Call for Papers for the Anglo-Indian Studies Workshop
Nexus: Anglo-Indian Literature and Anglo-Indian life
To be held at Jadavpur University, Kolkata
19 January, 2017
Since their inception as a mixed descent minority Indian community Anglo-Indians have been represented in literature in particular ways. During the British India period, nourished by discourses of racial regimes, the fear of miscegenation was expressed about the community by the colonisers and colonised, Anglo-Indians were often portrayed as dejected and dissipated. Not surprisingly, much colonial and some post-Independence perceptions of Anglo-Indians translated into certain dominant modes of representation: Anglo-Indian males were often characterised as being bereft of moral fibre, females as pretty but promiscuous. In opposition to these tropes, and arguably, through a sense of despair and embarrassment in response to them, many, more modern, representations of Anglo-Indians construct them differently. Anglo-Indian writers such as Frank Anthony and Gloria Jean Moore, for example, posit a conservative claim of Anglo-Indians having a 'true, unblemished, uncorrupted identity' (D'Cruz 2006: 235), and Rushdie and Kunzru arguably fetish the hybridity of Anglo-Indians for their own agenda. With these representations of Anglo-Indians in literature, and the discourses that nourished such stereotypes, negative and positive, in mind, this conference invites responses. Some ways that this could be explored are through addressing questions such as:
- How have Anglo-Indian writers (literary and academic) responded to the predominance of the stereotyped tropes?
- How have non-Anglo-Indian writers (literary and academic) responded?
- Are any writers drawing on post-colonial techniques, for example, to resist characterisations, rewrite (or write unwritten) histories, or to disrupt thematics in other ways?
- Are other treatments available to combat the stereotyping this group has been subject to – from post-colonial studies, gender studies, comparative literature, history, the social sciences?
- How does Anglo-Indian literature intersect with the experiences of Anglo-Indian lives in India and abroad, if at all?
- Were the discourses of the various times responsible for producing such representations?
- How are other textual representations, such as film, portraying Anglo-Indians?
Key speakers are:
Irwin Allan Sealy: The Trotter-Nama: A Chronicle (1988), Hero: A Fable (1991), From Yukon to Yucatán: a Western Journey (1994), The Everest Hotel: A Calendar (1998), The Brainfever Bird (2003), Red: An Alphabet (2006), and The Small Wild Goose Pagoda (2014)
Keith Butler: The Secret Vindaloo (2014) and numerous Anglo-Indian-focussed short stories.
Abstracts: please email abstracts of approximately 300 words to Dr Robyn Andrews (R.Andrews@massey.ac.nz) and Professor Samita Sen (sensamita@yahoo.co.uk) by 31 October. Successful participants will be notified by 10 November.
This event is to be hosted by Jadavpur University, with support from the New Zealand India Research Institute (NZIRI)
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