New Voices in Postcolonial Studies: Interdisciplinary Imaginations, Critical Confrontations Symposium THURSDAY 13 JUNE School of English and Workshop Theatre, University of Leeds
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Programme 8:45 – 9:00
Registration and welcome | School of English Foyer and Douglas Jefferson Room
9:00 – 10:15
Keynote: John McLeod | Alumni Room
10:15 – 11:45
Parallel Panels Panel 1: Medical Humanities and Childhood | Alumni Room Frances Hemsley, University of Bristol Alex Henry, University of Leeds Rawa Alblowi, University of Sheffield Panel 2: Peripheral Histories | Workshop Theatre Jason Allen-Paisant, University of Leeds Judith Voecker, University of Leicester Daniel Bilton, Nottingham Trent University Panel 3: Intersections of Race and Gender | Seminar Room 5 Amber Lascelles, University of Leeds Beth Parkes, University of Birmingham Rukhsar Hussain, University of Strathclyde
12:00 – 12:45
Network Direction Meeting | Alumni Room
12:45 – 13:45
Lunch | School of English Foyer and Douglas Jefferson Room
13:45 – 15:00
Parallel Panels Panel 4: Borderlands, Environments and Landscapes | Seminar Room 5 Hannah Boast, University of Birmingham Cathie Jayakumar, Queen Mary University of London Amulya Gyawali, University of Warwick
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Thursday 13 June Panel 5: Postcolonial Economies and Cosmopolitanism | Alumni Room Alexander Thom, University of Birmingham Kamalika Jayathilaka, University of Leeds Yang Zhao, University of Nottingham Panel 6: Decolonising Education | Workshop Theatre Jason Arday, Durham University Tajpal Rathore, Tribe Arts Melissa R. Jogie, University of Roehampton 15:00 – 15:10
Break | School of English Foyer and Douglas Jefferson Room
15:10 – 16:25
Parallel Panels Panel 7: Cultural Industries and Artistic Production | Alumni Room Jeremy Poynting, Peepal Tree Press Caterina Scarabicchi, Royal Holloway Stacey Kennedy, University of Birmingham Panel 8: Race and Resistance | Workshop Theatre Jordan Harris, University of Leicester Isabella Villanova, University of Leeds Nahla Raffaoui, Manchester Metropolitan University Panel 9: Indigenous Perspectives | Seminar Room 5 Victoria Downing, University of Leeds Emma Barnes, University of Salford Lotta Schneidemesser, University of York
16:30 – 17:30
Keynote: Amy Rushton | Alumni Room
17:30 – 17:45
Closing Remarks | Alumni Room
18:30 –
Conference Dinner at Thai Edge, Leeds
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Organising Committee Sofia Aatkar, Nottingham Trent University and New Voices Director Emily Timms, Leeds University and New Voices Director Natalie Ilsley, Keele University
Sponsors
Supporters
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Keynote: John McLeod
When Memories Fade: The Politics of the “New” in Postcolonial Writing In Zadie Smith’s NW (2011), a youthful black Briton, Felix, flicks through a book of photographs, Garvey House: A Photographic Portrait, that depicts life in a 1970s’ London squat where his aged father, Lloyd, once lived. Once a bastion of black British radicalism, a temporary home for vulnerable young blacks and a hub of political activism, Garvey House is now little more than a glossy memory, commodified and packaged for romantic consumption, regarded with bewilderment and near-indifference by a new generation. My keynote addresses a range questions similar the one Smith powerfully raises here: in the declaration of the ‘new’ in postcolonial culture and criticism these days, what is happening to the political resistance and radicalism of previous generations? What is remembered and forgotten in the desire to voice newness? How do we critique the political gains of old while mindful of their unhappy weaknesses (such as Lloyd’s bleak chauvinism)? What agendas does the latest ‘new’ serve, and whom might be forgotten? In pursuing these questions I engage with a range of literary enquiriesinto such relations between old and new, including recent writing by Caryl Phillips and Diana Evans, in pursuit of a dynamic, knowing and supple articulation of ‘old’ and ‘new’ in postcolonial studies today.
John McLeod is Professor of Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures at the University of Leeds. His books include Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (2004), Beginning Postcolonialism (2nd ed., 2010) and Life Lines : Writing Transcultural Adoption (2015). He was recently a Visiting Researcher at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His new book, Global Trespassers, will appear with Liverpool University Press next year.
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Panel 1: Medical Humanities and Childhood Chair: Emily Timms Frances Hemsley, University of Bristol Resilience and epigenetics in racist environments: Reading heredity in Bessie Head’s The Cardinals The field of epigenetics research is developing in ways that show us how the organism is constructed by what is without – materially, socially, and environmentally. The epigenetic also takes us beyond narrow genetic determinants of heredity. In some cases, we know that epigenetic adaptions like gene hypo-methylation can be passed between generations. This radical inter-permeation of human heredity and environment extends that which Frantz Fanon, in his examination of colonial environment and psychophysiology, had already suspected: a biological caesura imposed between colonised and coloniser. Nonetheless, if misappropriated, epigenetic research can work to pathologise particular ethnic or social groups as ‘(epi) genetically damaged’ (Meloni, 2016: 221). Philosophers, like Catherine Malabou and Shannon Sullivan, suggest that epigenetic discoveries reveal a biological resistance to politics (Malabou, 2016: 438). In the first part of this paper, I suggest that a non-conscious (because inscribed at the level of the gene) model of “resistance” allows us to follow Achille Mbembe’s recommendation: that in order to account for postcolonial relations of power – their effectiveness and psychology – we need to go beyond the binary categories (like passivity vs. resistance) so frequently deployed in the analysis of domination. In the second part of the paper, I offer a literary example from apartheid South Africa. In Bessie Head’s The Cardinals, physiology is imagined as the hereditary effect of segregated environmental space. The Cardinals thus offers something like a literary imagining of the epigenetic, before epigenetic research had been established. In fact, the text’s imagining of heredity is insistently non-genetic (this accounts for the text’s collapsing of incest taboos). Writing in apartheid South Africa, Head’s engagement with non-genetic understandings of identity is motivated: scientific racism constructed races as biologically distinct (modern genetic science shows us that there is no biological basis for “race”). Instead, Head positions environmental spaces, including the Indian ocean (a conduit not only for South Asian arrivals but for new philosophies and potential political affiliations that arrive with them) as points of genealogical origin.
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10:15 – 11:45
Alex Henry, University of Leeds ‘Go Home’: Female Illness, ‘Monstrosity’ and White Appetite in Helen Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching (2009) Eating practices which transgress food boundaries provide counter-discourses to dominant cultural narratives of bodily health, consumption and Otherness. Similarly, the literary Gothic transgresses ‘realist’ frameworks to express alternative states of being and manifestations of colonial fear. The Postcolonial Female Gothic writing of Helen Oyeyemi uses abject female bodies and their associated ‘culture-bound’ mythologies to critique persisting imperialist ideologies in contemporary British anxieties of ‘reverse colonisation’. This paper examines these fears through a reading of white appetite in Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching. I read this novel as a Gothic illness narrative which problematizes different cultural treatments of the ‘monstered’ female body. I am interested in how Oyeyemi’s novel identifies and examines the shortcomings in medical language when describing complex eating ‘dis-orders’, and how these failings contribute to the novel’s socio-political commentary through Gothic narrative devices. The medicalised ‘disordered’ eating of Pica (craving and consumption of non-food items) and Yoruba Abiku mythology are offered by Oyeyemi as competing cultural narratives of illness, hunger and ‘monstrosity’. The coexistence of the ‘auto-cannibalism’ of self-starvation, and monstered predation of the Caribbean soucouyant (vampire) mythology in the text, produces a critique of contemporary anxieties toward diasporic populations, which characterises white nationalism as a self-consuming myth.
Alex’s undergraduate degree was MA (Hons) in English Literature at the University of Dundee. Alex completed their Masters at the University of Glasgow in 2016, studying The Modernities: Literature, Theory, Culture MLitt. Alex is currently a PhD student at the University of Leeds researching cross-cultural illness narratives, specifically focussing on the representation of ‘unexplained’ chronic conditions and global health concerns in twenty-first century British women’s writing.
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Rawa Alblowi, University of Sheffield The Diasporic Child in Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2005)
This paper explores how children as central characters can enrich the representation of migration experiences in Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl. Helen Oyeyemi comments on the child protagonist of her novel as being “a newbreed kid, the immigrant diasporic kid of a need for some name that she can call herself with some authority” (Lee 2005). Setting the narrative of the novel within the marginal space of childhood adds another dimension to the diasporic experience. Being black, female and a child Jess occupies the margin, and she needs to negotiate her identity and belonging in this peripheral space. The childhood space also allows the narrative to gracefully move between the real and the magical. The site of the magical is based on the Yoruba myths of the abiku, and ibeji. The trope of the child spirit or the abiku works as a means of empowerment, TillyTilly existence enables Jess to move through different spaces and overcome the boundaries that confined her. Oyeyemi shows how the social spaces of diaspora sometimes restrain individuals rather than contain them, and only by altering the boundaries between these spaces the child protagonist is able to find her own subjectivity and construct her own identity. Rawa Alblowi is a PhD student in Department of English Literature at University of Sheffield. Her research interests centre on the different representations of contemporary migrant children and childhoods in English and American literature.
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Panel 2: Peripheral Histories Chair: Clare Chun-yu Liu Jason Allen-Paisant, University of Leeds Poetry Reading
Jason Allen is going to be reading a selection of his poems. His work has been published lately by Callaloo, the most prominent US Journal of African diaspora arts and letters, sx salon and POUI, among others. In 2015, I he received a poetry fellowship from Callaloo itself. He is currently working on a book of poems to be published by Peepal Tree Press by the summer of 2020.
Jason Allen is an Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Languages, Cultures & Societies. His research is mainly on performance studies in relation to the African diaspora, but the methodologies are interdisciplinary, combining philosophy, poetics, theatre studies, and the History of ideas.
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Judith Voecker, University of Leicester Giorgio Agamben’s Theory of the ‘State of Exception’ and the Holocaust “At the limit between and politics and law” or “the emptiness of law” are just two of the myriads of definitions that contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben draws up to describe a ‘State of Exception’. In my talk, I want to examine whether his current theories and approaches can be adapted on the Holocaust – since I argue that through foreign occupation and discrimination, a different paradigm of government emerged. Drawing from the example of Poland under Nazi occupation, I aim to explore whether the legal sphere established by the occupiers exemplify of what Agamben describes as a ‘State of Exception’, where it “appears as the legal form of what cannot have legal form.” Especially through the destructive policies drawn up against Poland’s Jewry, my talk asks whether the establishment of the German criminal code – and with that a elimination of the Polish and Jewish legal sphere – can be regarded as what Agamben describes as a “no-man’s land between public law and political fact and between the juridical order and life”, since members of different religions or ethnicities enjoyed different levels of legal protection – or none at all, which is described by Agamben as “a suspension of the juridical order itself.” This approach is arguably encouraged by Agamben himself, as he sees a close relationship of the State of Exception to resistance and uprising – both of which were heavily practised in the Warsaw Ghetto due to the occupational status of the Nazi regime. My talk therefore aims at applying a novel philosophic approach of law, justice and social practises onto communities far beyond self-control, government or justice. Judith is a first-year PhD candidate at the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Leicester, a Fellow of the Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Programme of the AHRC and of the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure. Judith’s PhD project is supervised by Dr Svenja Bethke (University of Leicester), Prof William Niven (Nottingham Trent University) and Dr Klaus Richter (University of Birmingham).
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10:15 – 11:45
Daniel Bilton, Nottingham Trent University In search of a Dalit Culture: Reinterpreting Dalit History in Contemporary Contexts From the inception of the Dalit Panther activist group in the 1970s, Dalit literature in India has been inextricably tied to the activist project. With many Dalit activists being creative writers, literary representations of the struggles of Dalit life have been important components of Dalit activism in order to highlight the oppressive nature of the caste system and show society the harsh realities of living life at the bottom of the hierarchy. In this paper, I will argue that this kind of representation has begun to shift in the 21st century, with writers today focusing on other aspects of Dalit life that are not rooted in pain or poverty. To do this, I will focus on G. Kalyana Rao’s novel Untouchable Spring and will argue that through the novel’s representation of song and performance, Rao is able to engage with the cultural history of the Dalit community in a positive way that brings a sense of self-respect to both the characters in the text and the Dalit readership. This paper will bring issues to the fore that are often neglected within postcolonial studies outside of India and will highlight the necessity of caste studies within the field. Daniel Bilton is a second year PhD student at Nottingham Trent University. Daniel’s research is concerned with exploring the relationship between contemporary Dalit literature and activism, focusing on literature published in the 21st century. Other research has included trauma and Dalit autobiography, and representation of political history in Tamil Dalit literature.
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Panel 3: Intersections of Race and Gender Chair: Natalie Ilsley Amber Lascelles, University of Leeds Black feminist resistance in Chimamanda Adichie’s and Dionne Brand’s fiction Black female novelists are currently producing some of the most subversive and experimental critiques of our neoliberal political, environmental, and social climate. Since the late 1980s, the Global North has continued to advance capitalism by pushing neoliberal policies that ultimately increase capital accumulation in the North through indebting and exploiting the South, and the consequences have disproportionately fallen upon poor people of colour (Mies, 1998; Harvey, 2005; Griffith, 2010). My research is concerned with how literature reveals the ways this neoliberal world-order shapes black women’s lives, whose class, economic power, sexuality and even skin tone alters the way they experience the world. Amber Lascelles is a PhD candidate in the School of English at the University of Leeds. Her thesis explores transnational black feminism, neoliberalism and the body in the fiction of four authors: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dionne Brand, Edwidge Danticat and Taiye Selasi. Her research is a cross-cultural exploration of how contemporary black female authors creatively respond to inequality and oppression within our neoliberal world-system. She co-directs the funded intersectional feminist research group Women’s Paths and has led several racial justice and arts-related conferences and seminars at the University of Leeds.
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10:15 – 11:45
Beth Parkes, University of Birmingham Suntanning, Race, and Protest in Teenage Magazines: 1970-1989
Framed through the lens of suntanning in popular teenage magazines, Jackie and Just Seventeen, this paper illustrates how raced discussions of beauty draw together intersectional histories of racism Britain, the U.S, and the African diaspora from 1970-1989. This paper addresses three major questions of the ways suntanning and more broadly, white beauty, was presented in teenage magazines. Firstly, in a post-colonial, post-imperial Britain, and amid an increasingly diverse populace, how and why were black teenagers excluded from cultures of beauty and leisure? Second, it will demonstrate how suntanning and skin, as one part of a complex intersectionality between gender, race and class – alongside hair, body weight and appearance – is significant to the study of race in Britain during the 1970s and 1980s. And third, this paper places particular emphasis upon the nascent scholarly focus on black female teenagers, and their subsequent marginalisation from such magazines. Thus, black female voices are reiterated here as ‘new voices in Postcolonial Studies’. This paper illustrates both the absence of women of colour in beauty practices and their self-spoken discontent with marginalisation. These instances of marginalisation are recurrent themes in contemporary race relations, and thus, prove timely when confronting and refuting normalised postcolonial narratives.
Beth Parkes is a first year Doctoral Researcher in History in receipt of an Economic and Social Research Council Doctoral Training Partnership at the University of Birmingham. Her broader PhD project looks at histories of race and beauty through the lens of suntanning, skin bleaching and protest movements in twentieth century Britain, United States, and the Caribbean.
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Rukhsar Hussain, University of Strathclyde A Deceptive Case of Hijra Community in India
What does it actually mean to be a ‘man’, ‘woman’ or a ‘third gender’ in Indian ways of thinking? How does the hijra (a cultural group with different gender identities which do not work on the binaries of male-female; and who have their own kinship ties, rules and regulations) identity reveal the problem of performing one’s gender against the normative binary structure of gender? And how do hijras complicate prevailing understanding of gender and sexuality in West? My paper seeks to indulge in these compelling questions by complicating the use of ‘transgender’ as an universal umbrella term to address all non binary people despite the obvious cultural differences. It also aims to bring forward the criminalised status of hijras in the postcolonial India; and to study their current situation where the new law which apparently addresses their issues, though under the term ‘transgender’, only to further marginalise them. A term that came to be associated with the regional non binary gender groups – like hijras, kothis, and zenanas – with the emergence of globalization and transnationalism in order to raise funds from international funders. It is hence, also the usage of the term ‘transgender’ that I seek to complicate in my paper by studying it in Indian context, bringing in theorists like Mohanty, Gopinath and Vanita who have already emphasized on area studies. Rukhsar Hussain is a first year PhD student in the University of Strathclyde. Rukhsar’s research focuses on the representation of Hijras in literary fiction and film in India, and it also draws on the ethnographic research/ oral history with hijra communities. Rukhsar has been a part of a Delhi based NGO, Aarohan, which works for ‘transgender’ society in Delhi and hence, and interviewed and talked to many hijras while she was there. This especially motivated Rukhsar to pursue her research.
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Panel 4: Borderlands, Environments and Landscapes Chair: Natalie Ilsley Hannah Boast, University of Birmingham Postcolonial Ecocriticism and the Environmental Humanities
Almost ten years after the publication of Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin’s landmark Postcolonial Ecocriticism, the fields of postcolonial and environmental thought are much changed. Huggan and Tiffin’s book crested a wave of publications, including others by Cara Cilano and Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Pablo Mukherjee, Rob Nixon, and Laura Wright, that firmly established the connections between two disciplines that had previously reacted to each other with responses ranging from indifference to active hostility (see Nixon 2005 and O’Brien 2001). Yet in many ways the emergence of the environmental humanities, at roughly the same time, seems to have stalled the incorporation of postcolonial methodologies into ecocritical thought. In a recent paper for Feminist Review (2018), Jennifer Mae Hamilton and Astrida Neimanis examined the genealogies of the environmental humanities, noting the widespread invocation of feminist concepts and scholars without engagement with their feminist politics. In this paper I build on Hamilton and Neimanis’ critique of the citational investments of the environmental humanities, asking whether the term’s dominance of the literary-environmental landscape can be considered a regressive move against the politicising demands of postcolonial ecocriticism. Focusing on examples from my own areas of hydropolitics and the ‘Blue Humanities’, I will consider the possible answers offered by newer ‘world-ecological’ methods. Hannah Boast is Teaching Fellow in Contemporary and Postcolonial Literature at University of Birmingham. Her book Hydrofictions: Water, Power and Politics in Israeli and Palestinian Literature will be published in 2020 by Edinburgh University Press, and she is working on a new project called World Literature and Water Crisis.
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Cathie Jayakumar, Queen Mary University of London ‘I heard a drum beating on the far bank of the river’: seascapes, soundscapes and the reframing of historiography in Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River According to the UN report on global migration, a 20% increase of international migrants has been entailed by rising instances of conflict and poverty. Fleeing the rising levels of inequality, these migrants are often facing police brutality, deportation or the danger of crossing the Mediterranean Sea on a flimsy embarkation. Le Monde newspaper has recently reported the case of Subsaharian migrants being forcefully expelled from Algeria and abandoned in the desert, on the basis of their race and origins. Such discriminatory attitudes, mainly propelled by the rise of right-wing populist parties’ rhetoric on migrants, and the hollowing out of the middle class from weak wage growth and austerity have fostered a cultural hostility and indifference towards people of different origins. As a response to the government’s willingness to enforce the country’s borders by sending Border Force vessels, and its reluctance to account for the deaths at sea, the ‘Left-To-Die-Boat’ project was launched in 2011 by the Forensic Oceanography project to demand accountability for the deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean Sea while the region was monitored by NATO. The pernicious silence from these institutions are illustrative of the persistence of the coloniality of power (Quijano), which consolidates the principles on which colonial societies operated: race, colour, class. Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River tackles these existing racial orders and injustices by poetic affirmation and a rejuvenating lyricism. Seascapes and soundscapes are authentic literary metaphors and tools calling for a reconsideration of borders, be it physical, mental, or between the self and the other. The novel is also an invitation to listen to the sounds of water where the voices written out of history could be heard. Water is the reservoir of hidden and lost memories: it is pleading to demand accountability for the deaths at
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13:45 – 15:00
sea, it testifies for the voiceless, the unrecorded histories subjected to neglect, it carries the characters’ laments in its bosom. It is precisely in this incremental personification of water, in this anthropologic enterprise of providing agency to an inanimate being, that the process of mental and historical recollection could be fathomed. This paper will explore how the expansion of the reader’s perception and sensibility occur through reading as an act of re-membering and attentive listening. Cathie Jayakumar-Hazra has completed her masters at Paris Sorbonne Université and is now a PhD candidate at Queen Mary University of London. Her work focuses on the Phillipsian novel and non-fiction, mainly on the subject of intertextuality and polyphony. Her various interests on stylistics, linguistics and semiotics have led her to reflect upon the role of the historical document in Caribbean and Black British fiction. Previous research projects include reflections upon the crisis over the legacy of slavery and imperialism within maritime space in Caryl Phillips’s novels and poetics of intimacy in Phillips’s new novel A View of the Empire At Sunset.
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Amulya Gyawali, University of Leeds Imagining Nation and Nature in the Indo-Nepali Borderland
This paper aims to establish the links between postcolonial state-building and environmental imaginaries. While debates around “imagined communities” (Anderson 1983, Chatterjee 1993) are well-documented in postcolonial studies, discussions around imagined natures remains minimal. What role does imagining, representing, and mapping nature play in the projects of the colonial and postcolonial state? Why are certain representations of nature adopted by state and society, while others excluded? Combining research trends in the eco-criticism and cultural geography, this paper focuses on the Indo-Nepali borderland – the terai – as a site where these discussions take place. To this end, I first propose that colonial anxieties to territorialise and make the terai landscape “legible” (Michael 2012, Scott 2009) register in colonial imaginaries through naturalism, entropic narratives, and the sublime, evidenced in the writings of Emily Eden (1866) and Jim Corbett (1944). I then argue how local writers of the terai, such as Phaniswarnath Renu (1954, 1957), resist these territorialising anxieties in colonial writing, and instead invite us to imagine the region as a fluid, transnational environment. As such, I suggest that spaces like the terai borderland – both culturally and spatially peripheral to the state – enable discursive contestations in the intertwined paradigms of colonial-postcolonial, state-society, and man-nature. Amulya Gyawali is a first-year PhD student in English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. His research focuses on environmental-making practices in colonial and postcolonial South Asia, and how these register in literature. He primarily works on English, Hindi, and Nepali literary texts.
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Panel 5: Postcolonial Economies and Cosmopolitanism Chair: Sofia Aatkar Alexander Thom, University of Birmingham British Arms Sales as Neo-Colonial Apparatus: Past and Present
British arms exports have received some superficial media scrutiny in recent years, particularly in relation to ethically dubious regimes, like Saudi Arabia. However, this issue has been distorted in the contemporary political discourse, particularly by framing the issue as if it were a short-term, profit-motivated export industry like any other. By doing so, mainstream political discourse has frequently overlooked the strategic geopolitical utility of arms exports for securing British interests overseas. By reframing this discussion historically – recontextualising arms supply as a long-standing imperial tactic – I will then note several key contemporary partners for British arms exports: briefly summarising their geopolitical value to British interests, their political histories, and current economic distribution. Overall, I argue that British arms exports do not flow to regimes in spite of their oppressive treatment of their domestic populations but in support of such domestic oppression. This is done in order to support economic penetration by British interests, and to encourage the expatriation of domestic resources. By making clear British stakes in the anti-democratic suppression of domestic populations, I contend that, through arms exports, British colonialism can be seen to be alive and well, albeit in a concealed form. Alexander Thom is a PhD student at the University of Birmingham. His research focuses primarily on Renaissance drama, intersections of theology and jurisprudence, and the political philosophy of Giorgio Agamben. His wider research interests include classical philosophy, modern politics, and the cultural histories of banishment. His research has been generously supported by Midlands4Cities and the AHRC.
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Kamalika Jayathilaka, University of Leeds 21st Century Tourism Representations of Sri Lanka and the Worldmaking Role of Sri Lankan Travel Writers This paper originates from my ongoing PhD research within the sphere of tourism worldmaking. It engages in an empirical examination of the production/consumption of place and the critical ‘worldmaking’ role of Sri Lankan travel writers. I argue that institutionalised travel writers have been socialised/indoctrinated into the practice of maintaining exoticised, colonial images within 21st-century projections of Sri Lanka. Most significantly, they contribute to the marketing the country for Western tourist consumption which underlies the ‘cosmetic’ writing they engage in for tourism. Through this paper, I endeavour to explore how in contrast travel bloggers, using new technology, form a distinct category of travel writers demonstrating the most agential meaning-making in representing the country. Their independent work contrasts with the passivity of counterpart travel writing involved in the reproduction/preservation of a certain preferred vista/perspective/ representation of Sri Lanka. Therefore, I present the authority/agency of these travel bloggers in their effort to construct a ‘potential’ or ‘alternative’ version/ representation of the country, which they believe is not only “wholesome” or ethical but also “authentic”. The knowledge germinated from their writing significantly impacts the way Sri Lanka is represented within legitimised systems of ‘worldmaking’ /knowledge production leading to particular understandings of Sri Lanka within international tourism.
Kamalika is currently a third year PhD candidate as well as a Teaching Assistant of the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds. In 2015, Kamalika was awarded the School of Sociology and Social Policy full fee International Scholarship to undertake the MA in Social Research which Kamalika completed with a Distinction in 2016. Soon after, led by their research interest in the sphere of travel writing, Kamalika ventured onto a PhD funded by the Leeds Anniversary Research Scholarship (LARS) offered by the University. Kamalika is currently in the process of writing up their thesis and anticipate its completion within the course of 2019.
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13:45 – 15:00
Yang Zhao, University of Nottingham Challenges and Possibilities: Haitian Immigrants and Vernacular Cosmopolitanism in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty Set in a Wellington college town peopled with intermixing nations and races, Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty (2005) is characterized by a continued concern about establishing cross-boundary connections in a time of globalization. Depicting a world of relations rather than an assemblage of separate entities, it reveals Smith’s unique cosmopolitan mindset, which, in a general sense, concentrates on how to be a ‘citizen of the world.’ In this presentation, I explore the feasibility of ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ - a critical, oppositional vision and practice thriving on the periphery - through the representation of Haitian immigrants in On Beauty. I examine Haitians’ oscillation between a fixed attachment to their nation and an expanded and more flexible affiliation to the wide globe, and approach their predicament from three aspects: uneven global capitalism, racial and class stratification and cultural transmission.
Yang Zhao is a second-year PhD candidate in the English Department at the University of Nottingham. Her thesis is entitled ‘Globalization and Critical Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary British Fictions.’ Her research interests revolve around globalization and cosmopolitanism, contemporary British fictions, locale and globe, and cultural studies.
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Panel 6: Decolonising Education Chair: Alex Henry Jason Arday, Durham University Decolonising the Academy (University of Leeds): Dismantling Racism in Higher Education Understanding the centrality of racism within a higher education context has become pertinent in attempting to ascertain patterns of discrimination, marginalisation and subordination. This becomes a particularly important consideration as we begin to challenge some of the racialized and normative orthodoxies that pervade within the Academy. Many of the challenges we face concerning racial inequality are predominantly situated within the context of Whiteness and the power and privilege that often accompanies this. This talk will address issues which consider notions of ‘otherness’ and illegitimacy for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic academics (BAME) within the Academy, with particular reference to how universities perpetuate racial inequality through poor diversification of academic workforces, senior leaders and dominant Eurocentric curricula. Furthermore, this talk will consider the persistence of structural racism and how it functions through vehicles and canons such as dominant Eurocentric curricula and racial micro-aggressions. Considerations will also explore how the Academy continuously marginalises, oppresses and disadvantages Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic university students within its inherently white Higher Education institutions. Finally, this talk will conclude with a call to all custodians of the Academy to take collective responsibility for Decolonising the Academy.
Jason Arday is an Assistant Professor in Sociology at Durham University in the Department of Sociology. Jason is a Visiting Research Fellow at The Ohio State University in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion and a Trustee of the Runnymede Trust, the UK’s leading Race Equality Thinktank. He is also an Elected Steering Committee Member of the Parliamentary Group Comprehensive Future and a School Governor at Shaftesbury Park Primary School in London.
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13:45 – 15:00
Tajpal Rathore, Tribe Arts
In 2017, theatre company, Tribe Arts, initiated a project in collaboration with the Carnegie School of Education at Leeds Beckett University. Working with academic partners, and utilising Tribe’s in-house developed participatory theatre format called Tribe Talks, the project proposed to investigate race in educational workplace settings, with a specific focus on the staff of primary and secondary schools. The project aimed to explore and attempt to provide a narrative to the questions raised in a number of significant education reports, in particular whether minority ethnic student output has any correlation with the attitudes and approaches of its (predominantly) white staff demographic; and whether having a more mixed demographic – that is reflective of the school – has positive outcomes. Drawing on work by Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility), Reni Eddo-Lodge (Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race), Shashi Tharoor (Inglorious Empire) and Tribe’s own decolonial performance theatre practice, this presentation proposes to delineate, explicate and present its uncomfortable findings and research, and aims to lay bare some of the structural and societal problems that lay at the heart of difficult conversations around race in the UK today. Conversations about race are frequently sequestered amongst people of colour, yet the only meaningful way to progress with issues relating to race and identity in a supposedly postcolonial world is to include everyone in the dialogue, black and white, the oppressor and the oppressed, the privileged and the unprivileged. The presentation, therefore, will not only focus on the outcomes and findings of the project but will also present the (decolonial) theatrical praxis that Tribe has developed, which underpinned much of that research, and will propose how these evolving artistic techniques can be used as an effective tool to further conversations about race in our contemporary and politicised world, especially to address decolonising education, curricula and the academy, as well as understanding the black hole of British Critical Race Theory.
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Melissa R. Jogie, University of Roehampton Combatting the Transmission of Colonial Values with a ‘Roving’ Postcolonial Approach Can we stop the transmission of colonial values through the teaching and reading of English literary texts? The visceral and deleterious nature of the propagation of ‘colonial’ values is well discussed in sociological fields in terms of the ‘hidden curriculum’ (Apple, 2004) and theories of social reproduction (Bourdieu, 1986; Bernstein, 1981). However, such approaches tend to take a ‘black box’ construction of the classroom and focus on the mechanics of material persistency in wider society (Morrow & Torres, 1995), rather than critical resistance. Conversely, proximal perspectives of social inequality tend to be associated with individual students’ and teachers’ psychological and behavioral states (McClelland, 1961), and therefore transmission appears to be constrained in scope to particular classroom environments. Melissa’s research focuses on cultural reproduction and social injustice drawing from scholarly fields of philosophy, sociology, psychology, economics, literature and education. Her forthcoming book Transmission of Colonial Values (Routledge, 2019) establishes a meta-theory of knowledge reproduction known as the ‘postcolonial hegemonies of knowledge’. Her insights into knowledge reproduction has led to her recent award of a British Academy Grant to a UK-Australia Knowledge Frontier Forum to work with a small group of selected scholars on the shaping of the ‘future’ of research in the humanities and social sciences, taking place in Australia later this year.
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Panel 7: Cultural Industries and Artistic Production Chair: Emma Parker Jeremy Poynting, Peepal Tree Press How Come Caribbean literary publishing is happening in Leeds?
This presentation will attempt to explain why literary publishing has failed to establish a continuous and widespread existence in the Anglophone Caribbean, will note the attempts to develop literary publishing lists, their uneven development across the region, the kind of publishing that has surfaced/survived and the factors that work against literary publication in the region. It will look briefly at the history of mainstream metropolitan publishing of Caribbean and Black British writing and the emergence of independents committed to Caribbean and Black British publishing, of which Peepal Tree Press is one. It will conclude with an outline of Peepal Tree’s publishing and editorial policies and its attempts to address the issues of centre and periphery, readerships and regional-based literary development. Jeremy Poynting graduated at Leeds University in 1968, completed a part-time PhD on Caribbean writing at Leeds in 1985, while teaching in further education. He founded Peepal Tree Press in 1985 and remains its managing editor; it has published almost 400 books. In 2014 he was awarded an honorary DLitt by the University of the West Indies at Mona, and in 2018 he was elected an Hon FRSL. He has written many articles and one book, A Reader’s Guide to Kwame Dawes’ Prophets.
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Caterina Scarabicchi, Royal Holloway Curating Transnational Migration: The Complexities of Representing Postcolonial and Migrant Identity at Musée National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration in Paris The representation of postcolonial and migrant identities in French society has increasingly been located at the centre of a heated political and cultural debate over the last decades. In the context of museums and heritage on the national territory, the ways in which immigration and exile are being memorialised through monuments and exhibitions have recently raised concern among academics and critics, for the persistent use of a nationalist approach which prioritises notions of cultural assimilation and Frenchness (Fauvel, 2014; Kiwan, 2017) and appears still rooted in exoticized narratives of diversity. This ‘spectacle of the Other’ (Hall, 1997) remains particularly detectable in the institutional narratives of European museums, which have played, since their origins, a crucial role in justifying colonial expansion and white supremacy (Blanchard et al., 2008). This paper addresses the persistent gaze cast on the story of the migrant as ‘Other’ within the permanent and temporary displays at the Musée National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration in Paris, a museum dedicated to modern and contemporary immigration to France, problematically hosted within an imposing building originally conceived for the Paris Colonial Exposition of 1931. Drawing on postcolonial museology (Chambers et al., 2014), I will discuss the complexities of the discourse conveyed by this heritage site, with particular attention to its narrative on French identity on the one hand, and its representation of migrant individuals as ‘others’ of the French Republic on the other, as presented in the visual, written and spatial texts contained in the museum. Caterina Scarabicchi holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and Culture from Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research area is located at the intersection between cultural studies and migration studies, with a focus on the ambiguities of social commitment in contemporary texts in support of migrants’ rights in literature, cinema and institutional narratives.
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15:10 – 16:25
Stacey Kennedy, University of Birmingham Women’s agency in the African Contemporary Art World: exploring Afropolitan art networks There is an historical critical silence around women and gender in the art world, where scholarship to correct this focuses primarily upon art networks in the West. To address this silence I explore female agency and networking within the ‘African contemporary visual art world’; an exciting subgenre of the wider contemporary visual art world. In this rapidly emerging and expanding field, African (and Diaspora) women are highly visible in decision making and influencing roles: in greater numbers than in the contemporary art world more broadly where gender disparity persists (Reilly and Lippard, 2018). I view these art world spaces and the connections between women as inherently ‘Afropolitan’. ‘Afropolitanism’ is a form of cosmopolitanism relating to ideas of connection and belonging to Africa (Mbembe and Balakrishnan, 2016) which has been conceptually led by women of colour (Abebe, 2015). I suggest that Afropolitan networks of individuals congeal the global ‘spaces’ of the African contemporary art world and, in tracing how Afropolitan women operate within local, national and transnational art networks, shed light on the role of women in diaspora, female transnational networks in cultural production and female agency in relationships between Africa and the West. Stacey Kennedy is an AHRC funded PhD candidate in the Department of African Studies and Anthropology at the University of Birmingham. Her research title is ‘Women’s agency in the African Contemporary Art World: exploring Afropolitan art networks’. She has an undergraduate degree from the Centre of West African Studies and Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham, and her Masters research project focused on the African contemporary art sales at Bonhams Auction House in London.
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Panel 8: Race and Resistance Chair: Sofia Aatkar Jordan Harris, University of Leicester Overlooked: an examination of Britain’s mixed-race population in the late 19th and early 20th century My research project aims to give a voice to an unrepresented group of people in postcolonial studies: mixed-race people of late 19th- and early 20th- century Britain. Historically, mixed-race people of African and European descent have been overlooked and/or grouped within the Black and African populations. Recognition of these individuals’ mixed-race heritage ought to be highlighted as it had an impact on their personal experiences and potential opportunities in life. Attention must be placed on the racial assumptions and perceptions that were attributed to mixed-race people in comparison to the ‘pure’, unmixed races. Mixed-race experiences of the late 19th- and early 20th- century were unique and varied from person to person, that being said, there were often underlining racial experiences shared among mixed-race people. My research project will cover these various aspects of mixed-race studies. Currently, those who identify as mixed-race in Britain are among the fastest growing ethnicity in the country. It is imperative that we shine a light on this history and give (historical) attention to Britain’s mixed-race population. This project is a snapshot of Britain’s mixed-race history, and my intention is to expand upon mixed-race studies and for more awareness to be brought to other groups of individuals who continue to be disregarded by history.
Jordan Harris is a second-year postgraduate researcher at the University of Leicester. Her research project focuses on mixed-race people of African and European descent in 19th century Britain. Jordan is using case studies to help illustrate the potential/ different opportunities and obstacles mixed-race people encountered during their lives. This is done from a racial standpoint to showcase the complexities of the mixedrace experience. Jordan is intrigued by the evolving racial dynamics of the age and the lasting effects the concept of ‘race’ has had on present-day society.
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15:10 – 16:25
Isabella Villanova, University of Leeds The female subject with agency: subjectivities and strategies of resistance in contemporary Anglophone African women’s writing This paper investigates the African female subject in terms of her agency, subjectivities and strategies of resistance she adopts, as represented in the fiction of Adichie and Emecheta from Nigeria and Dangarembga and Vera from Zimbabwe. Set both in Africa and in Western countries in various different time periods and dealing with a wide range of themes, the narratives I examine all focus on women who are subjected to the constraints of patriarchy and colonialism while at the same time remaining active agents who are capable of resisting or totally subverting these restrictions. I employ a feminist approach, notably Teresa de Lauretis’ theory of subjectivity-agency (1984; 1986) to analyse the postcolonial female character with agency as a site of gender, sexual and racial differences which shape her multiple and often contradictory subjectivities. By using Carole Boyce Davies’ perspective on ‘migratory subjectivity’ (1994) in relation to agency, I specifically discuss the migratory subject, emphasising the impact that ‘home’ and the diasporic site have on her subjectivities. Finally, I explore her strategies of resistance which sometimes involve the use of a “fighting body” (Santos 2013) and which are deployed precisely to challenge the ‘double colonisation’ she is subjected. Isabella Villanova is a PhD student in African women’s writing at the University of Padua (Italy), currently visiting scholar at the University of Leeds. She completed her BA and MA in Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Udine (Italy). Her research project focuses on the African female subject in terms of her agency, subjectivities and strategies of resistance she adopts in Nigerian and Zimbabwean women’s fiction. Her broader research interests include African and diaspora literature, postcolonial and decolonial thinking, gender theory, and trauma studies.
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Nahla Raffaoui, Manchester Metropolitan University Intersections of Race, Gender, and Diaspora in Contemporary Black Feminist Writing This paper offers a discussion about the interrogation of the intersections of race, gender, and diaspora in the writings of transatlantic contemporary Black feminists. This study incorporates post- 2010 cross-genre and cross- border texts by multiple Black feminist writers across different locations significantly Black British and African Americans. It will employ the intersectional approach within Black feminism and diaspora studies to examine how these contemporary Black feminist writers are questioning the models of the earlier generations of Black feminists’ rendering of the intersections of race, gender, and diaspora. At the same time, by depending on diaspora models, the study will look into the extent the selected texts could be considered transnational by interrogating how these writers are mobilizing concepts of the Black Atlantic and negotiating aspects of location as well as migration. Within Black feminist writing, there is specific attention given to autobiographies and memoirs as forms of life writing. I will consider how this form of writing is used by contemporary Black feminist writers as a tool to draw connections between legacies of slavery in America and the British Empire with an emphasis put on the issues of gender. Nahla Raffaoui is a full-time second-year PhD student in the school of English Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is working on a thesis entitled: Reading the Intersectionality of Race, Gender and Diaspora in Contemporary Black Feminist Writing.
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Panel 9: Indigenous Perspectives Chair: Daniel Bilton Victoria Downing, University of Leeds Against Linear Thought
Within western culture, we are taught that time is linear, that what is in the past stays there, this thought veil our appreciation about things, time and in the case of heritage, this linear dimension separates the past from the present. This paper explores firstly, how the conceptions of linearity of time and Cartesian gaze have framed the understanding and management of heritage within a view into the future and development. Secondly, it examines the indigenous conceptions through work of the poet and artist Cecilia VicuĂąa arguing that her work presents the past in front of us, and the future behind addressing the heritage as something for the present and decolonised ways of understanding and seeing heritage.
Victora Downing is art historian and heritage researcher. She holds a BA in Theory and History of Arts at University of Chile, Curating Diploma at Universidad Adolfo Ibanez and MA in Arts Management and Heritages studies at University of Leeds. Currently PhD candidate at School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the same university. Her research is based on the approximations between contemporary art and heritages discourses.
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Emma Barnes, University of Salford The Environment as Culture in Zitkala-Ša’s American Indian Stories (1921) The degradation of the natural environment and exploitation of indigenous wildlife in nineteenth and twentieth-century North America is ultimately connected with the displacement of indigenous tribes. Both injustices were caused by the capitalist-imperialist belief that all white Americans of European descent had the right to own land and which dismissed Lakota claims to land based on ancestral heritage. This link between the exploitation of the natural environment and the oppression of indigenous cultures is prevalent within Lakota folklore, particularly within Zitkala-Ša’s American Indian Stories (1921). This paper will bring Zitkala-Ša’s semi-autobiographical stories into dialogue with postcolonial ecocriticism to explore the relationship between the Lakota tribes, animals and the natural environment. By decentring Western ideologies that pose nature as separate from and inferior to culture, this paper foregrounds the progressive and environmentally sustainable elements of Lakota culture. By analysing Lakota literature through a postcolonial framework, I aim to extend the focus of postcolonial studies beyond that of canonical literature and aim to present indigenous literature as valuable within various fields of study from which it has long been excluded.
Emma Barnes is a second-year PhD student in indigenous literatures and folktales at the University of Salford. Research interests include representations of animals and environments in Victorian, colonial and postcolonial literatures, and the global concerns within children’s literature.
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15:10 – 16:25
Lotta Schneidemesser, University of York Cultural Homelessness in Patricia Grace’s Cousins
The concept of cultural homelessness has first been introduced by Vivero and Jenkins; they argue that it ‘describes certain individuals of mixed ethnic and/ or cultural background living within a framework of experiences, feelings and thoughts that do not belong to any single racial, ethnic or cultural reference group.’ (Existential Hazards of the Multicultural Individual: Defining and Understanding “Cultural Homelessness” pp. 11-12) This sense of unbelonging is depicted very powerfully at the beginning of the novel Cousins by Patricia Grace, when Mata, one of the three female protagonists, decides to just start walking, and to leave everything behind, because she feels no sense of connection or belonging to the city where she lives and to her job. She epitomises the homeless, lonely stranger, an outcast. I would like to take Vivero and Jenkins’ argument further and explore the depiction of Māori women in the novel, and how they are marginalized in Pakeha (New Zealander with European ancestry) society for being Māori, but also in their Māori community for embracing feminism and rejecting, for example, an arranged marriage, and very narrowly defined gender roles. The novel, published in 1992, is different to Grace’s earlier work as it focuses on the rights of Māori women and explores rising feminism and women’s rights movements in New Zealand from the perspective of women who are marginalized, and on whom a ‘cultural homelessness’ is enforced, as they and their demands for equality are not granted in either Māori or Pakeha society. Lotta Schneidemesser is a Doctoral Candidate at the University of York. She spent part of her undergraduate degree at Victoria University of Wellington, researching Māori literature and culture. She did a Master’s degree in World Literatures in English at Jesus College, at the University of Oxford, continuing her research on Māori Literature. Her PhD-research focuses on the moment of homecoming and broader issues that concern home, homecoming and return migration in Pacific Literature. Her PhD is funded by the Heinrich-Böll-Foundation.
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Keynote: Amy Rushton
It takes a village: new methodologies, collaborative communities Speaking to this symposium’s focus on ‘Interdisciplinary Imaginations, Critical Confrontations’, this presentation outlines the long development of the methodology developed during my PhD – and beyond. More importantly, I will emphasise the importance of community and collaboration in developing new research. Too often, intellectual and creative work is assumed to be isolating and individually produced. Even the common viva question about the development of a thesis cannot account for all the coincidences, kindnesses and epiphanies that shape the final thesis. This presentation will attempt to combine a narrative of critical development with one of professional – and personal – development. In wrestling with how to talk about the ‘Anglophone African novel’ in nonreductive ways, I found myself traversing across different disciplines and often competing critical ideas. Somewhat appropriately as it would turn out, my research was a very slow process and involved a lot of failure. Fortunately, the long duration of my PhD meant that I had the opportunity to encounter different research communities; here, I acknowledge the people who shaped and supported me – and I invite you all to think about your own communities, present and future. In the spirit of the importance of research communities, this keynote presentation is dedicated to Anthony Carrigan, whose generosity towards and championing of new voices in postcolonial studies continues to inspire.
Amy Rushton is a Lecturer in English at Nottingham Trent University and her research intersects with postcolonial studies, world-literature, and queer theories, with particular interest in American and African literatures. She joined Trent in 2016 after completing her PhD on contemporary African fiction, tragedy, and neocolonialism at the University of Manchester. She is currently revising her thesis for publication and recent publications include essays on Afropolitan utopianism and depression in contemporary fiction and pop music. Amy’s new project considers the relationship between narratives of depression and ongoing legacies of colonialism and neoliberalism. She also currently leads the World-Literature Network’s (very small!) research cluster on World Literature and Mental Health.
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