Call for Additional Chapters - Postcolonial Hauntings: New Perspectives
We are looking for additional chapters for the upcoming edited volume, to be published in the Anglophone Postcolonial Studies series by HeiUP (2026), on the theme of haunting in postcolonial literatures and cultures as well as the endurance of Eurocentrism in academic practices and spaces. We are particularly interested in further contributions on the latter.
CfP:
Despite the surge of national liberation movements, contesting the legitimacy of colonial rule, and the concomitant independence of many formerly colonised nations in the 20th century, the legacy of imperialism and colonialism persists. Sometimes subtle, sometimes patently obvious - from linguistic and vernacular preferences such as the prolonged use of stilted received pronunciation to devastating debt - the consequences of imperial strivings haunt their former territories to this day. This volume examines the intricacies of these hauntings from a variety of perspectives and through a number of different lenses in order to delineate not only what postcolonial hauntings within the literary and cultural studies entail, but also how they may be questioned, countered, or even employed as a tool to bring to the fore and/or deconstruct those very legacies.
The idea of haunting has permeated literary and cultural texts for centuries. While material hauntings tend to connote windswept houses tormented by ghosts and spectres, they also serve as a way of forging a connection between an unresolved past, the troubled present, and imagined futures. The figure of the spectre became a byword for the “disjunction in the presence of being” (Goellner 5), pointing to the conflicting connection between the present and the past. Indeed, “[i]nstead of demanding a distancing, the twists and turns of haunting manifest as a thinking against or after” (Blanco and Peeren 32). While haunted houses and ghosts are the most classic exponents of hauntings, the postcolonial often engages with other sites of haunting: borders and liminal spaces, loci of violent suppression, and communities who themselves have been haunted by their colonial histories and legacies, as well as environmental destruction. In these contexts, hauntings often manifest as metaphoric “specters raised by colonial violence, trauma, atrocities, control, dispossession, dehumanization, . . . disease” (Goellner 3) as well as environmental destruction.
In addition to versatile examinations of hauntings within various cultural products, the volume employs the notion of haunting to critically engage with the broader field of postcolonial studies as it intersects and, at times, stands in tension with other approaches. It thereby aims to open discussions of constructing new frameworks within which colonial legacies may be shed and their hauntings finally banished—or if such an undertaking is even possible. The volume therefore asks the following: How can we, if at all, productively work within a postcolonial framework going forward? More importantly, (how) can we change, evade, or circumvent exclusionary systems of knowledge production (e.g., pay-walled publishing monopolized by institutions located in the ‘West’) by drawing, for instance, on digital spaces not confined and hidden away behind paywalls?
We are particularly looking for contributions which address and/or engage with the following:
- How the postcolonial field may indeed still be haunted by its colonial legacies. This includes, but is not limited to, the continuance of Eurocentrism and the dominance of the West and its academic institutions in the production of knowledge as well as the perseverance of dichotomies such as margins/centre that neglect experiences outside such binaries.
- How such hauntings may be countered, within and outside of academia.
- Given the predominance of former British imperialism in the postcolonial field, we are also open to contributions exploring the notion of hauntings stemming from other European colonial legacies (French, Dutch, Portuguese, etc).
This volume strives towards diversity in representation, considering imperial legacies from multiple angles, across various genre, media, and regions. While anchored within the larger field of literary and cultural studies, this volume invites a variety of theoretical and methodological frameworks that enable new and radical approaches to a wide range of subject matters.
Deadline: Please submit an extended abstract (500-800 words) along with a research bibliography as well as a short author bio (100 words) by July 15th, 2025, to theruinsofempire@gmail.com.
Abstracts will be accepted on a rolling basis. Full articles (6000-8000 words, Chicago Citation Style) will be due October 15th, 2025. Please note that the articles will go through peer review process after initial reviews by the editors.
Nadine Ellinger & Danica Danica Stojanovic-Schaffrath
