SARE: Southeast Asian Review of English: Announcements

CALL FOR PAPERS: Special Issue: Vol 61, No. 1, July 2024

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 10:55:48 +0800

Our everyday life is defined by what we do. These actions are vital to the meaning of both the present and the future. The future lies in the now, and hence we need to nourish this now, the present moment, with intimacy, social engagement, aesthetic education, and resilience. That is to say, the future of the planet and possibilities of life conditions for human and more-than-human survival need to be invested with components of care and repair right here, right now.
However, the post-1990s has marked a turn to more rigid forms of suppression and disruption of the elements of care. Perhaps, a case can be made that the neoliberal regime has rendered a transformation from care-mentality to governmentality - precisely the reason why Margaret Thatcher went on to claim that there is no such thing as society: “There are individual men and women and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.”
Consequently, social infrastructures were rendered fragile, and, in many countries, they were even devoured. The extractive nature of the neoliberal regime led to the emergence of precarious lives. It also led to the onslaught of rapacious colonization of the planet. Likewise, many scholars, including Amitav Ghosh, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Achille Mbembe, ask us to reconsider our relationship with the planet, to become more cognizant of the lurking threat of destruction or extinction that awaits us if we remain inactive. They advance the need to think more collectively, and to create modes of care and repair of what Wai Chee Dimock (2020) terms the “weak planet”, where the “baseline condition” of humans and other forms of life is vulnerability and susceptibility to harm. Dimock advocates human agency in initiating interactions and collaborations for resilience building, because “these precarious mediations release us from paralysis, sustaining hope in a future still unforeclosed, weakly but meaningfully open to our efforts” (12)
This special issue of SARE: Southeast Asian Review of English, “Faces of Precarity: Restructuring Care-mentality in Asia,” seeks to identify and debate different forms of precarity that pervade our planetary life. It aims to discuss the relevance of care in our daily lives that has the potential to mitigate the disruptions caused by extractive economies. We identify care not just as an affective mode; rather it is to be seen as an action and process that hold possibilities to create sustainable futures.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:
• healthcare privatisation
• urbanisation and precarity
• migration and neoliberal labour market
• digital trauma and care aesthetics
• intersections with disability studies
• ageing population and neoliberal ageing policies
• food security and hunger
• conflict, trauma and healing
• environmental precarity
• consumerism and materialism
• mental health
• social media, self-care, identity
• post-work society
• post-biopolitical porous entities
• postgenomic body-politics
• the politics, and ethics of care
• trans-corporeal ethics
• queer identities
• hope and utopia
• neoliberalism and socioeconomic equality
We solicit articles that deal with the above-mentioned themes via literature, popular culture, and cinema. Articles should not exceed 6000 words. Kindly submit an abstract of 150 – 200 words with 6 keywords.

Abstract submission deadline: October 31, 2023
Article submission deadline: February 28, 2024
Final draft submission: April 30, 2024
Publication date: June end, 2024
Email: precaritycare@gmail.com

CALL FOR PAPERS: SARE Volume 60, Number 2, 2023

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 10:50:37 +0800

CALL FOR PAPERS, SPECIAL ISSUE, JULY 2023: SPECIAL ISSUE: SARE, VOL. 60, No. 1, JULY 2023

Wed, 14 Sep 2022 11:49:47 +0800

Image taken by Nukhbah Taj Langah

CALL FOR PAPERS

“Religion, Secularism and Nationalism: Literature of South Asia”

Guest Editors: Nukhbah Taj Langah and Goutam Karmakar

The history of colonization has significantly impacted the understanding of three key terms within the context of South Asia: religion, secularism, and nationalism. Considering the fact that the idea of civic nationalism as a political formation is arguably a Western liberal construct that is intricately linked to imperial legacies, the overarching question remains how religion has convoluted the secular and nationalistic perceptions within the South Asian context. Religion and nationalism in South Asia are frequently determined by the racist rhetoric of certain communities and the extremist rhetoric of fundamentalism and religious fanaticism; minority politics; issues of caste, class, and ethnic identity; border politics; pseudo-secular overtones coupled with liminality; rhetoric of war and violence; right-wing politics; defensive strategies and essentialism; and diaspora and ambivalence, among others.

Based on such a convoluted context, this special issue seeks to explicate how the rich religious, political, and cultural dynamics of South Asia remain entwined with questions such as: how can democratic processes be implemented in independent states by separating politics from religion? How do certain literary texts depict the notion of nationalism expanding beyond the concept of a single nation due to the intricate ethnic, regional, and cultural offshoots? How does the idea of nations within a (independent) nation create the need for a broader understanding of nationalism? How does religious mobilization in South Asian literary narratives become a carrier of culture within and beyond South Asian countries? How can (mis)conceptions regarding religious fundamentalism be understood through the policies and politics of secularism and postcolonial nationalism? In what ways does religion in the South Asian literary landscape play a significant part in the creation of political structures and secular democracies in South Asia?

Addressing these pertinent questions, this SARE special issue aims to explore the representation of "Religion, Secularism and Nationalism" in contemporary South Asian literature. This special issue aims to investigate the extent to which religious and national identities are regarded as potent dimensions of social participation in South Asian literature. This special issue also intends to probe deeper into literary and theoretical studies of particular authors and writings to locate how religions in South Asia enhance cohesiveness among all creed-sharing adherents, regardless of their geopolitics, and how countries assert a unity of those sharing attributes, such as linguistic, racial, and ethnic diversity, within a particular geo/demography. The crucial questions raised above evidently invite us to explore the layers of identity and representation issues deeply rooted in the highly charged historical and political context of South Asia. This can be approached through the literary and cultural analysis of diverse literary productions. Contemporary South Asian literature remains significantly impacted by this dense socio-political and cultural context. Hence, themes concerning nationalism, evolving identity concerns, and resistance are reflected in the works of many South Asian writers, including: Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Rabindranath Tagore, Khushwant Singh, Rabisankar Bal, Taslima Nasreen, Kazi Nazurul Islam, Saadat Hasan Manto, Bapsi Sidhwa, Fehmida Riaz, Jameel Ahmed, Kamila Shamsie, Mohammad Hanif, Sri Nissanka, Lakdasa Wikkramasinha, Yasmin Goonerante Manjushree Thapa, Lekhnath Paudyal, Lakshmi Prasad Devkota, Prasad Koirala, Balkrishna Sama, Khaled Hosseni, Husain Salaahuddheen, Bodufenvalhuge Sidi, Ibrahim Shihab, Saikuraa Ibrahim Naeeem, and many more writers belonging to the peripheries.

We invite critical academic debates from scholars interested in exploring such challenges emerging from South Asia as represented through their primary focus on literary discourses. The thematic focus may include but is not limited to the following areas of interest reflecting through South Asian literature:

Evolving dynamics of South Asian identity

Redefining nationhood and nationalism

Tradition vs modern South Asia

Religion vs. nationalism

Place, identity and ethnic nationalism

Gender, religion and identity

Redefining Nationalism(s)

Secularism and the formation of the nation-states

South Asian Diaspora and nationalism

Ethno-nationalism and nationhood

Language, Identity and Nationalism

Religious minorities and politics of otherization

Secularism and postcolonial nationalism

Religious fundamentalism and extremism

Right-wing Politics in South Asia

Religion, war, and nationalism

Articles & Book Reviews

This SARE issue invites scholarly articles (5000 and 7000 words), and book reviews (not more than 1500 words) addressing the themes suggested above.

Creative-Non-Fiction & Poetry

We are also inviting creative prose/non-fiction and poetry (originally written in English and/or translated from other South Asian languages) related to the thematic focus of this issue. Creative non-fiction should not be longer than 4000 words.

Abstracts of 200 words (maximum), along with a 50-word author bio, are to be emailed to Guest Editors, SARE at specialissuesare@gmail.com with a copy to The Editor, SARE at sare@um.edu.my by 15 November 2022.

All decisions about the selection of contributions will be sent out by 30 November 2022.

The deadline for the submission of full papers (5000-7000 words) and/or creative non-fiction/poetry: is 1 March 2023. Submissions should be in English and uploaded to the SARE website through the “Make a Submission” portal at https://sare.um.edu.my.

Publication date: July 2023

If you have any questions related to the special issue, please direct your inquiries to The Editor, SARE at sare@um.edu.my or specialissuesare@gmail.com

About Guest Editors

Dr. Nukhbah Taj Langah, Ph.D. (English) obtained her PhD from University of Leeds, UK in 2008. She started teaching at Forman Christian College University, Lahore (Pakistan) in 2009 while also fulfilling key administrative roles within the domain of Humanities. Her doctoral research is published as a monograph entitled, Poetry as Resistance: Islam and Ethnicity in Postcolonial Pakistan (Routledge, 2011). She did her post-doc from Center of South Asia Studies (Le Centre d'Études de l'Inde et de l'Asie du Sud), Paris in 2016-17. As Charles Wallace Fellow (2018) at School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, she conducted a project focused on Siraiki Language speakers in Britain : An Ethnographic Study. Her first edited volume focused on Literary and non-Literary Responses towards 9/11 (Routledge, 2019); she also co-edited two volumes entitled, Film, Media, and Representation in Postcolonial South Asia (Routledge 2021) and Narratives of Loss and Longing: Literary developments in Post-colonial South Asia with Dr. Roshni Sengupta (School of Modern Media UPES, Dehradun, India). She has co-translated acknowledged Urdu poet, Noshi Gillani’s poems in collaboration with British poet, Lavinia Greenlaw (Poems: Noshi Gillani Enitharmon, 2008) and contemporary Siraiki poetry by into English for the Poetry Translation Center (London). She is currently coediting a book focused on marginality and identity in Pakistan with Dr. Goutam Karmakar. She is a freelance translator, a political activist and pursues interdisciplinary approaches in postcolonial studies through her teaching and research. She will be joining the department of English, University of Malaya (Kuala Lumpur) in 2023.

Goutam Karmakar, Ph.D. (English), is an Assistant Professor of English at Barabazar Bikram Tudu Memorial College, Sidho-Kanho-Birsha University, Purulia, West Bengal, India. At present, he is working as an NRF Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. His forthcoming and recently published edited books are Nation and Narration: Hindi Cinema and the Making and Remaking of National Consciousness (Routledge, forthcoming), The Poetry of Jibanananda Das: Aesthetics, Poetics, and Narratives (Routledge, forthcoming), Narratives of Trauma in South Asian Literature (Routledge), The City Speaks: Urban Spaces in Indian Literature (Routledge, 2022), and Religion in South Asian Anglophone Literature: Traversing Resistance, Margins and Extremism (Routledge, 2021). He has been published in journals, including Visual Anthropology, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Intersections, SARE, IUP Journal of English Studies, MELUS, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, Comparative Literature: East & West, Journal of International Women’s Studies, South Asia Research, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, South Asian Review, Journal of Gender Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, National Identities, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, and Asiatic among others.

CALL FOR PAPERS: SPECIAL ISSUE: Vol. 59, No. 2, December 2022

Fri, 04 Mar 2022 15:17:00 +0800

Photo credit: Lijesh Karunakaran; Concept: Dr Anitha Devi Pillai; Model: Sumi B Thomas

SPECIAL ISSUE: SARE, Vol. 59, No. 2, December 2022

CALL FOR PAPERS

“Food: Culture, Consumption, and Representation”

Guest Editor: Dr Anitha Devi Pillai

What we eat and won’t eat, food we crave, desire, or abhor, where we will eat or won’t eat, and in fact how much we eat when we eat are all deeply reflective of our heritage, our background, our exposure, and our connection to food, and to the memories that these food items bring to us. Food choices establish and perpetuate boundaries and borders. Food is closely tied to our identity. It has history and it has a story. How we experience food is personal on one level and relatable on many levels to those with whom we share geographical, cultural, and emotional ties.

SARE’s Special Issue on “Food: Culture, Consumption, and Representation” seeks to examine representations of food in literature, film, podcasts, short videos, menus, cartoons, comic strips, exhibits, and any other cultural productions of and from Asia, including its diasporas, that articulate ideas or stories about food. What can Asian-centred narratives and texts tell us about the relationship between language and food? How can Asia as a site of study contribute to discussions in or around food scholarship? In what ways can analyses of food writing and other textual matter from Asia engage debates on postcolonial, gender, and critical race studies? We are seeking insightful and thought-provoking pieces that are methodologically interesting and pay careful attention to the texts under examination.

The following list of topics is meant to be generative of ideas and is neither authoritative nor exhaustive:

Food and Fantasy
Food and Power
Food and Identity
Food and Desire
Food and Heritage
Food and Consumption and Eating Practice
Food and Addiction
Food and Rituals
Food and Travel Writing
Food and Deviance
Food and Power
Food and Religion
Food and Taboo
Food and Language
Multimodal representations of food and storytelling
Positive and negative connotations of food in literature

Articles & Book Reviews

This SARE thematic call for participation invites scholarly articles, of between 5000 and 7000 words, and book reviews of food fiction novels or anthologies, of between 1000 and 1300 words, that address, but need not be limited to, the above topics.

Abstracts of 200 words (maximum), along with a 50-word author bio, are to be emailed to The Guest Editor, SARE at anitha.pillai@nie.edu.sg with a copy to The Editor, SARE at sare@um.edu.my by 30 April 2022.

Decisions will be sent out by 15 May 2022.

The deadline for the submission of full papers is 31 August 2022. Submissions should be in English and uploaded to the SARE website through the “Make a Submission” portal at https://sare.um.edu.my.

Fiction, Creative-Non-Fiction & Poetry

You are invited to send in food fiction and poetry that address, but need not be limited to, the above topics. Fiction and Creative non-fiction should not be longer than 5000 words.

The deadline for submissions is 31 August 2022. Submissions should be in English and uploaded to the SARE website through the “Make a Submission” portal at https://sare.um.edu.my.

***

Further submission guidelines can be found on our website.

Publication date: December 2022

If you have any questions related to the special issue, please direct your inquiries to The Editor, SARE at sare@um.edu.my or anitha.pillai@nie.edu.sg.

About our Guest Editor

Anitha Devi Pillai (Ph.D, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) is Senior Lecturer at the National Institute of Education (NIE), Nanyang Technological University, where she teaches and researches on multi-disciplinary areas related to English language pedagogy (writing component), community literacy studies, academic writing, and creative writing. Dr Pillai is the recipient of three Teaching Awards: Excellence in Teaching Commendation 2018 from NIE and Teaching Merit Awards from the Singapore University of Social Sciences in 2013 and 2014.

Dr Pillai’s research on the Singapore Malayalee community was supported by a National Heritage Board (Singapore) grant and resulted in the publication of From Kerala to Singapore: Voices from the Singapore Malayalee Community (2017). She was awarded the Pravasi Express Research Excellence Award in 2017 for this study.

Dr Pillai has also authored and edited creative and non-creative fiction books. She has also translated a historical fiction novel, Sembawang: A Novel (2020), from Tamil into English. The novel was shortlisted for the Singapore History Prize by the National University of Singapore and as Best Literary Work by the Singapore Book Publishers Association. Her poems have made their way into classrooms in Singapore, India, Australia, and the Philippines. Her short stories have appeared in various anthologies including The Best Asian Short Stories 2019, Letter to My Son (2020) and Food Republic: A Singapore Literary Banquet (2020). Much of her work explores themes of identity, heritage, and culture. She also serves as Co-Director of the 16th International Conference on the Short Story in English and Editor for the prose (fiction) section of the new literary journal, Practice, Research and Tangential Activities (PR&TA). She is currently working on a collection of short stories focusing on food and love.

CALL FOR PAPERS: SPECIAL ISSUE: SARE, VOL. 59, No. 1, JULY 2022

Thu, 12 Aug 2021 17:47:41 +0800

CALL FOR PAPERS

SPECIAL ISSUE: SARE, Vol. 59, No. 1, July 2022

"EcoGothic Asia: Nature, Asia, and the Gothic Imagination"

Guest Editor: Associate Professor Li-hsin Hsu

Since the emergence of modernity, the perceived eastern emphasis on the harmony between humanity and nature has been profoundly challenged and reshaped by the process of industrialization. Asia as a geo-poetic imaginary and a geo-political locus of both utopic imagination and dystopic anxiety in literature – both non-Asian and Asian – magnifies, problematizes, or sometimes accelerates such a disquieting and polarized projection. The “EcoGothic”, as an interdisciplinary approach that investigates the intersection between the ecological and the Gothic imagination, provides a useful epistemological and methodological tool to rethink how aesthetics, philosophical thoughts and social-cultural or environmental discourses in (or about) the Asian / Pacific region complicate our understanding of human-nonhuman interactions.

We invite submissions for a special issue of SARE to explore the enmeshed human-nonhuman relationship by examining the interconnectedness between the natural, the supernatural or the unnatural, the diseased, (dis)possessed and contagious bodies - human or nonhuman – the haunted as well as haunting landscapes, and the terrifying or monstrous flora and fauna in literature in or about Asia. We ask how the EcoGothic imagination in (or about) Asia conceptualizes or addresses the notion of human-nature co-existence or the precarious state of human-nonhuman (dis)harmony. How does reading literatures of ecological crises, disasters, or extinctions help us reimagine Asia as a heterogeneous geography, both symbolically and in reality? In an age of the Anthropocene, how are our perceptions of human-nonhuman interactions redefined by the COVID-19 pandemic or other environmental/ecological crises? How does local knowledge address global issues in the environmental humanities from or about this region?

Submissions might consider how recent theories of ecologies, technologies, philosophies or sociologies might renew our ways of reading literature about human-nonhuman interactions in our time. Papers might also consider how the notion of Asia is represented or reconfigured in relation to contemporary events or interdisciplinary approaches and narratives, or how reading environmental works, both Asian and non-Asian, might assist our understanding of the EcoGothic as a multifaceted concept in refreshing directions.

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

Asia and the (un)natural / supernatural

Transcultural / Transpacific Gothic

The Gothic and Orientalism

Gothic gardens and tropical wildlife

Volcanic islands and vengeful oceans

Aliens, monsters, or ghosts / spirits in an Asian context

The inhuman, transhuman, anti-human, more-than-human / posthuman

Apocalyptic / dystopic imagination and the (non)Asian other

Deserted rural areas and haunted urban landscapes

Indigeneity and environmental injustice

Invasive species and regional Gothic

Disorder / excess / transgression in nature

Diseases and extinction

Bodily contagion and dis / trans-figuration

Migration, displacement and (im)mobility

Fear of the nonhuman world and / or the wilderness

Ecological crises and race / gender / class (in)equality

Strange natures and queer ecologies

This SARE special issue invites papers, of between 5000 and 7000 words, that address, but need not be limited to, the above questions.

Abstracts of 200 words (maximum), along with a 50-word author bio, are to be emailed to The Editor, SARE at sare@um.edu.my, with a copy to the Guest Editor at johsu@mail2.nccu.tw by 15 November 2021.

Decisions will be sent out by 30 November 2021.

The deadline for the submission of full papers is 1 March 2022. Submissions should be in English and uploaded to the SARE website through the “Make a Submission” portal at https://sare.um.edu.my.

Further submission guidelines can be found on our website.

Publication date: July 2022

If you have any questions related to the special issue, please direct your inquiries to The Editor, SARE at sare@um.edu.my.

About our Guest Editor:

Li-hsin Hsu (Ph. D in English Literature, University of Edinburgh) is Associate Professor of English at National Chengchi University, Taiwan. Her research interests include Emily Dickinson studies, Romanticism, Transatlantic studies, Transpacific studies, Orientalism, and Ecocriticism. She has published in a number of international journals, such as the Emily Dickinson Journal, Symbiosis, Cowrie and Romanticism. She is the recipient of the Academia Sinica Research Award for Junior Research Investigators in Taiwan (2019) and was a Top University Strategic Alliance Scholar at UC Berkeley (2018–2019). She has served the Emily Dickinson International Society board and the Los Angeles Review of Books Lit-World Senior Editorial team since 2018. From 2017 to August 2021, she was editor-in-chief of The Wenshan Review, an international academic journal devoted to the promotion of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches to literary and cultural studies. She has guest-edited journal issues on transculture-related topics, including a special issue on “Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations: 1776 to the Present” for The Wenshan Review (June 2018), and a special issue on “International Dickinson: Scholarship in English Translation” for The Emily Dickinson Journal (Fall 2020). She has also contributed to a number of edited volumes, such as Ephemeral Spectacles, Exhibition Spaces and Museums: 1750-1918 (Amsterdam University Press, 2021) and Romantic Environmental Sensibility: Nature, Class, Empire (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming), on topics related to space and race.

SPECIAL ISSUE: SARE, VOL. 58, No. 2, DECEMBER 2021

Fri, 12 Feb 2021 13:09:52 +0800

CALL FOR PAPERS, SPECIAL ISSUE, JULY 2021: SPECIAL ISSUE: VOL. 58, NO. 1, JULY 2021

Fri, 31 Jul 2020 18:12:30 +0800