2019 Events Archive

Collaborative Postgraduate Symposium 2019

Current Research on Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Cultures

28^th September 2019

This postgraduate symposium, a collaboration between the Open University and the University of Southampton and hosted by the University of Southampton, invited MA and PhD students to present their research in individual fifteen-minute papers and gain professional and peer-feedback. Supporting individual postgraduate presentations, the symposium included papers by the convenors on developments in the sector, journal publication, disseminating your work and impact, presentation skills and advice on employability and career-paths in academia.

Keynote Lecture

Alex Tickell, “Infrastructure and the Global Novel: Arundhati Roy’s ‘Threatened History’ Fiction”

10^th October 2019

Goethe-University, Frankfurt

This keynote paper discussed Arundhati Roy’s novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) through the lens of recent writings on (urban) infrastructure. In this reading of Roy’s second novel Tickell tested ‘infrastructure’ as a critical concept-term and an approach for reading postcolonial and global fiction. He showed how Roy applies her well-documented architectural sense of literary design to two spaces: the city of Delhi and the Kashmir Valley. In both these settings, forms of infrastructure and infrastructural transformation bear the burden of Roy’s broad critique of the Indian state and convey her sense of a multi-ethnic intercommunal history profoundly threatened by India’s present political and economic trajectory. In reflecting on Roy’s urban infrastructural preoccupations, Tickell also examined her use of the graveyard or necropolis as a symbolic site of alternative identity and dissident remembrance. 

Symposium

Literature, Culture and Translation: An International Symposium on Han Suyin

11^th-12^th July 2019

Chinese Programme & Centre for Chinese Language and Culture, School of Humanities,

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Members of the PGLRG assisted with the planning for this symposium and a co-edited published outcome, a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, is in preparation for March 2021.

Symposium/Workshop

Infrastructural Reading: Fragments, Flows, Forms

4th June 2019

City, University of London

Keynotes: Professor Keller Easterling (Yale); Professor Matthew Gandy (Cambridge); Professor Caroline Levine (Cornell, via weblink)

Artist’s Talk: Sarnath Banerjee

This day-long workshop (a collaboration between the PGLRG and City, University of London) explored how literary, visual and other narrative forms mediate and intervene into current debates on cities, urban spaces and sustainable infrastructure developments. In particular, it asked: how are the forms represented in literary and visual texts connected to the often-violent infrastructural layouts of urban space, especially (though by no means only) in the Global South? Can we trace the shape of the built environment, its underlying circuitries and systems, in the forms of such texts? And can literary and cultural texts enable practitioners of urban design – from architects and policy-makers to engineers and urban planners – to reflect critically on their methods?

Keynote Lecture

Millennium’s Children Conference

23^rd–24^th May 2019

University of Naples “L’Orientale”

Alex Tickell gave the keynote talk: “‘A Good Bombing Begins Everywhere at Once’: Reading Disrupted Infrastructure and Form in the Contemporary Indian Novel in English”.

Keynote Lecture

Challenging Precarity Conference

27^th–29^th January 2019

Auro University, Surat, India

Alex Tickell delivered the keynote paper on “Narrating Urban Precarity Differently: Aman Sethi’s A Free Man”.

Round Table Session and Book Launch

Oxford History of the Novel in English: The Novel in South and South East Asia since 1945

January 2019

SALA Conference, Chicago

Chaired by the editor, Alex Tickell, this round table session brought together contributors to the Oxford History of the Novel in English Volume 10 including Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Kavita Daiya, Ruvani Ranasinha and Charlotta Salmi.