One Hundred Years of Gabriel García Márquez
Sikkim
Organization: MELOW: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the World
MELOW: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the World has been in existence since 1997 and organizes an international Conference every year. To date, it has held twenty-six such conferences. Alongside the annual main conference, MELOW also conducts other activities from time to time, including mini-conferences like the proposed one now, which bring together smaller groups of delegates to focus on specific thematic concerns.
The conference seeks to re-examine the literary corpus of Marquez, exploring how his works represent life, history, and society in Latin America, as well as the critical reception and continuing relevance of his work across time, space, cultures, and disciplines. It will explore his narrative strategies while also examining the diverse critical responses his work has generated over the decades.
The conference aims to bring together scholars working in literature, cultural studies, history, philosophy, translation studies, and related fields, encouraging interdisciplinary and comparative perspectives. In particular, attention will be paid to how Márquez’s writing travels across languages and cultures, shaping literary traditions beyond Latin America, including Asia, Africa, and the postcolonial world. It seeks to engage in a sustained reflection on his enduring legacy and assess what his work continues to mean in an increasingly fragmented, unequal, and uncertain world. The conference will focus on areas that include, but are not restricted to magic realism; memory, history, and the ethics of forgetting; power, dictatorship, and political violence; journalism, narrative truth, and literary craft; love, solitude, ageing, and human endurance; women, matriarchy, and domestic spaces; space, geography, and the imagination; comparative perspectives; adaptations, afterlives, and popular culture.
The proposed panels for the conference are:
1. Memory, Myth, and Storytelling Traditions: (Background, inheritance, and worldview) comprising oral traditions, memory as resistance to historical erasure, myth, folklore, and cultural inheritance, storytelling as survival and continuity, and the politics of remembering
2. One Hundred Years of Solitude: Time, History, and the Making of Macondo: This panel will focus on circular time and repetition, Macondo as myth, nation, and archive, family and genealogy as narrative structures, solitude as a historical and emotional condition, violence and silence as counter-history, and the role of women as custodians of memory.
3. The Major Novels: Beyond Macondo: This panel will examine García Márquez’s major novels beyond One Hundred Years of Solitude, addressing themes such as love, aging, and endurance; power, decay, and dictatorship; fate, foreknowledge, and social complicity; and waiting, dignity, and moral resilience in works including Love in the Time of Cholera, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and No One Writes to the Colonel.
4. Short Fiction and Journalism: Compression, Violence, and the Everyday: This panel will consider García Márquez’s short fiction and journalistic writing, focusing on narrative economy and control, sudden violence and moral shock, the rendering of the ordinary as uncanny, ethics of brevity, the short story as witness, journalism as craft and apprenticeship, narrative credibility, the chronicle as a literary form, and the ethics of witnessing violence and injustice.
5. Translation, Reception, and Global Afterlives: This panel will explore the translation and circulation of García Márquez’s work across languages and cultures, his relationship to postcolonial literatures, and his continuing influence through adaptation, reinterpretation, and cultural afterlives.
These subthemes are indicative rather than exhaustive and are intended to encourage diverse critical and interdisciplinary engagements with García Márquez’s work.
Submission Guidelines: In a WORD document, your abstract ( in 200–250 words) along with a short bio (in about 100 words), may be sent on one of the above themes in the format given below to minimelow2025@gmail.com
Panel under which the abstract may be considered (1 to 5):
Mode of presentation: online (only for foreign delegates) or in-person?
Do you need hotel accommodation? Yes or No:
(If yes) Shared or Single:
(If shared) State your gender, please. M/F:
Is ppt required? Yes or No:
Name of the participant:
Designation and Affiliation:
Email id:
Title of the abstract:
Abstract in 200-250 words
Keywords (4-5):
Brief Bio: (200 words. Please mention your expertise–if any-in this area.)
The Subject of your email should read: ABSTRACT FOR MINI-MELOW 2026.
Important dates
Last date for submission of abstract: 1 March 2026
Notification of acceptance: 15 March 2026
Full papers: to be submitted by 15 April 2026
Participation Details
· The conference will be in-person for Indian Delegates.
· It is a self-supporting event: participants will bear their travel and accommodation costs and also pay a Membership and Delegate Fee. Subsidized arrangements for food and stay will be facilitated by the organizers.
· Details regarding Registration fee/accommodation will be sent along with the acceptance letters.
· Participants from outside India may present online. They will not be charged any Membership or Delegate Fee.
· Selected papers will be considered for publication in a peer-reviewed volume to be published by a reputed international press.
Organizers
· MELOW: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the World
URLs: https://melow.in/, https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100003036474708, https://melusmelow.blogspot.com/
· Local Host: Department of English, SRM University Sikkim, https://srmus.ac.in/
RSVP: minimelow2025@gmail.com
https://melow.in/conference/14
Manju Jaidka