Indian
Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies
[Officially
recognised Indian chapter of the International ACLALS]
ANNUAL
CONFERENCE - 2018
8
– 10 February 2018
CO-HOSTED
BY
DEPARTMENT
OF ENGLISH
ALIGARH
MUSLIM UNIVERSITY
"Tolerance
and Bigotry: Contestations in Indian Literatures in English"
Long after the shadow of the ‘postcolonial’ stayed
its course in the history of literature’s encounter with the political, the
question of reception has still remained a thorny one. Placed against the
red-hot outrage surrounding a Santhal writer’s place within his own community
at the ‘margins’, it is important that we re-open the spaces of cultural
consumption to a more searching scrutiny – beyond markers of political
certitude and rehearsed idioms of correctness. Insofar as this latest
controversy traces its origin to debates around the textuality of tribal
languages, it is important to mark this moment as unsettling a self-assured
postcoloniality at the peripheries. The latter are no longer unproblematic
sites for resurgence and mimicry. Structures of epistemological violence are
imported from the sovereign fetish of the ‘canon’ and re-enacted with
vengeance, till the excluded participate in their own expropriation. While the
empire was writing back its own fantasies of ‘tolerance’, the subaltern
performed to a script of ‘bigotry’ that has long been its historical destiny.
However, the marks of injury that establish parallels between a Perumal Murugan
and a Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar – or a Wendy Doniger and a Taslima Nasreen – are
equivalent, but not identical. The effects of their violence are utterly
unequal. But, might an apolitical humanism of ‘tolerance’ be enough to tame a
national culture into foregone templates of ‘diversity’ – or, to civilize the
subaltern into this culture? Must the ‘centre’ and the ‘margins’ dance to the
same anthem of ‘tolerance’ – or, must their difference be recognized in an
other script, an other text, an other history and an other nation?
In thinking through this, the IACLALS Annual
Conference, Tolerance and Bigotry: Contestations in Indian Literatures in
Englishwill attempt a reading of subjectivities, alterity, hybridity,
ambivalence, liminality and the interstitiality negotiated within and beyond
current understandings of ‘tolerance’ and ‘bigotry’. In this would be questions
that could account for diverse modes of citizenship and belonging within
modernity’s genealogies of freedom and agency. Further, how these are
willy-nilly ascribed within the religious and the secular, the sacred and the blasphemous,
as also the ways in which the burdens of tolerance and the scourge of
intolerance/bigotry fall on minorities – ethnic, religious, sexual, linguistic
– would be of interest. How might tolerance translate into a communal gesture
of assimilationist expansionism, or bigotry be the mark of a politics of
default secularity? Is ‘critique’ necessarily tolerant, or must it rather shun
a politics of consensus that passes for ‘tolerance’? Importantly again, is the
much-vaunted idea of tolerance adequately historical – or, in other words, can
it address the structural asymmetries of history and social justice? If,
commonsensically speaking, tolerance augurs an ‘effect’ of passivity while
bigotry presupposes active vigilantism, might democracy be redefined through
recourse to questions of individual-collective agency? What are the evaluative
rubrics at stake in understanding the conflicts and tensions between the self
and the other, free speech and other freedoms of living and being? Finally,
what role does literature play, in understanding and negotiating conflicts and
differences within affectively volatile communities or nation-states?
The conference, located in the historic Aligarh
Muslim University, seeks to investigate how literatures in India have narrativised
the complex interactions stemming from deep-seated divisions. From negotiating
colonial modernity to asserting multiple nationalisms, from contesting caste
hierarchies towards a politics of Dalit identity, from narratives of military
invaders to the unwritten tales of indigenous peoples and tribal communities,
from the inherent heteronormativity of civilizational humanism towards the
assertion of an entire spectrum of genders; the subcontinent throws up a
vibrant matrix of polyphonic multilingual literary endeavours. Located in the
heartland of the country, this conference proposes a complicating of concerns
outlined but not limited to the following:
A politics of ‘tolerance’ and the idea of India
The limits of tolerance and effects of censorship
Non-state players and censorship
Literatures of intolerance, and cultures of
reception
Tolerance while contesting: Literatures from the
subcontinent
Tolerance and Bigotry in – Dalit Literature
Gender/Sexuality
Public/Private
Spaces
The
Sacred and the Profane
Religion, affect, reason, and tolerance/intolerance
Tolerance discourse and minority literatures in
India
Teaching tolerance: Pedagogical potential of
tolerance narratives.
‘Liberal’ bigotry?
Critique and the secular
Linguistic and other markers of identity/difference.
The
conference is open only to members of IACLALS (visit www.iaclals.com to know
how to become a member).
Abstracts (250 words) to be sent to
[email protected] by September 30th 2017
Acceptance will be intimated by October 15th 2017
Complete papers to be submitted by November 30th
2017 (All papers will be considered for the CD Narasimhaiah Prize for the Best
Paper read at the conference unless specified otherwise)
Registration to be completed by January 5th 2018
(details will be sent with acceptances)
IACLALS also announces the next edition of the
Meenakshi Mukherjee Prize for the Best Paper published in the previous year by
a member of the IACLALS. Please submit your published paper with all details to
[email protected] by November 1st 2017.
About our
hosts
The Department of English at AMU offers courses both
in English and ELT. It has the Raleigh Literary Society which is named after
the eminent professor Sir Walter Raleigh, who was also the first Head of
Department. The society aims at recognizing and encouraging hidden talent of
the students. The Department is engaged in both the teaching of Literature and
English Language Teaching, besides being engaged in various research activities.
Currently the Department has just moved into Stage II of the UGC SAP DRS
program, after completing Stage I with a focus on Translation Studies in India.
The Department has over 40 members who teach both in
the Women's College and the Central Faculty of the University, and engage in a
diverse range of topics in its pedagogy. Practically every student in the
University is in touch with the department with takes Compulsory and Technical
Writing courses aimed at language teaching, Subsidiary courses for non
departmental students interested in pursuing Literature, Core courses on
Canonical British and Indian Literatures and offers a wide range of optional
courses at the Master's Level, besides training and guiding research scholars
at the PhD level.
Aligarh is situated in the middle of Doab - the land
between the Ganga and Yamuna rivers, at a distance of 120 kms from Delhi. It is
very well connected by rail and road. The university is about 3 km from the
Aligarh Railway Station. The nearest airport is Indira Gandhi International
Airport, New Delhi that is about two and a half hours’ journey to Aligarh.
The Chairperson of the Department of English at AMU
is Prof. Seemin Hasan ([email protected]). The coordinator of the
conference is Dr Siddhartha Chakraborti ([email protected]).
The contact information for the members of AMU’s
organising committee along with information about registration formalities will
be given with the acceptances of paper proposals.
