Taking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Pascale Casanova’s field-defining La République mondiale des lettres (The World Republic of Letters, 1999) as its point of departure, this conference seeks to decentralize the praxis of cultural reading and literary critique that the notion of Paris as the world capital of literature represents. Drawing inspiration from a host of decolonial projects that seek to renegotiate the terms in which we understand the world—a process that Walter Mignolo terms “epistemic delinking”—we seek to examine trans-peripheral and counter-hegemonic cultural infrastructures that flourished despite, in resistance to, and in the aftermath of colonial domination. This project is historical, but also oriented toward the present and, crucially, dedicated to rethinking the epistemic assumptions that undergird the study of literature and associated forms of cultural production in the present.

Themes

• Independent publishing networks, including journals, newspaper, and little magazines.
• Translation and circulation across minor and/or languages of non-European origin
• Translation programmes between cultures of the Global South, particularly beyond English and other imperial languages
• Literary congresses and festivals in/from the Global South
• Orature, performance, and transmedia
• South-south literary influences and exchange
• Competing literary systems and network-building in the Cold War and beyond
• Literary and artistic representations of other cultures and regions of the Global South, including South-South travel narratives
• Integration programmes and strategic alliances within the Global South
• Narratives of shared belonging among different cultures of the Global South
• South-south comparative literature
• Epistemologies and literary theory from the South(s)
• The untranslatable, the vernacular, the idiomatic

Submission details
Proposals should include the author’s name, affiliation, email, title, and a 500-word abstract to be submitted by 30 November 2023 to: decolonisingparis2024@gmail.com
The conference welcomes researchers at all levels and on all regions of the Global South. While we encourage papers that engage with material in a range of languages, including languages not of European origin, presentations themselves should be in English.