Iaclals Annual Conference 2010

Theme: Word, Image and Music in the Age of New Media: Postcolonial Readings
4-6 January 2010
Utkal University, Bhubaneswar

The privileging of the written word in general and the literary text in particular has led to the postcolonial condition being examined and theorized largely in relation to literature. As a consequence, the diverse cultural production of a large part of the postcolonial world falling outside the verbal – both traditional narrative and performing genres and the new electronically mediated arts – is excluded from the category of culture. However, in the age of new media dominated by the visual and the aural, representations of the postcolonial experience in film, television, music, and art compete with those in literature. How do new technologies alter the way the postcolony represents itself? How do the new cultures of circulation differ from those in the past? What happens to literature in the new media age and how does the verbal text engage with other kinds of texts? What is the role that translation plays in this era of visualization? What is the impact of technology on global communication? This Conference aims to call attention to the wide array of traditional and contemporary performing, visual and plastic arts that complement and supplement the literary. By bringing together scholars from all fields of cultural production – fiction, film, music, dance, arts, translation and so on – we hope to initiate a conversation between different postcolonial cultural spaces and thus to generate a new understanding of the colonial and the postcolonial.

Papers are invited in all areas relating to the general theme of the conference. Some such areas are listed below.

• Defining Culture
• Aesthetics and Politics
• The Verbal and the Visual
• Literature and Film
• Text and Performance
• Technologies of Production and Dissemination
• Purity and Hybridity
• The New Media
• The Culture Industry
• The Image Text
• Sound Cultures
• Resistance, Identity, Community
• New subjectivities
• Translation

Abstracts for papers (300 words) should be mailed to Dr Brinda Bose at iaclalsdelhi@yahoo.com by October 15th 2009. Acceptances will be mailed by November 5th. Members who want to be considered for the CDN IACLALS Prize should submit the full text of their papers (approximately 2,200 words) by email by November 25th.

The IACLALS Annual Conference 2010 is co-hosted by the Department of English, and the Directorate of Distance and Continuing Education, Utkal University, with Professor Jatin Nayak as our local coordinator.