05/09/2024
CALL FOR PAPERS
The 20th Triennial Conference of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS)
Transcultural Englishes in a Multipolar World
July 1-5, 2025
University of Nairobi (Kenya)
More than three decades after the end of the Cold War, the idea of a multipolar world seems omnipresent. Old centres do not seem to hold any longer, new centres are emerging, and the global map of political, economic, social, and cultural relations is being redrawn. At first sight, this seems to align well with the expectations once linked to the work of decolonization that – as Edward Said put it in 1995 – would allow “a new geographical consciousness of a decentred or multiply-centred world.” This world, Said envisaged, would be one no “longer sealed within watertight compartments of art or culture or history, but mixed, mixed up, varied, complicated by the new difficult mobility of migrations, the new independent states, the newly emergent and burgeoning cultures.”
How can literary and cultural studies avoid the pitfalls of inevitably “triangulating ideas […] through the West” that Mukoma wa Ngũgĩ has warned against,5 and how can they engage with new (and revived) South-South connectivities and relations generated in an increasingly multipolar world? How indeed can the term “multipolar world”
be made critically productive for the humanities, given the fact that (old and new) power games are continuously played with this term?
The 20th ACLALS Conference to be held at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, from 1 – 5 July 2025 seeks to bring together writers and academics from all over the world to deliberate on transcultural Englishes and the current state of Anglophone literary and cultural studies in a multipolar world.
Confirmed Keynote speakers include:
Simon Gikandi (Princeton University)
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (Kenyan Author)
Goretti Kyomuhendo (Ugandan Author)
Mukoma wa Ngũgĩ (Cornell University)
Proposals for papers and panels on these or other topics of relevance to our discipline are welcome. Abstracts should be no more than 350 words and are to be submitted online by Dec. 1, 2024, at the following email address:
[email protected].
This address can also be used to submit panel proposals.
Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by 31st January 2025.
