Frames, Terrains, and Worldings: Comics and Storytelling across the Global South
Organization: Special Issue: Global South Literary Studies (Taylor & Francis))
Abstract: This special issue brings together innovative and interdisciplinary comics scholarship that rethinks the epistemic, aesthetic, political, material, and decolonial aspects of comics across the Global South. These forms prompt renewed reflection and inquiry into what it means to draw knowledge, memory, community, dissent, and futurity, while simultaneously interrogating the foundational categories of representation, authorship, narrative form, and colonial epistemology.
Topics may include but not limited to:
• Indigenous visual traditions and proto-comics
• Decolonial caricature and critique
• Nation-building, pedagogy, and mythography
• Caste, gender, sexuality, and representation
• Comics journalism, reportage, documentary comics
• War memory, partition, conflict, and reconciliation
• Environmental storytelling and ecological activism
• Migration, precarity, urbanity
• Illness, disability, trauma, caregiving
• Digital webcomics, zine cultures, feminist/queer collectives
• Materiality, circulation, festivals, exhibitions, and comics economies
• Diasporic and transnational graphic worlds
• Decolonial visual epistemologies, Global South world-making, and Futurity
Submission Instructions: A 500-word abstract (excluding bibliography) and a 100-word biographic statement should be sent as a single MS Word file to special issue editors Ajith Cherian, Ana Ferreira and Sathyaraj Venkatesan (comicsgsls@gmail.com) no later than July 15, 2026. If you have any questions,
do not hesitate to contact the special issue editors. The guest editors will communicate their decision on the abstract submission by August 15, 2026. The deadline for submitting full manuscripts is December 31, 2026.
It will be highly appreciated if the potential contributors discuss the aims and scope of their abstracts to avoid repetitive and highly discussed issues, given that unnoticed and overlooked areas should be considered. Thus, if you have any notes of interest, please contact the guest editors via email before the submission of your abstract. Articles should be no more than 8,000 words, including the abstract, keywords, main body of the article, figures, endnotes, and references. All completed articles must be initially emailed to the guest editor, and following their feedback, submitted to the journal’s online submission portal for external review.
Please visit the website of Global South Literary Studies to prepare the article as per author instructions that can be accessed at
https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmissionshow=instructions&journalCode=rgsl20
Ajith Cherian