ENTANGLEMENTS Postcolonial Futures and New Futurisms - International Summer School
Padua, Italy
Organization: University of Padua
Welcome to POSTCOLONIAL FUTURES AND NEW FUTURISMS.
Registration is now open for the second edition of the International Summer School ENTANGLEMENTS, hosted by the University of Padua from July 7 to 11, 2025.
The Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies is inviting undergraduate and master’s students, PhD candidates and young researchers to take part in an immersive cultural experience focused on post- and decolonial futures and the latest literary futurisms (Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, Indigenous futurisms, Latin American futurisms), and featuring dialogues with exceptional international guests.
The 2025 edition looks to a postcolonialism of the future, synonymous with the awareness that a fair, sustainable, liveable future will necessarily have to be a postcolonial future. A future that will have gone ‘beyond’ colonial trajectories of world organization and divisions and will be based on alternative ways of planetary living, which we cannot yet foresee, but which must be ‘created’, including through literary imagination.
The present is the battlefield of versions of possible futures, which people imagine, anticipate, fear or aspire to. In this contest, postcolonial visions of the future have an important role: not only do they fight for a deeper decolonization of the planet, but they are indispensable contributions to “the work of creating the future” (Appadurai 2013).
Postcolonial perspectives are increasingly informing the new archives of literary futurisms, which knit together the work being done by people of colour and of the Global South, such as Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, Indigenous Futurisms and Latinx Futurisms. Each of these represents a clearly identifiable movement, mode, aesthetic, and subgenre (science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction…). What they seem to share is a vision that bypasses the white supremacist future of the Global North, and offers the hope of surviving the dire future we face as a species and that we inflict on other species and the planet, should we not urgently institute change.
Registragion for the summer school will be open until May 31, 2025, at a cost of €300. Applications received will be evaluated by the scientific committee, which will confirm admission as soon as possible.
Registrants will have access to subsidized housing reserved by the organizers of the initiative at a guesthouse at the University of Padua. Requests will be fullfilled on a rolling basis.
Resgister here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScJ_DhRImpTnTiAHUprCCqVkL4IMkDKWe9AHznXztLVljOaCw/viewform?usp=header
https://postcolonialdialogues.disll.unipd.it/en/home-en/
Comitato organizzativo
