Papers on Language and Literature has released a call for papers for a special issue.
The mid-20th century anticolonial struggles for liberation and independence across the global south produced a new aesthetics of opposition and resistance to hegemonic and colonial powers. The literature produced during this period also provided a less overt aesthetics of subversion. Today, as former colonial states are increasingly beset by neoliberal reforms, new practices of securitization, state violence and forced migrations, there is much to gain from returning to and reevaluating this former historical period for the aesthetic innovations it created. Anticolonial aesthetics not only grapple with traditions of empire but also have the potential to be powerfully subversive, corrupting and undermining of structures of such power. At the same time, these subversive aesthetics help to challenge or reimagine literary forms, perhaps providing a new language to confront the way older imperial forms of power are being transformed.
Anticolonialism in the 1950’s and ‘60’s targeted tangible forms of injustice in the form of European administrations, occupations, and military forces. Yet this special issue will concentrate on the logic of power that embeds and inheres within state and transnational systems and discourses. It considers how anticolonial works subvert the underlying rules of law and corrode the controls and operations of language within empire. Therefore, the editors propose to consider the legacy of anticolonial subversive aesthetics and its continuing relevance.
A generation of writers and critics, including Gayatri Spivak and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o have urged the critique of lingering forms of imperialism around the globe. Rather than rehearse confrontations with key works of anticolonialism, the editors want to place focus on more marginal works that are not canonical, and their engagement with literary forms, media and processes of translation. Why do certain works end up in these margins, and what does their consideration offer the present moment in need of new approaches to hegemonic forms of power? How are such works shuffled through various mediums, media, and discourses? How are patterns of interpretation worked on and streamlined (and/or domesticated) by a Western dominated literary arena? In addition to explorations of the relevance of the anticolonial aesthetics of subversion, the editors invite papers that look at the restraints imposed by publishing, translation, dissemination, and reception that non-European authors had to contend with and that limit and define their potential readerships.
The editors are interested in exploring works that play with language, media, and form, works clearly aimed at corroding colonial discourse involved with the subjection of the colonized subject. Such efforts, to subvert or undermine the aesthetics of hegemony, offer a lasting distortion of these systems and their techniques of power that remains relevant today. In particular, this special issue brings together readings of Non-European authors who incorporate or reject modernist forms while presenting specific challenges to European horizons of style and interpretation. Undermining the idea that modernism was a form that developed in the colonial metropole and was then taken up to a lesser extent in the colonial peripheries, this issue focuses on the broad field of influence, including publishing and translation networks, of non-European aesthetics of subversion as a much more sustained and complex set of engagements.
Please send a brief bio and article proposals of 500 words or less to kylewan@nyu.edu by Oct. 26.