Organizer: Barnali Chanda
Contact the Seminar OrganizersIt is intriguing to examine how the documents from and about the global colonial countries written during the 19th and 20th century describe the extremely unstable social and political environments while narrating an emergence of a new world order and world imagination.The auto-biographical narratives,memoirs and travelogues document the transformative experiences of the narrators and their intentions to transfer such experiences as the colonised subjects to different stratum of the society and communities.This transformative experiences and the potential of its people and the society that underwent numerous reform struggles and anti-imperialist movements are documented in these genres by acknowledging the civilizationally connected colonial nation-states which are divided by the newly designed borders.The ways in which the writers come to terms with their new cultural and linguistic experiences and use these newly acquired perspectives to understand the traveling spaces create a new discourse,providing the readers with a comparative perspective on the formation of new colonial nation-states who are involved in anti-imperialist movements at several levels.In the travel narratives,memoirs,auto-biographical documents human interactions go beyond the typical stereotypes,breaking the boundaries between political propaganda and elements of curiosity and hospitality.The narratives reveal how personal memory can be merged with the collective memory to conform to the political ideology.Emerging with the development of print culture and several other literary genres, such as novels and short stories,the autobiographical narratives and travelogues become a point of intersection of elements of various other genres.The colonial spaces with their anti-imperialist struggle and colonial trauma often produced a dynamic literary space for the narrators from across different social and political spectrum to give life to their experiences.In the personal narratives the readers can find a deconstruction of the mythical stereotypes. The evaluation of the connections between the personal and the collective memories became an important means to substantiate the readers‘ knowledge about the pre-colonial past and their understanding of the present.An autobiographical narrative, memoir or travelogue, holding a space between fiction and history,document history as lived experience and with an understanding of new places,people and milieus, where the narrators share their personal and empirical space with a larger group of readers,enabling them to see the unforeseen and to understand what have not been conceptualized.This is a distinctive and meaningful way to study and understand the historical connections between the colonial world orders. The seminar expects papers that narrates not only different world orders, power structures and colonial experiences under anti-imperialist struggles but also talk about narratives of imagination about the newly constructed world orders.