IACLALS ANNUAL CONFERENCE – FEBRUARY 2-4, 2012 - Text, Culture and Performance: Postcolonial Issues...

Co-hosted by Central University Jharkhand, Ranchi

The IACLALS Annual Conference 2012 on the theme Text, Culture and Performance: Postcolonial Issues will revisit the continuing and important debate within cultural studies on how texts are read, disseminated and performed to both reiterate and interrogate postcolonial paradigms and contexts. The Conference will be held at the Central University of Jharkhand, Ranchi, from February 2 to 4, 2012.
All texts are performative because they are socially constructed and not inherently possessed and in this, constantly contested and in a dynamic process of remaking. With this as a starting point, we aim to look at the ways in which culture gets written within a text and also how the performance of texts is shaped by culture in postcolonial contexts. Further, how the performance of a text transforms and/or translates meaning from the page into reality, we hope, would provide further contexts for conversations that will open out the registers of postcolonial literature to different expressions and (re)definitions, and admit a self-reflexivity into its theoretical postulates and premises.
In one context, we know that many postcolonial writers come from strong native oral traditions even as they seek to participate in the print-text market, exploring ways to infuse properties of the oral tradition into the printed text. In this they often struggle with, artistic and national identities, negotiating an indigenous cultural heritage with the realities of political and cultural colonization. What then are the spaces within the Indian postcolonial experience that use spectacle and performance and their discursive sweep to create archives of both ‘modern’ and ‘national’ memory, disseminated through texts that perform culture, even as they are culturally performed? How do identifiably ‘postcolonial’ issues – gender, race, religion, caste, class, ethnicity, borders, nationalism, imperialism, history, archive, sexuality, violence, memory – then circulate and shape themselves in the performance of texts in culture, and in cultural texts? Does performance change or direct our understanding of these texts, issues and cultures in specific ways? Some rubrics for discussion could be:

Politics of postcoloniality in performance
Acts of cultural translation
Postcolonial Literature into film
Theatre as a space for rethinking the postcolonial
Tradition and innovation in postcolonial dance
Colonial Texts, Postcolonial Transformations
The culture industry in the postcolonies
New technologies of production, circulation, reception
Music in postcolonial contexts
Questions of purity, hybridity, translation, trancreation
Comparativist frameworks
· Reading texts, performing contexts

Texts in transition: performance cultures
Culture and ideology
(Re)configuring the canon
Oral traditions and pressures of the print-market
· Performing identities in resistance

· Cultures of the popular:

· Writing memories, enacting histories

· Gendering cultures, engendering norms

· Post-ing the postcolonial: what comes after?



We invite abstracts of approximately 300 words on any aspect of the theme. These may be sent by 5th November 2011, to iaclalsconferences@gmail.com along with your full name, institutional affiliation and designation, contact address and phone number. If you wish to submit your paper for consideration for the C.D. Narasimhaiah Prize for the Best Paper Presented at the Conference, please send, besides the abstract, a complete text of your paper (running to no more than 2,200 words) by 15th December 2011.