IRNPPC event: International Conference
February 7-8 2025, International Conference: Anti-Colonial/De-Colonial Text and Print in the Cold War Era: Lives and Afterlives
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. The conference brings 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. Find the conference note and program schedule here.
Upcoming IRNPPC seminars
Seminar 1: We invite you to join us on zoom on Friday, February 21, 2025, at 9AM CT (8.30PM IST | 3PM GMT) for a discussion of Aakriti Mandhwani’s new book Everyday Reading: Middlebrow Magazines and Book Publishing in Post-Independence India, published by UMass Press in 2024. You can find the introduction online here.
Seminar 2: Friday, March 7th 2025 at 9AM CT (8.30PM IST | 3PM GMT) Hayley Toth will be talking about her archival research at the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection in Chicago, where she explored the print activities and cultural logic of an explicitly political organisation, the National Alliance of Black Feminists that was officially founded in Chicago in 1976. More details of the talk can be found here.
Recent Publications of IRNPPC Members & Affiliates
Baer, Ben and Smaran Dayal. Spider-Mother: The Fiction and Politics of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. Warbler Press, 2024.
Dhingra, Kanupriya. Old Delhi’s Parallel Book Bazaar. Cambridge University Press, 2024. 
Dhital, Pragya. The Technopolitics of Communication in Modern India: Paper Chains and Viral Phenomena. Bloomsbury, 2025. (Forthcoming, January 23, 2025)
Other News
Symposium
Dynamics of the Black Diaspora
January 21-22, France Chicago Center, Paris. The Chicago Cluster of the Institute of the Americas presents a two-day symposium focusing on the networks of intellectual, artistic, material and political exchanges of black diasporas, especially between the United States, France and the Caribbean. More details about the symposium, including the registration link to attend online, can be found here.
Call for Applications:
University of Brussels seeks a postdoctoral researcher to work on Ugandan literary, cultural and/or student magazines (1940s-60s). Vacancy details (in Dutch but soon to be available in English) can be found here. Application deadline February 28, 2025. All questions may be directed to cedric.van.dijck@vub.be
Summer School:
Bookings are open for a week-long summer school course “Modern Political Pamphlets”, offered by Pragya Dhital, which looks at various non-European examples of the form. This is part of London Rare Books School, and is scheduled for Week 2, 23-27 June, 2025. Concessions and bursaries are available for students.
More details can be found here.
Call For Papers:
The National Library of Angola, in partnership with GIEIPC-IP – International Group of Studies of the Colonial Periodic Press of the Portuguese Empire, is organising the International Colloquium “50 Years of Dipanda. The African press and democracy”, with the aim of promoting studies on the history of the Angolan press and the Portuguese-speaking African Countries, exploring their cultural and political aspect, and their intellectual role in the history of the countries involved, their connections and their registration in wider intellectual networks. More details, including the call for papers, can be found here.
Archives:
A database of Hindi novels in English translation post-1947, created by PhD candidate Jey Sushil (Washington University), can be accessed here.
IRNPPC website : You can consult our section on digitalized archives here. This is a work in progress, and we welcomes 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, our intern and web administrator, at shrudutta@gmail.com