The South Asian Short Story Conference

The South Asian Short Story
A one-day conference at the
University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
September 10, 2010

CALL FOR PAPERS

The short story has had an unusual importance and popularity in the cultural life of decolonising and contemporary postcolonial societies. In South Asia in particular it has flourished within national and mainstream publishing institutions as well as under their radar in innumerable local journals and presses and more recently in proliferating electronic media. This conference will take up issues of origins, boundaries and new directions in the South Asian short story, placing equal emphasis on writing in English and other languages. We will consider the many negotiations that take place between genres and languages, and the contested borders of local, national, and diasporic affiliations. At the same time as we explore some of its common preoccupations, we will begin to redress the surprising under-theorisation of this area of literary production: what is the appeal and reach of the form, what are the relations between its popular and marginal manifestations, how does it mediate its multiple vernacular and Euro-American origins, and how does it inform or disrupt our understanding of literary cultures within and beyond South Asia?

Keynote address by
Professor Vinay Dharwadker

Participants include: Aamer Hussein,
Francesca Orsini, Neelam Srivastava, Lyn
Innes, Michael Hutt, Alex Tickell, Shital
Pravinchandra

Venue: Seminar Room 3, Grimond Building,
University of Kent.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers. Themes may include (but are certainly not restricted to):

Translation and cross-regional influences

Theorising the South Asian short story: genres, affiliations and origins

Film and the short story

Displacement and travel

Sites of reception

Illness and sexual violence

Homes, nations, fragments

Send queries and abstracts (200-300 words) to Dr Alex Padamsee and Professor Abdulrazak Gurnah at SouthAsianStory@kent.ac.uk .
Deadline for receipt of proposals July 10th.

Attendance is free but please contact Dr Alex Padamsee (A.Padamsee@kent.ac.uk)
to reserve your place. Full conference details, along with travel and accommodation
can be found at the conference website: http://www.kent.ac.uk/english/postcolonial-
conference.html .

For any other queries contact either Dr Alex Padamsee or Professor Abdulrazak Gurnah
(A.S.Gurnah@kent.ac.uk).


September 10, 2010

9:15-9:45 Conference registration and coffee in Grimond Building Foyer.

9:45-10:45 Keynote address: Professor Vinay Dharwadker (University of Wisconsin-
Madison): ‘Modernism, realism, and experimentalism: the short story and social
transformation in South Asia’

10:45-11:00 Coffee and tea

11:00-12:30 Panel 1: Re-reading contexts
Dr Neelam Srivastava (University of Newcastle): ‘Relating the part to the whole? The
Indian short story and anthologization’
Dr Shital Pravinchandra (SOAS): ‘Not just ‘prose’: the South Asian short story and
postcolonial studies’
Dr Francesca Orsini (SOAS): ‘High expectations: the Hindi short story between genre
definition and generic instability’

12:30-1:30 Lunch

1:30-3:00 Panel 2 Dislocations
Dr Alex Tickell (University of Portsmouth): ‘The Bengali Jacobins: revolution and
insurgency in early Indian fictions in English’
Professor Michael Hutt (SOAS): ‘The Nepali story: from rural parable to urban
alienation’
Storm Mukherji-Barrett (University of Newcastle): ‘Representations of the city in the
Indian English short story’

3:00-3:15 Coffee and tea

3:15-5:00 Panel 3 Global locations
Professor Lyn Innes (University of Kent): ‘Contexts for reading Cornelia Sorabji’s short
fiction’
Dr Claire Chambers/James Dodge (Leeds Metropolitan University): ‘Muslim
cosmopolitics: Daniyal Mueenuddin and the Pakistani short story’
Antara Chatterjee (University of Leeds): ‘The short story in articulating diasporic
subjectivities in Jhumpa Lahiri’
Professor Aamer Hussein (University of Southampton): ‘Heterogeneity and the South
Asian writer’

Attendance is free. To reserve a place contact Dr Alex Padamsee
(A.Padamsee@kent.ac.uk) or Professor Abdulrazak Gurnah (A.S.Gurnah@kent.ac.uk).