Postcolonial Narrations 2025
Inner Circles: Kinship, Inclusion, and Inaccessibility
We encourage applicants from different disciplines, institutions and linguistic backgrounds. By bringing together our own community, we hope to do our part to reconfigure the bounds of the ‘inner circle’ – to transform it from a closed loop into a porous and generative nucleus.
We welcome papers by early career researchers on and beyond the following topics:
● Literary inheritance, elites, and ‘gatekeepers’: marginality and exclusion from the ‘inner circles’ of literature or slippages at their borders and/or thresholds
● Exits (or exclusions) from the ‘imagined communities’ of the nation, region, or diaspora and the literary ancestries they invoke or disrupt
● Hegemonic and disobedient models and practices within ‘the domestic sphere’ of kinship and the family: nonnormative, queer, and Indigenous kinship networks from a postcolonial perspective
● ‘The Loop of History’ in literary form: repetition, (re)memory, and intergenerational transmission or inheritance as well as circularity and nestedness in narrative modes
● ‘Mother tongues’ and the linguistic circles forged or compromised by exile, diaspora, migration, the (re)formation of nations/states, the globalised spread of dialects, sociolects, jargon, etc.
Submission Guidelines and Details
Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words and bios of no more than 100 words to postcolonialnarrations[at]g-a-p-s.net by June 30 2025.
The conference is jointly organised by members of the University of Oxford and Ludwig-Maximilian Universität. It will take place on the 23rd and 24th of September 2025, at St Hilda’s College, the University of Oxford.
For more information on the conference format, please visit:
https://postcolonial-narrations.net