Right, Wrong and the Truth
•Private Self and Public Persona
•Freedom versus Responsibility
•Private and Public as Socio-Political Categories
•The Politics of Secrecy and Intrusiveness
•Ethical Discourses in Humanities and Social Sciences
•Academic Spaces and Life Worlds
•Institutions and Personal Autonomy
•I, Me, Myself, and Others
•The Home and the Street/World
•The Sacred and the Profane

Please send abstracts of around 300 words by 1st July 2015 to
publicprivateconference@gmail.com

Acceptance will be intimated by 15th July 2015.

Registration fee: Rs. 500 for students, Rs. 1500 for independent scholars/researchers, Rs. 2500 for teachers

Coordinators:

Prof. Syed Sayeed
Department of Philosophy
The English and Foreign Languages University
Tarnaka, Hyderabad 
AP - 500007 - India
Email: syedsayeed55@gmail.com

Prakash Kona
Associate Professor
Department of English Literature
The English and Foreign Languages University
Tarnaka, Hyderabad 
AP - 500007 – India
Email: prakashkona@gmail.com

Contact: Prakash Kona

Email: prakashkona@gmail.com OR prakash@efluniversity.ac.in

 

--

Friday, April 17, 2015

Fwd: [iaclals] FW: Talk by Amritjit Singh, April, 20, 2015 at 3 pm


The Department of English

 

Invites you to a talk

 

"The Minority Psyche: Between South Asia and North America"

 

By

 

Amritjit Singh

 

Time : Monday, April 20, 2015, 3:00 pm.

 

Venue: Room 56, The Faculty of Arts, Delhi University.

 

 

Abstract: In my talk, I shall attempt to convey a measure of my goals in my mixed-genre work-in-progress on the meaning of being a South Asian as a global citizen since the 1940s. A personal but not autobiographical book, it will include micro-narratives from my own life, as well as historical and cultural commentary in relation to four carefully chosen historical moments that also have a resonance in my own intercontinental journey – 1948, 1968, 1983, and 2001. But I hope my analysis would have much larger consequences for our understandings of how "difference" is maintained and patrolled in democratic societies such as India and the United States, and also for how communication between the "majority" and "minority" groups in both locations might be improved to build a more cohesive and participatory sense of a democratic community.

 

Using Critical Race Theory, I will establish how the majority communities in both India and the U.S. – affected by unacknowledged privilege – face serious challenges in identifying and connecting with what I call "the minority psyche." For example, African Americans in the U.S. and Muslims in India – roughly the same percentage of the total population in their respective locations – have very different historical formations. And yet, they share group memories and daily experiences that are quite distinct from those of most Euro-Americans in the U. S. and middle-class upper-caste Hindu citizens of India respectively. The questions I expect to raise in my analysis include the following: How do the differential perceptions, lived experiences, and cultural politics of minorities affect their relationship to the socio-economic realities they apparently share with the members of the majority? How do we come to terms with the alienation experienced by a minority through an event or public policy that members of the majority might view as innocuous or necessary for national interest? How do minority writers attempt to destabilize the dominant narratives of home and nation? How do they navigate the traps and lures of identity politics, assimilation, and ghetto existence in their fictional and life-narrative responses?

 

Amritjit Singh, Langston Hughes Professor of English at Ohio University, is currently a Fulbright-Nehru Visiting Professor of English at the University of Delhi. He served as Academic Associate at American Studies Research Centre in Hyderabad, 1974-77; Associate Professor of English at the University of Hyderabad, 1977-78; and as Professor of English at the University of Rajasthan, 1978-83. An internationally known scholar of American, African American, South Asian, and Migration Studies, Singh has lectured and/or taught in more than a dozen countries in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Books edited or authored by him include: The Novels of the Harlem Renaissance (1976, 1994); Indian Literature in English, 1827-1979:An Information Guide (1981); India: An Anthology of Contemporary Writing (1983); The Magic Circle of Henry James (1989)Conversations with Ralph Ellison (1995); Conversations with Ishmael Reed (1995); Memory and Cultural Politics (1996); Postcolonial Theory and the United States (2000); Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman (2003); Interviews with Edward W. Said (2004); and The Circle of Illusion: Poems by Gurcharan Rampuri (2011). Singh has served in leadership positions in organizations such as MELUS, USACLALS, and SALA. He received the MELUS Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007 and the SALA Distinguished Achievement Award in Scholarship in January 2014. In November 2014, he received Ohio University's Faculty Award for Excellence in Global Engagement.

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Various UGC Fellowships and Scholarships 2015

Please find the various Fellowships and Scholarships of UGC for the year 2015.




More on this can be found at


Fwd: Authorspress New Arrival


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Authorspress <info@authorspressbooks.com>
Date: Wed, Apr 15, 2015 at 3:15 PM
Subject: Authorspress New Arrival
To: abusalehenglish@gmail.com


Authorspress

(Publishers of Academic and Creative Books & Journals)

 

Publish with Authorspress

Authorspress and its imprints are leading publishers of India for Scholarly and Academic Writings, Poetry, Short Fiction and Novels. We do accept submissions for book length publication of academic and scholarly writing in all disciplines, poetry, short fiction and novels as we are committed to introducing new and vibrant authors from all over the world but at the same time we publish quality works.

If you wish to submit your work, please send a sample of 05 poems, a chapter of short fiction and novels or a short synopsis of other genre from a book-length collection to our team of coveted editors at

info@authorspressbooks.com

We will let you know our decisions after our editors recommend your works for publication. We are very quick in response and will come back to you within a week.

 

Browse, Recommend  & Buy the books published by Authorspress:

 -- 

2nd Sujit Mukherjee Memorial Lecture at University of Hyderabad

CENTRE FOR COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

School of Humanities, University of Hyderabad

 

is pleased to invite you to

 

2nd Sujit Mukherjee Memorial Lecture

 

by

 

Prof. Indra Nath Choudhuri

(Eminent Academician, Writer, Cultural Administrator)

 

on

 

"The Idea of an Indian Literature"

on

Thursday, 16th April 2015, 3.30 pm

@

Auditorium, School of Humanities, University of Hyderabad

Prof. Indra Nath Choudhuri is a well-known litterateur, has engaged in academics, administration and cultural diplomacy. He has taught at many universities in the country and abroad. Prof. Choudhuri was Secretary, Sahitya Akademi and Director, The Nehru Centre, London. He was Member Secretary and Academic Director of Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi. Prof. Choudhuri has written books on Comparative Literature, Poetics and Aesthetics in Hindi, English and Bengali. He assumed the first chair of Tagore Studies at the Edinburgh Napier University in Scotland. Prof. Choudhuri is currently the President of Comparative Literature Association of India (CLAI).


Tea Follows…                                                         All Are Welcome…


--

Friday, April 10, 2015

Workshop on "Philosophy, Anthropology, Culture, Community, Democracy and Politics"

The Department of Cultural Studies, Tezpur University is holding an interdisciplinary workshop on 'Philosophy, Anthropology, Culture, Community, Democracy and Politics' w. e. f 23-04-15 to 25-04-15 for Assistant Professors and also Research Scholars from any discipline of universities and colleges. The workshop is being organized under the joint auspices of Indian Council of Philosophical Research (ICPR), New Delhi and Tezpur University.

Those interested may apply for participation in the workshop on or before 18-04-15 by e-mail or post giving full details of their institutional association. Participants will be provided accommodation and food during the period of the workshop. However, no TA/DA will be permissible.

Contact details:

Pradip Jyoti Mahanta

Dean, School of Humanities and Social Sciences

&

Coordinator, e-mail: pjm@tezu.ernet.in

Or

Debarshi Prasad Nath

Head, Department of Cultural Studies

&

Deputy Co-ordinator, e-mail: dpnath@tezu.ernet.in


--