'New Topographies of the Postcolonial'

Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry - 'New Topographies of the Postcolonial'  
CALL FOR PAPERS
 

Dear Colleague,

At a time when disciplines are scrambling to keep up with both the accelerations and upheavals of a global informational economy and radical geopolitical shifts away from Euro-American dominance, how might literary postcolonialism be reconfigured? Since the turn of the century, we have witnessed genuine shifts in world literary flows brought on by proliferating information technology and translation networks; by transformed territorial and economic alignments in a post-Soviet era; and by the emergence of multiple war zones and new ethnic and religious conflagrations. Large-scale humanitarian crises wrought by wars and catastrophic climate change have brought new subalterns into our moral economy - asylum seekers, climate refugees, illegal migrants, and even large swathes of the Muslim populace demonized as a consequence of the ghoulish global visibility of fundamentalist versions of political Islam. 

A critical response to these developments on the part of postcolonial literary scholars ought not to ignore emergent literary topographies that can no longer be circumscribed by classical postcolonial geographies of Europe and its others. They demand new modes of comparative analysis: conceptual, philological, translational, textual, generic and, broadly, the aesthetic. 

Essays may range the spectrum from the transregional to the planetary and include under the rubric of the transregional, literatures from the Middle East, Asian and African influences on Anglophone and Francophone literatures, and literary/linguistic travel among post-plantation economies that bypass a now defunct colonial economy. Contributions from a planetary perspective may include essays on novelization in the era of humanitarian wars, subaltern literary genres of the information age, and literary works on climate change. The essays should be up to 8,000 words long including both notes and  bibliography. The deadline for submission of the essay is September 30, 2013. 

Please visit: journals.cambridge.org/pli for formatting and other submission information.
Sincerely,
Ato Quayson
Editor