Anti-Colonial/De-Colonial
Text and Print in the Cold War Era: Lives and Afterlives
7-8 February 2025, Calcutta
IRNPPC Kolkata Conference Poster
This conference of the International Research Network on Postcolonial Print Cultures (IRNPPC), co-funded by a UChicago Provost’s Global Faculty Award 2025, investigates the role of print in anti-colonial resistance and de-colonial thought in the context of the Cold War. It builds on recent scholarship that restores the Cold War as one of the shaping elements of decolonizing struggles (Popescu 2020; Orsini, Srivastava, Zecchini 2022). During the Cold War, literature and art were weaponized, and an impressive range of resources channeled to regulate their production and consumption, through censorship and propaganda. Battles for intellectual/political allegiance and emancipation were fought in a proliferating body of periodicals, pamphlets, posters, and magazines, generating literature with an activist agenda committed to cultural and political autonomy. The project’s principal aims are: to explore the role of printed texts in exercising and sustaining a critical culture which emancipated people from the asymmetries and alignments of a colonial / Cold War postcolonial order; to map the student movements, decolonization struggles, and feminist liberation movements that took place around and after 1968, and ask in what ways print participated in these local and global movements; and third, to explore the role of Cold War era print in producing “classic” literary texts, by writers such as Nirmal Verma, Coetzee, Gordimer, Neruda, or Octavia Paz. We seek to examine these texts, their afterlives in the current era, and the politics of their survival (or otherwise) in print, in archives, and in their digital surrogates.
Other areas of interest include Third-Worldist and Soviet-era magazines and the development of tricontinental and non-aligned alliances; small presses, magazines and print collectives in the era of decolonization; strategies of writing, practices of translation, and a publishing culture that produced editions of writers, thinkers and poets across metropolitan and decolonizing spaces (Europe, Asia, and Africa); the function of (and spaces for) literary criticism in postcolonial contexts; and how ‘theory’ travels to the vernacular (for instance in the Bengali little magazines which have put to use and contested European poststructuralist thinkers).
We will address these questions comparatively by bringing together an international group of scholars of print culture from diverse disciplines, who work on literatures of different regions and in diverse languages, at a two-day conference in Kolkata, hosted by two partner institutions of the IRNPPC: the Center for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and the School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University.
Full program of the conference is forthcoming.