CALL FOR PAPERS
The 20th Triennial Conference of the Association for
Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS)
Transcultural Englishes in a Multipolar World
July 1-5, 2025
University of Nairobi (Kenya)
| More than three decades after the end of the Cold War, the idea of a multipolar world seems omnipresent. Old centres do not seem to hold any longer, new centres are emerging, and the global map of political, economic, social, and cultural relations is being redrawn. At first sight, this seems to align well with the expectations once linked to the work of decolonization that – as Edward Said put it in 1995 – would allow “a new geographical consciousness of a decentred or multiply-centred world.” This world, Said envisaged, would be one no “longer sealed within watertight compartments of art or culture or history, but mixed, mixed up, varied, complicated by the new difficult mobility of migrations, the new independent states, the newly emergent and burgeoning cultures.” Three decades into the twenty-first century, the transition towards a decentred or multiply centred world has gathered pace, but it has produced ambivalent results. A multipolar world is not necessarily a happier one: war and conflict seem to be globally on the ascent, the international cooperation needed to make decisive progress in halting climate change is far from effective, and not only the older, but also many of the newly emerging centres are struggling with the lures of authoritarian policies and populist visions of the world based on clear-cut divisions between “us” and “them.” At the same time, new (or revived) South-South relations are indeed undermining notions of “watertight compartments of art or culture or history” all over the world, while “the new difficult mobility of migrations” is reshaping cultures and societies not only in the global North (where it has generated a powerful politics of anxiety) but also in the global South (where the majority of refugees in the world are located). For an association like The Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS) dedicated to the study of the global network of Anglophone literatures and cultures, this emerging multipolar world is not only an external context for literary and cultural studies, but also an internal dynamic transforming its very field of study. Where older notions of ‘the English-speaking world’ once envisaged a patchwork of Commonwealth nations (and literatures) under the hegemonic sway of “English,” contemporary understandings of the field acknowledge an ineluctable plurality of transcultural “Englishes” that can no longer be perceived in terms of “watertight compartments” or “national literatures.” These Englishes are not only inherently uneven and diverse (and shaped by a myriad social, political, and cultural contexts), but also invariably part of multilingual ensembles. As envisaged in Édouard Glissant’s “Poetics of Relation,” they are necessarily in relation to a wide variety of other linguistic formats, and writers and cultural producers have turned the manifold – conflictual as well as co-habitative – relations of “mother” and “other” tongues into a major source of creativity. This includes a growing body of Anglophone literary and cultural productions that has emerged beyond an older trajectory “from Commonwealth to Postcolonial” based on colonial histories of English. Indeed, Anglophone literatures can today be found in the Maghreb, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Latin America and many other parts of the world that cannot conceivably be thought of as ‘English-speaking.’ The new, ambivalent realities generated by the decentring of English and the emergence of a multipolar world present manifold challenges for the academic fields ACLALS is engaged in. How well are theories and methodologies in the field equipped for dealing with this multipolarity? Are postcolonial – or more recently, decolonial – theories still predicated on binary notions of “the West” (or “European modernity”) and its Others? What is the role of “centres” and “margins” in a multipolar world? Are “postcolonial” perspectives focusing on colonial trajectories of English and their continuation in post-independence times still sufficient for confronting the realities of “doing English” in the contemporary world? To what extent do they have to be supplemented by “transcultural” perspectives geared towards investigating what Arundhati Roy has called the “mind-bending mosaic” of language politics? “Decolonizing English” can undoubtedly be seen as part of a long-drawn out decentring process, but to what extent do decolonial theories run the risk (as Olufemi Taiwo has argued in Against Decolonization) of engaging in a presumptuous dismissal of intellectual and linguistic agency? in the various regions in which our Association is represented?3 For example, in the case of East Africa, How do transcultural Englishes contribute to maintaining and overcoming the legacies of settler colonialism and to projecting contemporary indigenous identities? What is their role “in the intertextuality of products from all corners from the globe” that – as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has put it – today constitutes the postcolonial as “the nonimperial heart of the modern and postmodern.” How can literary and cultural studies avoid the pitfalls of inevitably “triangulating ideas […] through the West” that Mukoma wa Ngũgĩ has warned against, and how can they engage with new (and revived) South-South connectivities and relations generated in an increasingly multipolar world? How indeed can the term “multipolar world”be made critically productive for the humanities, given the fact that (old and new) power games are continuously played with this term? The 20th ACLALS Conference to be held at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, from 1 – 5 July 2025 seeks to bring together writers and academics from all over the world to deliberate on transcultural Englishes and the current state of Anglophone literary and cultural studies in a multipolar world. Questions and themes to be addressed include: 1. Theorizing transculturality in the Commonwealth and beyond: World, Global, Postcolonial, Decolonial. 2. Unravelling Multipolarity: Real world processes, ideological misuses, utopian projections? 3. Literary crossings: Diasporic and local Anglophone literatures in a multipolar world 4. Multipolar lives: Biographies, creative non-fiction and oral histories in a transnational world. 5. Relationality in a multipolar world: Indigenous epistemologies and webs of interconnections in contemporary literary and cultural production. 6. Imagining alternative worlds: Contemporary literary and cultural forms of Futurism, Speculative fiction and cli-fi. 7. New Anglophones: English-language writing and cultural production in the Middle East, Latin America, and other ‘non-Anglophone’ locations 8. Languages in the contact zone: Linguistic border-crossing in literature, film and other media 9 Literature, language, and literacy: The complex social habitats of global Englishes today. 10. Mapping the old and new South-South relations in literary and cultural studies. 11. English, Indigeneity and power: The politics of agency and sovereignty. 12. Sheng, Camfranglais and Pidgin English: Mixed languages as cultural and literary resources 13. Gender and Transculturality in language, literature and culture 14. English as a medium of maintaining or resisting settler colonialism 15. Language ecologies and the global struggle against man-made climate change 16. Literature and mobility—migrants, immigrants and movement between the Global South and North in literary texts. 17. Narrative possibilities: Writing/righting wrongs through story telling 18. Translation, cultures and unity in difference 19. Englishes and social stratification: The class question in language and literature Confirmed Keynote speakers include: Simon Gikandi (Princeton University) Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (Kenyan Author) Goretti Kyomuhendo (Ugandan Author) Mukoma wa Ngũgĩ (Cornell University) Grace A. Musila (University of the Witwatersrand) Proposals for papers and panels on these or other topics of relevance to our discipline are welcome. Abstracts should be no more than 350 words and are to be submitted online by Dec. 1, 2024, at the following email address: [email protected]. This address can also be used to submit panel proposals. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by 31st January 2025 |