Interweaving Anthropology, Science, and History: Post anthropocentric Novels in the era of Climate Crises.
Kharagpur, INDIA
Organization: IIT Kharagpur and University of Oldenburg
Call for Papers
CEP International Conference
Interweaving Anthropology, Science, and History: Postanthropocentric Novels in the era of Climate Crises.
Event dates: 1st to 3rd November 2023
Place: Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, West Bengal, India
Extended Abstract Deadline: 30 September, 2023
This conference organised by Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Kharagpur in association with University of Oldenburg, Germany can be attended both through online and offline mode.
Coordinator (s): Dr. Saswat Samay Das, Liberal Arts and Critical Humanities, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Kharagpur.
Dr Ananya Roy Pratihar, Communication and Media Studies, Institute of Management and Information Science, Bhubaneswar, India.
Keynote Speakers: Prof. Dr. Anton Kirchhofer, Professor of English Literature, Institute for English and American Studies, Literary and Cultural Studies, University of Oldenburg.
Dr. Anna Auguscik, Linguistics and Cultural Studies, Institute of English and American Studies, University of Oldenburg.
Overview:
With anthropocenity driving the planet towards brink of extinction the survival of humanity hinges on reconfiguring its relationship with fiction. Rather than merely using narrative spaces to record encounters with phenomenological realities, fiction should become an effective mechanism for actualizing a post-anthropocentric imaginary. John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes, Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables of Planet in Crisis, Rajat Chowdhury’s The Butterfly Effect, James Bradley’s Clade and Jaspreet Singh’s Face imagine such a world by combining multiple trans-disciplinary strands. In their bid to problematize and transcend the existent anthropocentrism these writers produce new ecocratic sensibilities through their fictions, searching for what can stand as foundational essences of the post anthropocentric world that we seek to actualize at this juncture.
Simultaneously, anthropocentric fiction writers maintain a disjunctive relationality with organization of modern fiction and engage with planetary sciences, emphasizing the need for a "new philosophical anthropology". However, this is a process that partakes of side-lining modern fiction's colonial genealogy and overlooking the degree to which precolonial knowledge systems were integral to planetary and geological sciences. Despite these challenges, anthropocentric fiction offers a powerful means of grappling with the urgent issues facing our planet and imagining a post-anthropocentric future.
Our conference would then aim to engage with the following questions:
1. In what ways do what we call anthropocene fictions repeat the patterns of modern fiction and in what respects do they strike a radical departure from such patterns, radically transcending the outlooks and characteristics of modernity?
2. How these fictions revisit the conceptual territory of agency, concomitant with individuations (whether as cultural institutions or as narrative devices), while emphasizing geo-historicity and Planetarity?
3. How these fictions stand as the production house of philosophical anthropology and the supplemental ally of science?
4. Whether these fictions can be wedded to decolonial and postcolonial concerns or we need an exclusive set of new fictions that can yield what we may call decolonial ecosophy reflecting engagement with archived and minor alternative histories?
5. How specifically might these fictions stand as the ground for working out what Ghosh in his novel Nutmeg Curse calls vitalist praxis? How far do they buttress Dipesh Chakrabarty’s understanding of ecological crises in the light of planetarity and geo-history?
Call for Papers:
We invite papers making an attempt to link fictions with the following concerns and issues but of course not limited within the provided guideposts:
- Modernity, anthropocenity and accelerationism
- Geo-planetary science and geo-planetary immanentism
- Geo-history, events and minor histories
- Earth, materiality and smooth spaces
- Actual time and stratigraphy
- The ‘human’ in the context of colonization and decolonization
- Historicizing the ‘human’ in the context of conceptions of modernity
- New forms of capitalisms, cancel cultures and post neo-liberalisms
- coloniality, planetarity and ecology
- Eco-activisms, new parallaxes and the decolonial vitalist praxis
- Eco-politics, green capitalism and ecosophy
- Cultures, stratifications and New Earth
- Capitalist mobilizations and material dynamics
Please send your extended abstract within 500 words to email clificonferenceiitkgp2023@gmail.com by September 30, 2023.
Respective fees(i, ii, iii, iv) for registration and paper presentation
Participants
i. Offline Participation Fees
ii. Online Participation Fees
iii. Offline Paper Presentation Fees
iv. Online Paper Presentation Fees
Faculty Members: i- 2500, ii - 1500, iii- 3000, iv- 2000
PhD. /Post.Doc: i- 1000, ii- 750, iii- 1500, iv- 1000
M.A students: i- 750. ii- 500, iii- 1000, iv- 750
Industry: i- 5000, ii-4000, iii- 7000, iv- 3000
All the fees are in INR.
clificonferenceiitkgp2023@gmail.com
Dr Saswat Samay Das
