IRNPPC Events

BOOK LAUNCH
Join us on zoom for the upcoming book launch of

seminar, hosted by Neelam Srivastava (Newcastle University) and Laetitia Zecchini (CNRS-UChicago). Participants include contributors: Anne Bang, James Brennan, Joel Cabrita, Jeremy Dell, Sara Marzagora, Khwezi Mkhize, Phoebe Musandu, Maria Suriano.

Date: Friday, 13th March 2026
Time: 9AM Central Time | 10AM Eastern Time

The next IRNPPC conference will take place at the University of Chicago on November 5th and 6th, 2026. This conference will be a follow-up to our workshop in Paris that took place in September 2025, focusing on textual/visual interaction in postcolonial print and mixed media.

Events of IRNPPC Members

SEMINAR
Literatures of the Global South

“Poetry and Independence: Debates in Verse in the Swahili-Language Press (Tanzania, 1960–1965)”
Pierre Leroux (Nanterre University)

Seminar led by Elara Bertho, Céline Gahungu, Maëline Le Lay, and Tristan Leperlier.

Date: March 5, 2026 | 2:00–4:00 p.m.
Venue: ENS-Ulm, IHMC Room, 45 rue d’Ulm

CONFERENCE & PANELS

The American Comparative Literature Association’s (ACLA) Annual Meeting

Dates: Feb 26 – March 1, 2026

Several members of the IRNPPC network are hosting or participating in panels related to print culture, the global south, postcolonial literature, and more at this year’s ACLA meeting:

1. The World in South Asian Literatures, organised by Zain Mian
2. Archiving Socialisms: Material and Intellectual Legacies, organised by María Isabel Alfonso
3. Theorizing Translation in the Global South: Networks and Sites of World Literary Formations, organised by Razieh Araghi.

For information on other exciting panels please go here.

Call for Applications

CALL FOR PAPERS
Technologies of Belonging: The Periodical in South Asian Literary and Cultural Histories

Journal: South Asian Review
Abstract Deadline: 15 April 2026
Manuscript Deadline: 1 October 2026
Editors: Supurna Dasgupta, Sunayani Bhattacharya

Contributors are invited to explore the following themes, but are not limited to:

● Periodical and / as literature (genre, form, experimentation, etc)
● Periodicals rooted specifically to a locale/community/group (eg. caste journals, dialect-specific magazines, chapbooks with limited print, community zines, etc)
● Networks of modernism (eg. little magazines, avant-garde aesthetics)
● Political periodicals (organizational publications, ideological positions, etc)
● Construction of literary taste and citizenship (eg. mainstream or middlebrow magazines)
● Desires and pleasures (gender, advertisements, consumption, pulp, games, etc)
● Print and other technologies (multimedial engagements, infrastructures, etc)
●Democratizing voice and access (form and circulation, finances, materialities)
● Countering state-sponsored narratives (resistance, banning, and underground journals)
● Global world-making (translations, transregional news, letters etc)

Find the concept note here.

CALL FOR PAPERS
Social and Cultural Histories in African and African Diaspora Print Networks

Conference: African Studies Association of the UK, 2026
Deadline: 30 April, 2026
Find more details here.

The stream welcomes presentations not only on main feature stories which highlight the significance of observing African history through the gaze of black print, but how methodologies are used to analyse content and print production. Presentations on all and any aspects of print: from the covers to the classified ads, from colour to cartoons are welcome. Any or all aspects ofmagazine production can be considered from design to marketing; theoretical perspectives from aesthetics (such as Roland Barthes), to material culture (such as Leah Price). Presentations can focus on magazines, zines or newsletters, from any country on the continent or the African diaspora inany language. Print material in other languages should be accompanied by a visual presentation with English sub-titles. Scholars are invited to examine these suggestions and bring forth their own in order to illuminate the dynamism of African social and cultural histories through print networks.

Please contact Kadija Geroge if you plan to submit an abstract/panel to this stream kadijageorge@gmail.com

Recent Publications

James, Leslie. The Moving Word: How the West African and Caribbean Press Shaped Black Political Thought. Harvard University Press, 2025.

In the 1930s and 1940s, amid intensifying anticolonial activism across the British Empire, dozens of new West African and Caribbean newspapers printed their first issues. With small staffs and shoestring budgets, these newspapers nonetheless became powerful vehicles for the expression of Black political thought. Drawing on papers from Trinidad, Jamaica, Ghana, and Nigeria, Leslie James shows how the press on both sides of the Atlantic nourished anticolonial and antiracist movements.

“The Language Challenge: Modernisms in Multilingual South Asia,” Co-edited by Preetha Mani and Jennifer Dubrow. Modernism/Modernity. Volume 32, No. 3, September, 2025.

 

Journal of European Periodical Studies, Volume 10, Issue 2, 2025.

This open issue brings together a transnational selection of articles spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tracing how periodicals shape value, borders, networks, and participation across languages, regions, and media cultures.

Manzo, Kerry. Queer Contiguities of Nigerian Literature. African Humanities and the Arts Series. Michigan State University Press, April 2026.

Drawing on interdisciplinary research and archival materials—including institutional records, personal letters, and ephemera—the book presents a new framework for understanding Nigerian literature, one in which sexuality and gender containment through discourses of heteronormativity in colonial and postcolonial Nigeria are central to its problematics and poetics.

Mukim, Mantra. “Fugitive Poem: Bharat Bhawan Archive, Bhopal Gas Tragedy, and World Poetry.” English: Journal of the English Association, Volume 74, Issue 284, Spring 2025, Pages 60–77.

Iqbal, Asif. “Desh or Ummah: Bengali Muslim Literary Enigma in Anisuzzaman’s Muslim-Manas O Bangla Sahitya, 1757–1918”. 2025. BRAC University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Volume 12, December 2025.

 

Gentle reminder: Please send all IRNPPC news that you would like to promote (concerning publications, jobs, conferences, archives, etc) to Shrutakirti Dutta, our intern and web administrator, at shrudutta@gmail.comand to Laetitia Zecchini at laetitia.zecchini@cnrs.fr

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