Postcolonial Studies across the DIsciplines (ASNEL/GNEL)

The 22nd annual conference of the Association for the Study of the New
Literatures in English will continue some of the discussions of our
previous conferences about space and locations, migration and its
reasons, cultural and linguistic communities, as well as academic and
institutional concerns. In Hanover, we shall concentrate on specific
regions and communities, approaching them from various disciplinary
perspectives and with an explicit self-reflexive impetus.

The conference will focus on two interrelated issues, one thematic and
one methodological. It will bring together scholars from different
academic fields who share an interest in the comparative reflection of
their respective disciplinary and individual methodologies. The
following questions will be addressed: how do we develop our research
interests and topics? Which factors influence our choice of material and
methodology? How do the institutionalized modes of assessing and funding
research as well as the ongoing reforms of the BA and MA programmes
influence our scholarly work? How do we react to globalization and its
impact on the regions we work on? How do the new media and especially
the rise of the World Wide Web shape our teaching and research agendas?

We are interested in discussing both entangled methodologies and
entangled histories and therefore invite papers that offer cultural,
literary, linguistic, historical, geographical, sociological and other
disciplinary perspectives on the following themes: slavery, emancipation
and post-emancipation across the Atlantic, indenture and slavery
worldwide up to today, cultural agency and especially linguistic
creativity and resistance, cultural exchange across the Atlantic and the
Pacific. We welcome contributions on literature as historiography, on
strategies of re-writing history in Anglophone literatures, on
postcolonial literatures in English translation, and on recent trends in
postcolonial theory and in methodologies of transdisciplinary
Postcolonial Studies.

Confirmed plenary speakers are
*Sabine Broeck*, Professor of American Studies at the University of Bremen and author of White Amnesia - Black Memory? Women's Writing and History (1999), who is currently working on a book entitled No Slavery for the Subject - Slavery, Modernity and Gender,
*Jessica Hemmings*, Head of Context at the Edinburgh College of Art and author of Yvonne Vera: The Voice of Cloth (2008) and In the Loop: Knitting Now (2010), and
*Tim Watson*, Associate Professor of English at the University of Miami and author of Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1780-1870 (2008), who is currently working on The Sun Also Sets: Transatlantic Culture and the Ends of Empire.

The conference will include workshops on interdisciplinary Postcolonial Studies in teaching and research (both in school and at university) and on interdisciplinary Postcolonial Studies in the new BA and MA programmes. It will also provide the opportunity to present work in progress on all levels of academic qualification in the "under
construction" and poster sessions.

Please send abstracts of papers (20 min, 200 words), proposals for organizing (or contributing to) one of the workshops, or suggestions for the presentation of work in progress.