In the Name of Gender: The Literary Landscapes of Northeast India

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Event Date: 2025-05-25 Abstract Due: 2025-05-25

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In the Name of Gender: The Literary Landscapes of Northeast India.

 

Gender and its position in academe have been informed by fluidities and fears (Who’s Afraid of Gender?).  In terms of literature, the Northeast India—with its distinctive geographical location—lends an elaborate framework for the entanglements of gender with its ecology and cultural disparities alike. This volume seeks to explore feminine, masculine and queer representations and engagements in terms of their distinctive experiences and responses to the geography and the events (from the cultural to the historical) which represent this region. The project is elaborate in the sense that the literature spans from the oral to the written, the concerns spanning from the colonial to the postcolonial, the needs ranging from representation to decolonial alternatives, and styles which have been perpetually inventive (incorporating poetry, memoirs, novels, and non-fictional writings). In this elaborate setting, gender can be the matrix through which tounderstand how systems of domination operate so differently in different parts of the world. The “directional name” (Sanjib Baruah 2020) that “northeast India” wields literally and a series of armed conflicts—the preferred word for which is insurgency—which has marked the region’s history can also consider gender as a rubric under which to analysethe responses and resistance to systems of domination. Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003) talks about “the question of oppositional practice, memory, and writing as a crucial aspect of the creation of self- knowledges” in the context of Third World feminists. This volumewould explore these configurations with regard to gender and literary landscapes in Northeast India. The epistemologies that emerge range from memory—“Feminist work is often memory work” (Sara Ahmed 2017)—to writing which challenge existing methodologies: “Hold back your theories!” (Janice Pariat 2022). Within these concerns and configurations then, this CfP invites abstracts of 300 words on literatures from Northeast India dealing with frameworks including but not limited to:

• Gender and ecology
• Gender and violence
• Gender and memory
• Gender, health, and medicine
• Gender and oral culture
• Gender and modernity
• Gender and decoloniality
• Gender and activism
• Gender and insurgency
• Gender and poetic imagination

Abstracts may be sent to raktimabhuyan@gmail.com by May 25, 2025. Questions, if any,
may be directed to the same address.
 
P.S.- Literatures of Northeast India here is understood capaciously to include those works which are produced in languages other than English as well.
(Routledge has shown interest in this volume as part of their South Asian Literature in Focus
series).
 
Editor’s bio: Raktima Bhuyan is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Tezpur University. Her co-authored monograph, Print Modernity in Colonial Assam (2023) is with
Lexington Books.

raktimabhuyan@gmail.com

Raktima Bhuyan