On Feb 7th and 8th, 2025 the International Research Network on Postcolonial Print Cultures (IRNPPC) held its annual international conference, titled “Anticolonial/Decolonial Text and Print in the Cold War Era: Lives and Afterlives”at Kolkata. Attended by academics from USA, Canada, UK, France and India, and sponsored by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), University of Chicago, Provost’s Global Faculty Award; and University of Chicago, Nicholson Center, the conference was hosted by IRNPPC partner institutions Jadavpur University and CSSSC (Center for Studies in Social Sciences), Kolkata.
[Image 1: Conference Poster]
[You can find the conference schedule here]
Preceding the conference, on the evening of Feb 6th, Laetitia Zecchini moderated a conversation between writers Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Amit Chaudhuri, titled “Living Through and After the Cold War”. Held at JBMRC (Jadunath Bhavan Museum and Research Center), Kolkata, it opened up questions about the Cold War era that reverberated over the next two days.
[Image 2: “Living Through and After the Cold War” Invite]
The conference on Cold War Print Cultures saw six panels and 15 papers over two days that explored the role of print in anti-colonial resistance and de-colonial thought in the context of the Cold War when literature and art were weaponized, and battles for intellectual/political emancipation or allegiance were fought in a proliferating body of periodicals, pamphlets, posters, and magazines, generating literature with an activist agenda committed to cultural and political autonomy.
[Image 3: Day 1 panel with Abhijit Gupta (Jadavpur University), Shrutakirti Dutta (University of Chicago), Titas Bose (University of Chicago), moderated by Sarbajit Maitra (St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata)]
The conference’s principal aims were 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; to explore the role of Cold War era print in producing “classic” literary texts, by writers such as Nirmal Verma, J. M. Coetzee, Pablo Neruda, John Berger, Nissim Ezekiel, and Octavia Paz. We sought 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 included 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).
[Image 4: Day 2 panel with Sergio Delgado Moya (University of Chicago) and Neelam Srivastava (Newcastle University)]
[Image 5: (from left) IRNPPC Members Rosinka Chaudhuri (CSSSC), Rochona Majumdar (UChicago), Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (NYU), Laetitia Zecchini (CNRS-UChicago), Elizabeth Holt (Bard College), Jo McDonagh (UChicago), Supriya Chaudhuri (Jadavpur University), Neelam Srivastava (Newcastle University), Robert J.C. Young (NYU), Jonathan Sachs (Concordia University)]
Scholars of print culture addressed these topics comparatively. They spoke on the printed texts and images in a wide range of media – from civil service reports to small magazines and newspapers, and from pulp fiction to poetry; and from different regions of the world – including Bengal, Mexico, Prague, and Palestine. Paper topics ranged from socialist unities in 1960’s India to sensationalist newspapers from 1950’s-80’s America, from visual reportage in Hungry Bengal to Soviet picture books for children in India, from deep dives into Bengali comics and little magazines, to affective readings of Illustrated Weeklies and Indian parliamentary reports during the Cold War.
[Image 6: (from left) Sarbajit Mitra (St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata), Elizabeth Holt (Bard College), Anirban Das (CSSSC), Rosinka Chaudhuri (CSSSC), Laetitia Zecchini (CNRS-UChicago), Rochona Majumdar (University of Chicago), Shrutakirti Dutta (University of Chicago), Titas Bose (University of Chicago), Abhijit Gupta (Jadavpur University), Supriya Chaudhuri (Jadavpur University), Neelam Srivastava (Newcastle University), Sergio Delgado Moya (University of Chicago)]