A one-day symposium organised by the Open University's Postcolonial Literatures Research Group and the Institute for English Studies, University of London, Senate House.
This symposium examined the rise of South-Asian Fiction as a global literature and explored changes in its audiences; its political ambitions and its formal techniques in the past two decades. The event sought to read contemporary South-Asian writing against the momentous changes which have shaped the subcontinent in recent years and asked whether the conventional approaches of postcolonial commentators to these works are adequate to the task of critical reading. The event allowed critics and scholars of contemporary South-Asian fiction to exchange ideas, challenge current paradigms in postcolonial studies and map new areas of importance.
Speakers included Priyamvada Gopal, Elleke Boehmer, Susheila Nasta and Suman Gupta.
The Final programme is available online. [PDF, 98 KB]
Venue: Deanery Suite, 2nd Floor Stewart House, University of London, 32 Russell Square, adjacent to Senate House
Programme: Follow this link for programme details.
Download the flyer for this event [113 KB, PDF]
Convenors:
Dr Alex Tickell a.tickell@open.ac.uk or Pooja Sinha p.sinha@open.ac.uk
Download the programme [PDF, 862 KB]
This one-day symposium provided a forum for the discussion of new research and critical debates about print culture in Africa, with contributions from scholars of book history and postcolonial studies, together with African authors and publishers. The event was a collaborative venture between the Open University’s English Department and the Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies (OICPS) at Oxford Brookes University.
The symposium examined the production, dissemination and reception of the book in colonial and postcolonial Africa; the development of print culture and its implications for larger questions of nationality and colonial politics in Africa; the impact of print production on literary cultures and linguistic identities in Africa; the emergence and constitution of reading publics in Africa; the legal, social, political and economic forces that have affected print culture Africa and the current state of and immediate prospects for print culture in Africa.
The symposium aimed to bring together leading scholars in African literature with interests in literary and cultural history, publishing studies and the history of the book. Invited speakers are research active in the field, with recent or forthcoming publications directly dealing with the symposium topic.
The programme is available to download in PDF format.
Programme organisers: Caroline Davis c.davis@brookes.ac.uk; Alex Tickell a.tickell@open.ac.uk; Shaf Towheed S.S.Towheed@open.ac.uk; David Johnson D.W.Johnson@open.ac.uk.
Further details are available online.
The launch of the SOAS Centre for the Study of Pakistan will be marked by a public lecture followed by a reception. The lecture, Revolution's Late Style: Dialectics of Multitude in Faiz Ahmed Faiz by Aamir R. Mufti (UCLA), will be at 4.15 in the Khalili Lecture Theatre, followed by a reception in the Brunei Gallery Suite. Further information is available from the Centre for the Study of Pakistan's website.
2011-12:
South Asian Fiction: Contemporary Transformation
2010:
Biography, its Subjects and Sources: From Montaigne to Mandela
Romanticism and Postcolonialism
Inter-University Postcolonial Seminar Series, Spring 2010
Follow the links above for further details and programmes.