Newsletter #10 – September 2025

IRNPPC Events

We are thrilled to have Hana Morgenstern (University of Cambridge) come talk to us about ‘Revolutionary Papers’, the international research collaboration exploring the impact of 20th century anticolonial and postcolonial periodicals which she co-directs.
Date: Friday, Oct 3, 2025
Time: 9AM CT | 3PM BST | 7.30PM IST

Join Zoom Meeting
https://uchicago.zoom.us/j/3326833765?pwd=d3kyeVF3MmVkVUhDRzgzdlFVbDFCQT09&omn=97542531134

Meeting ID: 332 683 3765
Passcode: 688923

Panel 5: Institutions and Periodicals on Display
with Adom Getachew (University of Chicago), Elisabeth ‘Liz’ Gomis (Maison des mondes africains, Paris), Devika Singh (Courtauld Institute of Art, London)

Postcolonial Print Cultures: Exhibition-Making, Museography and Textual/Visual Interactions

The workshop of the International Research Network on Postcolonial Print Cultures (IRNPPC) co-organized by Josephine McDonagh and Laetitia Zecchini, and sponsored by CNRS, University of Chicago International Institute of Research in Paris (IIRP), and University of Chicago Nicholson Center for British Studies took place at the John W. Boyer Center in Paris on September 18-19, 2025, and was a huge success!

Find the concept note, schedule, and link to abstracts here!

Call for Applications

Call for Papers:
Seminar: Tricontinental Magazine and the Third World Left in the Era of Decolonization” for ACLA 2025
Organisers: Robert J.C. Young and Neelam Srivastava
Deadline: October 2, 2025

Papers are invited for a seminar proposal for the 2026 Meeting of ACLA(American Comparative Literature Association), which will take place in Montréal, Feb 26 – March 1, 2026. The portal will accept paper submissions until October 2. We will be informed of the outcome of whether the seminar panel has been accepted by December 1, 2025.Papers are invited on all aspects of the journal, including production, editing, circulation, readership, intellectual content, and more. Possible topics could cover, but are not limited to:

  • Tricontinental and the Cuban revolution
  • The dissemination and influence of the journal beyond Cuba
  • Editions of the journal in four languages and the role of multi-lingualism in the development of anticolonial revolutionary thought
  • Tricontinental and visual culture (the famous photo of Ernesto Che Guevara taken by Alberto Korda and first published in the journal helped to establish the popular iconography of Che as a global symbol of revolution)
  • Tricontinental and postcolonial theory
  • Contemporary legacies of Tricontinental and Tricontinentalism
Find the concept note here.
You can submit the paper abstract here.
For further information on ACLA and the process for submitting a paper, please go to the website: https://www.acla.org/annual-meeting
Call for Papers:
Deadline: 30 September, 2025Members of the International Group for Studies of the Colonial Periodical Press proposed three panels to the CHAM Conference “On the Move – Diasporas, Mobilities and Transcultural Practices in a Changing World”. The event will be held on 15th, 16th and 17th April 2026 at NOVA University Lisbon – Colégio Almada Negreiros (CAN), Campolide campus.The panels are:
P12: Mobility in a Post-Bandung World: from Anticolonial Solidarity to Postcolonial ExchangesP20: Nonhuman Mobilities and Immobilities in the Colonial Built EnvironmentP23: Anticolonial Press in Western MetropolesProposals must be sent through this form by the 30th of September.

Call for Papers:

Abstract: October 31, 2025 (up to 500 words)
Full Chapter: December  30, 2025 (5,000–7,000 words)

Dr. Ashutosh Kumar from the Department of Hindi, University of Hyderabad along with research colleague Mr. Mohammad Kamaran Siddiqui are in the process of editing a forthcoming volume titled Proscription Literature and Performance. This is a call for chapters for edited volume onEnacting Curtailment: Practices of Censorship in Colonial India. This interdisciplinary volume will explore themes of censorship and resistance in the literature, art, performance, film, sound, history, and related fields within the humanities and social sciences. For more information contact:

Ashutosh Kumar (University of Hyderabad) ashutoshpandey010@gmail.com
Mohammad Kamaran Siddiqi (Jawaharlal Nehru University) kamrancrazzyfrog@gmail.com

Events of IRNPPC Members

Lecture:

Books in their Elements: Print Culture in the Age of Climate Change | The Panizzi Lectures 2025

Delivered by Professor Isabel Hofmeyr, Professor Emeritus at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

Venue: Eliot Room, British Library. You can also access this event online.
Dates: 27 October, 30 October, 3 November

This year the Panizzi Lecture series consists of three lectures given by Isabel Hofmeyr.

  • Monday 27 October, 18.30: Lecture 1 – Plants, politics and print in South Africa: Botany and buried books – Smuts, Gandhi and Mandela
  • Thursday 30 October, 18.30: Lecture 2 – Insects, colonial archives and postcolonial book history
  • Monday 3 November, 18.30: Lecture 3 – Dried plants and print: Herbaria and African herbalists
Symposium:

53rd Annual Conference on South Asia | University of Wisconsin-Madison

Printing Without Permanence: The Periodical in South Asia
Organizers: Titas Bose, Supurna Dasgupta
Dates: October 22, 2025

  • Panel 1: Periodicals and Colonial Publics
    Sanjukta Poddar, Darshana Sreedhar Mini, Sneha Krishnan
  • Panel 2: Periodicals and Minority Voices
    Haider Shahbaz, Laetitia Zecchini, Titas Bose
  • Panel 3: Periodicals and “Glo-cal” Modernities
    Anjali Nerlekar, Supurna Dasgupta, Charu Singh

Recent Publications

Iqbal, Asif. Bangladesh in Anglophone and Vernacular Literature: Cultural Imaginings of a Postcolonial Nation.Routledge, 2025.

The author studies the impact of Muslim nationalism on the subaltern life-worlds of East Bengal during the Partition, religious minorities and their insecurity in East Pakistan, East Pakistan’s political insurgencies, the victims of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, the Indian stake in the 1971 War, and the cosmopolitan interpretations of the war. The literary and cultural texts that inform this project include contemporary Bengali novels, South Asian Anglophone literature, as well as selected visual media and digital sources.

IRNPPC website : You can consult our digitized archives here. This is a work in progress, and we welcome suggestions you may have for us to include in this section.

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