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ACLA CfP

Digital Memory and the Translation of World Literature

The ICLA Translation Committee seeks twenty-minute papers for a virtual ACLA panel on “Digital Memory and the Translation of World Literature,” exploring ways in which digital archives and data infrastructures inform conceptions of world literature, cultural heritage, and canon formation. Extending our work from previous seminars analyzing how translation relates to memory and historiography and plays a part in constructing different literary publics, we consider how the database participates in the preservation of world literatures and in the algorithmic curation of cultural memory.

We explore digital infrastructures both as crucial means of democratizing access and assuaging the loss of marginalized literatures and as systems complicit in “un-homing” texts from their original contexts. These archives and digital repositories are both invaluable troves of memory and forums in which established epistemological and geopolitical borders are reinscribed through metadata and curatorial design. We ask how the abundance of digitized texts and worldwide databases may expose the limits of digital universality and reiterate the standardization of language, the denial of nuanced translation, and/or the invisibility of the archivist-translator. 

Papers can be drawn from various perspectives including literary studies, digital humanities, archival studies, and other theoretical and practical modes. Papers might address:

•         Translation as database curation and metadata creation 
•         Digital archives and the preservation or loss of cultural memory 
•         The translation of marginalized languages into global digital architectures 
•         Database curation as historiography  
•         Translating oral histories into searchable texts  
•         Algorithmic searchability and challenges to untranslatability 
•         Digital anthologies and the remapping of world literature

Digital Visibility: Resistance, Marginalization and Platform Power

In the present digital era, the public sphere, as defined by Jürgen Habermas—a space where citizens negotiate power through collective discussion and political participation—has shifted on digital platforms. 

As digital media have become deeply entangled with some of the most significant political, cultural, and social events around the world, questions of accessibility, digital infrastructure, algorithms, censorship, and the digital divide have become increasingly significant. At the same time, the longstanding question of canonization and the marginalization of communities, voices, and movements can also be extended to the digital sphere. If digital platforms have become today's public sphere, what determines digital visibility, and what produces its absence: digital marginalization? 

While digital platforms are spaces of resistance, participation, and self-representation, this seminar approaches the question from another perspective, as well. What factors keep certain movements, communities, hashtags, narratives, and political struggles marginalized despite the apparent accessibility of digital platforms? How do algorithms, platform governance, state censorship, and unequal digital infrastructures shape what becomes visible, what remains invisible, and whose voices continue to be excluded from digital public discourse? 

We welcome interdisciplinary papers that examine these questions from comparative and transnational perspectives across literature, media, cinema, communication, digital humanities, political theory, sociology, anthropology, history, area studies, and related fields.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Digital divide and digital marginalization
• Social media platforms and digital resistance
• Self-representation and marginalized communities on digital platforms
• Algorithms, platform governance, and digital visibility
• Digital surveillance and data governance
• Digital criminalization
• Platform censorship and digital sovereignty
• Hashtags, digital narratives, and political movements
• Digital canonization and inequalities between the Global North and the Global South
• AI and new forms of digital exclusion
• Connectivity disruption

This seminar welcomes papers that explore these and related themes from diverse disciplinary and methodological perspectives. By bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines and fields, we hope to create an interdisciplinary conversation and look forward to collaborations beyond the conference. 

Please contact the organizer at akaviani@binghamton.edu for any questions. 

Organizers

Atousa Kaviani

Keywords

• Digital Studies
• digital media
• Comparative Media Studies
• digital humanities
• media studies
• Comparative Literature and Area Studies
• comparative literature

From Private Harm to Public Discourse: Representing Intimacy, Affect, and Everyday Violence in South Asian Pandemic Cinema

The scholarship on South Asian pandemic cinema that has emerged since 2020 has been disproportionately occupied with the migrant on the highway, the drone shot over the empty city and the mass cremation scenes. This work has largely bypassed the cinema of the household, of changing familial and interpersonal dynamics, the queer relation, the caregiving body and the way pandemic confinement reorganised intimacy itself into a register of harm that only occasionally, and unevenly, found its way into public and cinematic discourse.

This seminar examines how South Asian pandemic films make visible the hidden structures, emotions, and relationships that shape contemporary life across the region. Bringing together scholars from film studies, comparative literature, cultural studies, gender studies, and South Asian studies, the seminar explores the aesthetic, narrative, and affective strategies through which cinema represents intimacy, everyday life, and the often invisible operations of power in pandemic films. The lockdown did not only produce a crisis of mobility and labour, but also a crisis of proximity. Confinement intensified domestic and intimate-partner violence, exposed the invisible labour of caregiving and domestic work, and pressed queer and non-normative relationships into newly precarious forms of cohabitation or separation. 

This seminar is interested in exploring how South Asian pandemic cinema offers unique ways of understanding experiences that frequently escape public discourse and conventional political representation. In doing so, it demonstrates how film functions not merely as a reflection of social realities but as a powerful mode of perceiving, interpreting, and reimagining the ordinary worlds through which people experience both constraint and possibility. 

Possible areas of focus include, but are not limited to:

• The aesthetics of confinement
• Emotional abuse, coercive control, and intimate violence
• Domesticity, caregiving, reproductive, and affective labour
• Beyond the Hindi-language frame
• Affect, embodiment and the unevenness of ‘everyday violence’
• Masculinities, femininities, and gendered subjectivities
• Grief, loss, loneliness, and vulnerability
• Aging, disability, and dependency
• Migration, displacement, and belonging
• Silence, shame, and the politics of recognition
• Narrative and aesthetic strategies for representing everyday violence
• Queer and non-normative intimacy in confinement

• Spectatorship, affective engagement, and public discourse

   

Greening the Red Planet: Ecocriticism and Socialist SF

“In economic construction, like a child without experience, we declared war on the earth, unfamiliar with the strategy or tactics.”
Mao Zedong on the Great Leap Forward

Recent ecocritical scholarship has increasingly challenged the assumptions that underwrite dominant narratives of the Anthropocene, while renewed interest in socialist and communist traditions has reopened questions concerning planning, collective life, and planetary futures—as well as what work is necessary to accomplish those futures. Socialist science fiction occupies a particularly rich position within these debates. Across Soviet, Eastern European, Chinese, Cuban, and other literary traditions, science fictional depictions of the role of humans in shaping nature to its “most perfect form” allow us to examine environmental transformation within broader visions of social revolution and world-making.

For this virtual seminar, we invite papers examining the intersections of ecocriticism and socialist science fiction from a comparative literary perspective. “Socialist,” in this case, need not be literature produced under nominatively socialist governments, but literature that broadly engages with historical materialist ideologies broadly writ. We seek contributions that explore how socialist speculative fiction imagines ecological transformation and environmental crisis, either historical—as with the great human-caused famines of the Soviet Union and Great Leap Forward-era China—or contemporary.

This panel is especially interested in the literary strategies through which socialist science fiction constructs the "near future" as a privileged temporal horizon. How do these texts regulate the proximity of utopian possibility, imagining transitional historical moments in which ecological and social contradictions remain legible? What narrative forms emerge around anticipation, delay, and historical mediation? How does the near future function as an aesthetic category through which political transformation becomes imaginable? And what formal and aesthetic vocabularies do they develop for depicting planetary change, collective agency, and the production of new relations between humans and the nonhuman world?

Possible topics include:

• Ecocritical readings of socialist science fiction
• Literary representations of the near future as a distinct temporal regime
• Planning and environmental governance in speculative fiction
• Soviet, Eastern European, Chinese, Cuban, African, and Latin American socialist futurisms
• Comparative approaches to socialist and capitalist ecological imaginaries
• The aesthetics of planetary transformation, extraction, and restoration through a socialist lens

Comparative and multilingual approaches are particularly encouraged, as are proposals that place literary texts from different linguistic, national, or political traditions into dialogue.

Literature Without Return: Poetics and Sociology of the Long Exile

Most exile literature imagines return. Even when homecoming is structurally impossible, the originary homeland remains the gravitational centre around which the displaced writer orients. This seminar proposes a distinct and undertheorised category: the long exile, in which displacement spans centuries or millennia, return has been foreclosed by conquest, expulsion, or genocide, and literary production must reckon not with displacement itself but with its permanent, multigenerational inheritance.

Taking as its objects communities for whom statelessness is constitutive rather than episodic — for instance, the Parsis/Zoroastrians, the Sephardic Jews, the Armenians, the Asia Minor Greeks, the Tibetans, the Assyrians/Chaldeans — the seminar asks what permanent exile does, aesthetically and sociologically, to literary form, to language, and to the grammar of belonging, opening questions that existing frameworks of diaspora studies, postcolonial literary sociology, and postmemory theory do not yet answer. That postmemory theory is reaching its own limits at the multigenerational distances these communities inhabit is now acknowledged by Marianne Hirsch herself; this seminar proposes deep-time inheritance as the concept needed in its place. Crucially, the seminar also attends to what long exile is not: communities like the Huguenots, whose displacement ended in full assimilation, reveal by contrast how rarely genuine long-exile literary continuity is achieved.

The range of texts and problems is deliberately broad. How do we read Rohinton Mistry's Bombay fiction as the product of a 1,300-year Persian displacement — and when does it cease to be Parsi literature and become simply Indian literature? What does it mean that Ladino survived as a literary medium for five centuries while Spanish itself evolved without it — and what pressures face the contemporary Ladino poet writing for 60,000 remaining speakers? How do we situate Dido Sotiriou's Farewell Anatolia, canonical in Greece but invisible in comparative literature, within a framework of three-thousand-year continuity severed in 1922? Does the Tibetan Buddhist canon function as portable territory for poets like Tenzin Tsundue or Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, who have chosen English as deliberate political outreach, as the doctrinally untranslatable Avesta does for secular Parsi fiction? These examples are indicative: the seminar welcomes work across periods, languages, genres, and methods — from medieval manuscript traditions to contemporary autofiction, from epigraphy to social media writing in endangered languages.

Key questions  include: What happens to literary form when return is structurally impossible? What are the formal consequences of writing in a dying vernacular? How does a sacred textual corpus function as portable territory in the absence of national literary institutions? When does exile literature become homeland literature — and who decides?

Narratives of Loneliness

“Loneliness is one of the least satisfactorily conceptualized psychological phenomena,” wrote German psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann in a 1959 paper. This statement still holds true today. In recent years, loneliness has garnered considerable attention as a research topic across a wide range of disciplines, including neuroscience, sociology, philosophy, ethnology, and cultural history. Many scholars contend that, due to the rise of individualism under capitalist modernity, loneliness has come to be a characteristic feature of modern life—especially in Western societies. Loneliness is not only an object of scientific inquiry, however; it has been a concern for many writers and artists for centuries. The archive of modern literature, in particular, is full of characters who could use a friend (e.g., the bitter underground man of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground; the starving writer of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger; the pathologically indifferent protagonist of Albert Camus’s The Stranger; mysterious narrators and fragment subjects of Beckett’s trilogy; the bored bookkeeper of Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet etc.); likewise, the depiction of loneliness has informed the aesthetic language of numerous filmmakers such as Ingmar Bergman, Aki Kaurismäki, Andrei Tarkovsky, Nuri Bilge Ceylan. In contemporary narratives, loneliness frequently figures in depictions of hyper-commodified, hyper-digitized, productivity-obsessed capitalist societies, and in stories of marriage, friendship, (in)dependency, grief, isolation. Some recent popular examples that explore loneliness around these themes include: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, Rachel Cusk’s narratives of family and marriage; Jon Fosse’s Septology; television series Pluribus and Severance; films such as The Substance, Fallen Leaves, About Dry Grasses.

Potential questions to consider include but are not limited to: What does it mean to be and feel lonely (today)? How might literary and cultural production help us better understand loneliness? How does loneliness influence our aesthetic judgment and pleasures? How does loneliness influence dreams? Departing from these questions, this seminar invites papers that explore depictions of loneliness in literature, film, television, and visual culture. Papers from any linguistic, national, historical, or theoretical traditions are welcome; interdisciplinary and intermedial approaches are especially encouraged. Potential topics to explore include but are not limited to:

• Self-help literature and reading
• Aesthetics and politics of loneliness
• Loneliness and closely related states such as boredom, idleness, anxiety etc.
• Productivity and work culture
• Consumer society
• Narratives of pain
• Intimacy, friendship, vulnerability, care
• Marriage and family
• Trauma and memory
• Solitude vs. loneliness

For more information or questions: bcopurog@uwo.ca

Please submit a short bio (100-150 words) along with your abstract (250-300 words).

(Re)composing Rot

deadline for submissions: September 22, 2026

sonakshi.srivastava@ashoka.edu.in

To decompose is to live too, I know, I know… (Beckett, Molloy)

This seminar invites papers, across interdisciplinary and comparative interventions, that consider rot seriously: as a material process, temporal disturbance, or a biopolitical problem. Rot is everywhere: in the body, in the building, in the word used too many times, in the institution, in the relationship nobody has ended, in the archive, in the soil, in the pipe beneath the street, in the state of the world. Rot is rarely allowed to speak. It is dated, deferred, deodorised—managed into invisibility through infrastructures that promise control over time, matter, and life itself. Contemporary systems seek to render decay legible, predictable, and governable. Yet rot persists—not as rupture, but as a slow, ambient condition that exceeds its management.

Consider Michel Foucault's account of biopolitics that describes the administration of life as a modern technology of power. This seminar asks what it would mean to extend that account to the administration of life's undoing. If waste and spoilage have their own governing and internal logics, they also have their own counter-archive: what discard studies scholars have more recently theorized as the afterlives of the supposedly finished. Rob Nixon's notion of slow violence offers one vocabulary for thinking rot's temporality; Lauren Berlant's account of slow death offers another, while Jasbir Puar’s offers the taxonomy of debility and ability. 

How is decay variously governed, postponed, or aestheticized across everyday and institutional contexts? What forms of life (and afterlife) emerge in spaces designed to arrest transformation? We are particularly interested in work that engages rot beyond spectacle, attending instead to its cross-cultural and continuous presence. 

Treating rot, here, as not an endpoint, but a condition of suspension, we invite papers that address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Rot in translation: vocabularies of spoilage across languages 
• Colonial and postcolonial regimes and their archives as classificatory afterlives
• Critiques of waste, wasted life, and the politics of displacement 
• Rot’s recuperation into future productivity versus its resistance to repair
• Illness, debility, and bodily breakdown as forms of rot 
• Collocating environmental humanities and decay
• Precarity, bureaucratic decay, and capitalist ruins
• Infrastructures of postponement, and memory
• Fragment, scrap, and collage as an aesthetics of rot
• Literary and cinematic aesthetics of ruin, spoilage, and slow disappearance
• Scholarly burnout and institutional rot 
• Brainrot and its various valences
• Revisiting theories of the e(rot)ic

South-South Literary Relations and the Remaking of World Literature

Since the rise of World Literature as a major field of inquiry, discussions of literary circulation have often privileged routes that pass through metropolitan centers, emphasizing translation into dominant European languages, global publishing networks, and institutions located in the Global North. Yet literary works have long traveled through alternative circuits that connect regions of the Global South directly, producing histories of exchange that challenge center-periphery models of cultural transmission.

This seminar invites papers that examine literary relationships among Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, SWANA, Oceania, and other locations within the Global South. Such relationships may emerge through translation, political solidarity, migration, anti-colonial movements, publishing networks, educational institutions, shared aesthetic projects, or indirect forms of influence. They may also involve moments in which Northern institutions, languages, or markets facilitate, mediate, redirect, or constrain South-South encounters, raising questions about whether these exchanges can ever be understood as entirely autonomous.

Rather than treating the Global South as a unified category, the seminar seeks to explore its internal heterogeneity, asymmetries of power, and competing visions of solidarity. How do texts travel between Southern contexts? What historical, linguistic, and political conditions make these encounters possible? What role do translators, publishers, periodicals, archives, and digital media play in creating or sustaining South-South literary networks? How might these circulations reshape concepts such as influence, comparison, translation, reception, or worldliness?

We especially welcome papers that interrogate the implications of South-South literary exchange for the study of World Literature itself. If literary circulation is not exclusively organized through Northern centers, what alternative maps of World Literature become visible? Can South-South networks offer different ways of imagining literary value, canon formation, and global comparison? By foregrounding overlooked routes of circulation and exchange, this seminar aims to reconsider how World Literature is conceptualized and to illuminate the multiple worlds through which literature moves.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to: South-South translation; comparative studies across the Global South; Cold War and Non-Aligned literary networks; postcolonial and decolonial approaches; migration and diaspora; publishing and periodical cultures; digital literary circulation; transregional modernisms; indigenous and vernacular exchanges; reception studies; archives of literary solidarity; and new theoretical approaches to World Literature.

Organizers

Ann George

Keywords

• comparative literature
• colonialism and post-colonialism
• critical translation studies
• Decolonial Methodologies

Call for Papers

IN-PERSON 2027 Annual Meeting (May 20-23, 2027)

Sweetness and Trauma: A Cultural Analysis of the Human Taste

Human predilection for sweetness is an innate, universal biological trait as much as a cultivated and personalized taste. One conspicuous paradox of modern sweetness is that it is rarely tasted without a shadow, be it the sedimented history of sugar plantation slavery and colonial extraction, as criticized by Sidney Mintz's seminal work, or the cautionary tales of refined sugar in contemporary wellness culture. This seminar revisits the human taste of sweetness from the shadows and asks how sweetness bears witness to historical and personal traumas: how violence settles into taste, smell, texture, and atmosphere, and how sweetness saturates the traumatized body and the spaces it moves through.

Some catastrophes like war, famine, and expulsion are punctual while others are attritional, such as the slow violence of industrialization and the slow unmaking of the worlds it has built. In the aftermath of both, sweet things circulate with peculiar intensity: street food hawked by the newly dispossessed, confections that soothe the children of catastrophe, or sugar crops that once staved off starvation and now signify heritage. Here a productive friction emerges. Trauma theory has privileged experience that was never fully lived; phenomenology begins from lived experience itself. We take this tension as the seminar's engine. Can the senses register what consciousness could not? Can a smellscape hold a memory the subject never formed? When does sweetness console, and when does it anesthetize? Recent work in sensory anthropology and geography offers a vocabulary for this inquiry: the synesthesia of food experience, in which flavor fuses with sound, season, and setting to become a vehicle of memory; the foodscapes and smellscapes through which sweet things organize streets, neighborhoods, and territories; the haptic and gustatory registers of cinema and media.

Sweetness is also a barometer of social transformation. How people sweeten their food, who produces and consumes sweets, which sweets are rationed, taxed, heritagized, or renounced: each registers structural changes at the scale of the palate. We therefore treat sweet things not only as objects of memory but as instruments of diagnosis, and we invite papers from any geographic, linguistic, or historical context, welcoming work on literature, film, foodways, visual culture, and popular media, including sensory-ethnographic and practice-based approaches alongside literary and cinematic analysis.

Topics include, but are not limited to: synesthetic memory in diasporic and exilic writing; smellscapes of street vending and their regulation; famine foods and their afterlives; haptic visuality and culinary cinema; comfort food and cruel optimism; rationing, austerity, and the first sweet after scarcity; socialist and postsocialist confections; sugar taxes and the moralization of taste; sensory heritage and nostalgia economies; sugar, race, and empire; the gendered labor of sweetness.

Translating Theory for a Worldly Comparative Literature

In the last two decades, a more worldly comparative literature has emerged in the US by centering literary translation and translation studies as philosophical and methodological principles in both scholarship and pedagogy. The canon of literary theory, however, remains surprisingly Eurocentric. This paradox persists for at least three reasons. First, the canon and genre of literary theory are, in many respects, vestiges of an earlier form of comparative literature anchored in a few dominant European cultural and literary traditions. Second, translating theory is less rewarding than translating literary texts, in part because of its relatively limited readership. Third, the continued circulation and citation of established theoretical texts through anthologies, scholarships, and classroom teaching have diminished the urgency of producing/finding/birthing “new” theories that would require not only linguistic but also cultural translation of unfamiliar theoretical paradigms, and literary texts that inherently form the backbone of theoretical texts.

This seminar seeks to intervene in this situation by fostering a conversation between abstraction and practice, between the task and philosophy of translating theory, and between the stakes of such translation for comparatists working in languages that have not traditionally served as sites of theoretical production. We invite papers from scholars who have used – or have themselves translated – works from such languages, and who would like to reflect on how these works can change our understanding of the nature of theory, and to consider the implications of theory for local, national, and global frameworks as comparatists.

Participants are especially encouraged to consider how translated theory reshapes and thickens the field of literary texts, both in translation and in the original, synchronically and diachronically, within a complex quadripartite system of global, national, (pre)colonial, and local literary formations. Selected presentations may be considered for publication as a special issue in a journal or as an edited volume.

What Is the World in World Literature Today?

More than twenty years after the publication of What Is World Literature? (2003), world literature remains one of the central paradigms of comparative literary studies. Questions of circulation, translation, mobility, and the movement of texts across linguistic and national boundaries have shaped scholarship for decades and have become a recurring focus of ACLA seminars  and in comparative literature departments worldwide. Yet the question of the world itself no longer seems as straightforward as it once did.
This seminar returns to world literature through a new question: “What is the world in world literature today?” Instead of assuming that "the world" names a stable global framework, we ask how literary texts, critical debates, and comparative practices imagine, construct, negotiate, and remake worlds. What does it mean to speak of "the world" today? How might changing understandings of the world reshape the questions we ask of world literature and, more broadly, of comparative literature?
Revisiting one of the field's defining debates from the perspective of the present, this seminar explores how the concept of the world has evolved over the past two decades and what this shift might mean for the future of comparative literary studies.

When the Hand Thinks Back: Craft, Translation, and the Politics of ‘Secondary’ Aesthetics

What if craft is not the lesser twin of art, but another theory of making, one in which the hand thinks, the material answers, and form emerges through a dialogue with earth, fibre, clay, metal, wood, stone, pigment, or thread? What if the translator is not a mere carrier but a craftsperson, whose hands weaves culture, sound, meaning and memory? Is craft merely an act of mechanical repetition, or is it a profound performance of material translation? Is translation a routine reproduction or a craftsperson of cultural artefacts? This seminar proposes a critical intervention at the intersection of Craft Studies and Translation Studies, challenging the long-standing disciplinary hierarchies that have placed both craftsperson and translator to the margins of arts and aesthetics. It asks whether handicraft, far from being reducible to reproduction, may be understood as an act of transformation: a poetics of touch in which no object is merely duplicated, because every gesture, grain, pressure, fracture, and finish produces a new event of sense. Such questions also open a broader comparative inquiry into translation itself, long treated in many traditions as secondary to authorship, even though translation too is an act of invention and recreation rather than mechanical equivalence. We therefore ask: why are authors and artists immortalised as divine creators, while translators and artisans remain forced into anonymity, stripped of signatures, and systematically exploited within global market economies?

We invite papers that interrogate thinking back through hands as an epistemological and creative act. If no two handmade objects and no two translations are ever truly identical, can handicraft and translation ever be dismissed as a mere copy? We invite papers that trace the historical entanglement of craft and translation from preindustrial artisanal cultures to the transformations brought by industrial capitalism, mechanisation, and digital automation. The history of translation shows long continuity from ancient interpretive practices to the printing press and machine translation, while AI intensifies anxieties about the displacement of human judgement. In a parallel trajectory, craft has been recast under industrial modernity as residual, decorative, or archaic, as well as mass production and automation have altered the status of manual skill and material intelligence.

Rather than asking whether craft is like translation or translation like craft, this seminar asks what each reveals about the other. And in an age when AI promises seamless conversion while threatening depth, tact, and opacity, what forms of human making remain irreducible, unautomatable, and ethically necessary? We seek papers that challenge the politics of secondary art, separation of art from craft, originality from repetition, and authorship from labour, and that imagine a comparative aesthetics of craftmaking and translating as thinking across languages, materials, and histories.