Women's and Gender Studies / Interdisciplinary Humanities

Hybrid: The session will be held in-person but a few remote presentations may be included.

Amrita Basu Roy Chowdhury (Lady Brabourne College)

The twenty-first century is continuously defined by geopolitical shifts, armed conflict, environmental precarity, and evolving border regimes, within which migration operates as a critical locus of global transformation. This physical transgression of geopolitical boundaries inevitably instigates a profound restructuring of individual and collective subjectivities. Literature functions as a dynamic repository for these complex trajectories, articulating the psychological, political, and cultural exigencies of displacement and resettlement. Crucially, migration is a highly gendered phenomenon; an individual’s positionality is negotiated and reconfigured at every stage of the diasporic process—from the structural catalysts for departure to the physical perils of transit and the socio-political parameters of host nations. Global literary traditions rigorously interrogate these intersections, offering critical frameworks to analyze the nuances of home, alienation, and hybridity. This session aims to examine how global narratives represent the friction between shifting geopolitical borders and the ontological reconstruction of the gendered self. Consequently, it intends to investigate how authors across diverse historical epochs, geographic regions, and genres textualize the quest for belonging. By transcending static regional paradigms, this session highlights the multi-faceted modalities through which literature maps human mobility.

This session holds immense academic significance by applying an intersectional framework to global displacement. It bridges the analytical gap between individual trauma and macro-level geopolitical structures through the concept of community. Ultimately, it redefines world literature by treating textuality as a dynamic repository for marginalized subjectivities.