Kaustav Bakshi
Dr. Kaustav Bakshi is Associate Professor, Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. A Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow, his doctoral thesis, written with partial funding from the Trust, is entitled ‘Family, Sexualities and Ageing in Sri Lankan Expatriate Fiction: Kinship, Power Relations and the State’.
He has published in several international peer-reviewed journals such as South Asian Review (2012), Postcolonial Text (2015), New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film (2013), South Asian History and Culture (2015, 2017, 2021), South Asian Popular Culture (2018) and Café Dissensus (2018).His latest published books include, Popular Cinema in Bengal: Genre, Stars, Public Culture (Routledge, 2020-21), Queer Studies: Texts, Contexts,
Praxis (Orient Blackswan, 2019) and Rituparno Ghosh: Cinema, Gender and Art (Routledge, 2015). He is currently working on an anthology Ageing Bodies, Ageist Cultures: Growing Older in India (working title, Routledge) and a special journal issue on Queer Pedagogy in the Indian Academia.
An activist for gender rights, he is a member of the editorial advisory board of Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture (Intellect Bks.), and an occasional contributor to InPlainspeak, the digital magazine of TARSHI (Talking About Reproductive and Sexuality Health in India). He has presented papers in several national and international conferences in institutes such as Columbia University, University of London, University of Connecticut,
Syracuse University, City University of New York, University of St. Andrews, University of Bedfordshire, European Conference on South Asian Studies (Paris), Jawaharlal Nehru University, Indian Institute of Advanced Studies (Simla), Ambedkar University, IIT, Hyderabad, Hyderabad Central University, Delhi University, etc. He was also a visiting fellow at the Department of English, Delhi University in February 2020 teaching postcolonial queer theory to postgraduate students.
He has written for The Telegraph, The Wire, The Hindustan Times, while he has been cited by journalists widely in The Times of India, Scroll.in, Women’s Media Center, etc. He has appeared on India Today and Epicenter to speak on LGBTQ+ issues, while, he has been invited to speak at the Jaipur Literature Festival and Kolkata Literary Meet in 2016.
At Jadavpur University, Kaustav teaches courses related to gender and sexuality, apart from regular courses on English and postcolonial literatures and cultures.
Email address: [email protected]
Supervisors: Dr. Nilanjana Deb
Address: Kolkata
He has published in several international peer-reviewed journals such as South Asian Review (2012), Postcolonial Text (2015), New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film (2013), South Asian History and Culture (2015, 2017, 2021), South Asian Popular Culture (2018) and Café Dissensus (2018).His latest published books include, Popular Cinema in Bengal: Genre, Stars, Public Culture (Routledge, 2020-21), Queer Studies: Texts, Contexts,
Praxis (Orient Blackswan, 2019) and Rituparno Ghosh: Cinema, Gender and Art (Routledge, 2015). He is currently working on an anthology Ageing Bodies, Ageist Cultures: Growing Older in India (working title, Routledge) and a special journal issue on Queer Pedagogy in the Indian Academia.
An activist for gender rights, he is a member of the editorial advisory board of Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture (Intellect Bks.), and an occasional contributor to InPlainspeak, the digital magazine of TARSHI (Talking About Reproductive and Sexuality Health in India). He has presented papers in several national and international conferences in institutes such as Columbia University, University of London, University of Connecticut,
Syracuse University, City University of New York, University of St. Andrews, University of Bedfordshire, European Conference on South Asian Studies (Paris), Jawaharlal Nehru University, Indian Institute of Advanced Studies (Simla), Ambedkar University, IIT, Hyderabad, Hyderabad Central University, Delhi University, etc. He was also a visiting fellow at the Department of English, Delhi University in February 2020 teaching postcolonial queer theory to postgraduate students.
He has written for The Telegraph, The Wire, The Hindustan Times, while he has been cited by journalists widely in The Times of India, Scroll.in, Women’s Media Center, etc. He has appeared on India Today and Epicenter to speak on LGBTQ+ issues, while, he has been invited to speak at the Jaipur Literature Festival and Kolkata Literary Meet in 2016.
At Jadavpur University, Kaustav teaches courses related to gender and sexuality, apart from regular courses on English and postcolonial literatures and cultures.
Email address: [email protected]
Supervisors: Dr. Nilanjana Deb
Address: Kolkata
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Books by Kaustav Bakshi
The volume looks at ageing within the contexts of the larger discourses of gender, sexuality, nation, health and the performance and politics of ageing. The chapters grapple with diverse issues around ageing and elder care in contemporary India, shifts in socio-economic conditions and the breakdown of the heteropatriarchal family. The book includes personal accounts and narratives that detail the daily experiences of ageing and living with disease, anxiety, loneliness and loss for both elders and their friends and families. The book also explores the models of alternative networks of kinship and care that queer elders in India create in India as well as examining narratives—in society, art, sports and popular culture that both critique and challenge stereotypical ideas about the desires, aspirations, and mental and physical capabilities of elders.
Topical and comprehensive, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of gerontology, literature, cultural studies, popular culture, sociology, social psychology, queer studies, gender studies, social anthropology, and South Asian studies.
focus from auteur and text- based studies to exhaustive readings of the film industry.
This book covers a wide range of themes and issues, including: generic tropes (like comedy and
action); iconic figurations (of the detective and the city); (female) stars such as Kanan Bala, Sadhana
Bose and Aparna Sen; intensities of public debates (subjects of high and low cultures, taste, viewership,
gender and sexuality); print cultures (including posters, magazines and song- booklets); cinematic
spaces; and trans- media and trans- cultural traffic. By locating cinema within the crosscurrents of geopolitical
transformations, this book highlights the new and persuasive research that has materialized
over the last decade. The authors raise pertinent questions regarding ‘regional’ cinema as a category,
in relation to ‘national’ cinema models, and trace the non- linear journey of the popular via multiple
(media) trajectories. They address subjects of physicality, sexuality and its representations, industrial
change, spaces of consumption and cinema’s meandering directions through global circuits and lowend
networks.
Highlighting the ever- changing contours of cinema in Bengal in all its popular forms and proposing
a new historiography, Popular Cinema in Bengal will be of great interest to scholars of Film
Studies and South- Asian Popular Culture.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction: A brief introduction to popular cinema in Bengal: genre, stardom, public cultures
Madhuja Mukherjee and Kaustav Bakshi
Part I: Styles, Stars and Popular Forms
2. Rethinking popular cinema in Bengal (1930s–1950s): of literariness, comic mode, mythological and other avatars
Madhuja Mukherjee
3. Kanan Devi: a Bengali star
Sharmistha Gooptu
4. Performing the region: Sadhona Bose and the modern Bengali film dance
Pritha Chakrabarti
5. A postcolonial iconi-city: Re-reading Uttam Kumar’s cinema as metropolar melodrama
Sayandeb Chowdhury
6. Filmfare and the question of Bengali cinema (1955–65)
Anustup Basu
7. From Teen Kanya to Arshinagar: feminist politics, Bengali high culture and the stardom of Aparna Sen
Kaustav Bakshi and Rohit K. Dasgupta
8. The action heroes of Bengali cinema: industrial, technological and aesthetic determinants of popular film culture, 1980s–1990s
Spandan Bhattacharya
Part II: Ray and Felu Mittir, the private detective
9. Feluda on Feluda: a letter to Topshe
Rochona Majumdar
10. Reviewing ‘Feluda on Feluda’: Maganlal Meghraj ‘Writes Back’ to Tapesh
Kaushik Bhaumik
11. Negotiating mobility and media: the contemporary digital afterlives of Feluda
Pujita Guha
Part III: Photo Essays: Public Cultures
12. A booklets sequence
Moinak Biswas
13. Inside a dark hall: space, place, and accounts of some single-theatres in Kolkata
Madhuja Mukherjee
14. Rituparno Ghosh, performing arts and a queer legacy: an abiding stardom
Kaustav Bakshi
15. A Rendezvous with the Ghosh Brothers: A Sneak Peek into Bengal’s Homegrown Exploitation Cinema
Subhajit Chatterjee
Please not a redacted/shorter version of the introduction is available as a journal article in a special section of the journal SAHC. Available here: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19472498.2014.999441
Papers by Kaustav Bakshi
In this article, we offer a new concept of the “queer creative city”,
through a critical examination of how a regional queer Bengali
film culture has emerged in Kolkata as a result of the
convergence of certain urban policies, queer political organising
and cultural activism.
We explore two queer film festivals in Kolkata – the Siddharth
Gautam Film Festival and Dialogues, both having a very
significant impact in transforming LGBTQ + lives in Kolkata.
Through archival research, autoethnography and conducting
extensive interviews with organising committees, venue sponsors
and owners, and viewers, we show how these film festivals and a
pre-existing Bengali film culture engendered the emergence of a
prolific creative queer city, which became a site of resistance, and
community building that created a solid base for queer
counterpublics. Queer film festivals, we argue, are critical sites for
charting the dynamics of the public sphere in contemporary India.
We explore two queer film festivals in Kolkata – the Siddharth Gautam Film Festival and Dialogues, both having a very significant impact in transforming LGBTQ + lives in Kolkata. Through archival research, autoethnography and conducting extensive interviews with organising committees, venue sponsors and owners, and viewers, we show how these film festivals and a pre-existing Bengali film culture engendered the emergence of a prolific creative queer city, which became a site of resistance, and community building that created a solid base for queer counterpublics. Queer film festivals, we argue, are critical sites for charting the dynamics of the public sphere in contemporary India.
The volume looks at ageing within the contexts of the larger discourses of gender, sexuality, nation, health and the performance and politics of ageing. The chapters grapple with diverse issues around ageing and elder care in contemporary India, shifts in socio-economic conditions and the breakdown of the heteropatriarchal family. The book includes personal accounts and narratives that detail the daily experiences of ageing and living with disease, anxiety, loneliness and loss for both elders and their friends and families. The book also explores the models of alternative networks of kinship and care that queer elders in India create in India as well as examining narratives—in society, art, sports and popular culture that both critique and challenge stereotypical ideas about the desires, aspirations, and mental and physical capabilities of elders.
Topical and comprehensive, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of gerontology, literature, cultural studies, popular culture, sociology, social psychology, queer studies, gender studies, social anthropology, and South Asian studies.
focus from auteur and text- based studies to exhaustive readings of the film industry.
This book covers a wide range of themes and issues, including: generic tropes (like comedy and
action); iconic figurations (of the detective and the city); (female) stars such as Kanan Bala, Sadhana
Bose and Aparna Sen; intensities of public debates (subjects of high and low cultures, taste, viewership,
gender and sexuality); print cultures (including posters, magazines and song- booklets); cinematic
spaces; and trans- media and trans- cultural traffic. By locating cinema within the crosscurrents of geopolitical
transformations, this book highlights the new and persuasive research that has materialized
over the last decade. The authors raise pertinent questions regarding ‘regional’ cinema as a category,
in relation to ‘national’ cinema models, and trace the non- linear journey of the popular via multiple
(media) trajectories. They address subjects of physicality, sexuality and its representations, industrial
change, spaces of consumption and cinema’s meandering directions through global circuits and lowend
networks.
Highlighting the ever- changing contours of cinema in Bengal in all its popular forms and proposing
a new historiography, Popular Cinema in Bengal will be of great interest to scholars of Film
Studies and South- Asian Popular Culture.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction: A brief introduction to popular cinema in Bengal: genre, stardom, public cultures
Madhuja Mukherjee and Kaustav Bakshi
Part I: Styles, Stars and Popular Forms
2. Rethinking popular cinema in Bengal (1930s–1950s): of literariness, comic mode, mythological and other avatars
Madhuja Mukherjee
3. Kanan Devi: a Bengali star
Sharmistha Gooptu
4. Performing the region: Sadhona Bose and the modern Bengali film dance
Pritha Chakrabarti
5. A postcolonial iconi-city: Re-reading Uttam Kumar’s cinema as metropolar melodrama
Sayandeb Chowdhury
6. Filmfare and the question of Bengali cinema (1955–65)
Anustup Basu
7. From Teen Kanya to Arshinagar: feminist politics, Bengali high culture and the stardom of Aparna Sen
Kaustav Bakshi and Rohit K. Dasgupta
8. The action heroes of Bengali cinema: industrial, technological and aesthetic determinants of popular film culture, 1980s–1990s
Spandan Bhattacharya
Part II: Ray and Felu Mittir, the private detective
9. Feluda on Feluda: a letter to Topshe
Rochona Majumdar
10. Reviewing ‘Feluda on Feluda’: Maganlal Meghraj ‘Writes Back’ to Tapesh
Kaushik Bhaumik
11. Negotiating mobility and media: the contemporary digital afterlives of Feluda
Pujita Guha
Part III: Photo Essays: Public Cultures
12. A booklets sequence
Moinak Biswas
13. Inside a dark hall: space, place, and accounts of some single-theatres in Kolkata
Madhuja Mukherjee
14. Rituparno Ghosh, performing arts and a queer legacy: an abiding stardom
Kaustav Bakshi
15. A Rendezvous with the Ghosh Brothers: A Sneak Peek into Bengal’s Homegrown Exploitation Cinema
Subhajit Chatterjee
Please not a redacted/shorter version of the introduction is available as a journal article in a special section of the journal SAHC. Available here: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19472498.2014.999441
In this article, we offer a new concept of the “queer creative city”,
through a critical examination of how a regional queer Bengali
film culture has emerged in Kolkata as a result of the
convergence of certain urban policies, queer political organising
and cultural activism.
We explore two queer film festivals in Kolkata – the Siddharth
Gautam Film Festival and Dialogues, both having a very
significant impact in transforming LGBTQ + lives in Kolkata.
Through archival research, autoethnography and conducting
extensive interviews with organising committees, venue sponsors
and owners, and viewers, we show how these film festivals and a
pre-existing Bengali film culture engendered the emergence of a
prolific creative queer city, which became a site of resistance, and
community building that created a solid base for queer
counterpublics. Queer film festivals, we argue, are critical sites for
charting the dynamics of the public sphere in contemporary India.
We explore two queer film festivals in Kolkata – the Siddharth Gautam Film Festival and Dialogues, both having a very significant impact in transforming LGBTQ + lives in Kolkata. Through archival research, autoethnography and conducting extensive interviews with organising committees, venue sponsors and owners, and viewers, we show how these film festivals and a pre-existing Bengali film culture engendered the emergence of a prolific creative queer city, which became a site of resistance, and community building that created a solid base for queer counterpublics. Queer film festivals, we argue, are critical sites for charting the dynamics of the public sphere in contemporary India.
Most of the articles and interviews in the book point to the fact that Rituparno Ghosh cannot be seen simply as a filmmaker. He must be seen in totality - as a conglomerate of his films, his writing, his considerable scholarship, his eccentric lifestyle and his sexuality. Whether we like him or not, one thing is certain that it will take a long time to get used to the absence of this extraordinary person called Rituparno Ghosh. For most Rituparno aficionados, this volume, along with an earlier one entitled Reading Rituparno by Shoma A Chatterjee, will keep his legacy somewhat alive. Apart from his films he will also be remembered for his sartorial style, his idiosyncrasies and his overall contribution to the cultural sphere.
For the life of Rituparno Ghosh, this sartorial analogy must have had special relevance. In his final years, he appeared on the public stage in colourful dresses, complete with makeup and jewellery, as a conscious attempt to celebrate gender fluidity. However, if some of the contributors of this volume are to be believed, Ghosh's temerity in challenging the Bengali bhadralok's gender conformity was offset by his unwillingness to offend his class sensibilities. Therefore, he was never able to explore the truly subversive side of contemporary queer politics. Limitations such as these are explored with great insight in the remarkable anthology, Rituparno Ghosh: Cinema, Gender and Art, edited by Sangeeta Datta, Kaustav Bakshi and Rohit K. Dasgupta. The fact that the editors and the contributors are self-proclaimed aficionados of Ghosh's oeuvre does not come in their way of critically analysing aspects of his craft, his stardom and his contribution to the politics of sexual identity.
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This paper discusses the modalities adopted by two teachers, one who teaches English literature and the other who teaches medical sciences in two neighbouring institutes of Kolkata – Jadavpur University and K P C Medical College. Both the teachers who self-identify as gender-queer have to an extent initiated dialogue surrounding non-normative sexualities on both the campuses: at Jadavpur University, a course entitled “Queer Studies” is offered to postgraduate students, apart from several activities in support of recognizing LGBTQ+ identities. At K P C Medical College, an LGBT-taskforce has been formed under the umbrella of an organisation named Doctors for a Cause (DFC), which actively promotes queer-inclusive campus culture and mobilises students, teachers and administrators to preclude homophobic bullying.
The Indian medical education system and curricula is highly hetero-patriarchal and normative. Besides being tutored into accepting heteronormativity as the immutable “normal”, the only exposure that an Indian medical student has to queer vocabularies is highly deleterious, since discussions on non-normative sexualities appear only in the context of brain damage, unlawful behaviour, mental degeneration or STDs. During the pandemic, the two teachers who would present this paper have begun an initiative to include medical humanities in the training of doctors, by way of a critical introduction to LGBTQ+ history, literature and other cultural texts in order to reclaim homosexuality and gender-queerness from the realm of pathology and make aspiring doctors empathetic towards LGBTQ+ patients. This paper will focus on the contents of lectures, community-building and responses of medical students to this collaboration.
The vampire becomes a metaphor of current associations between machines, bodies, and patterns of consumption. In itself, it exists on the borders between life and death, between human, animal, and supernatural identities: she/he is a figure of transgression disturbing boundaries between inside and outside, home and foreignness. But what the vampire does is also crucial: consuming bodies, it transforms beings, contaminating them with its own appetites and desire. (2002: 288)
Of late, these vampires seem to have conquered the popular imagination of the Americans like never before. Following the peremptory rule of neo-imperialism, they have traveled to the other parts of the world as well, and have become a global phenomenon. Even if some American television series are not available everywhere, the internet access to the same is however unrestricted. While Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels flew off bookshelves swiftly, Hollywood cashed in on its immense mass appeal and in no time adapted the novels for the celluloid, which proved to be a judicious investment. The Twilight films were a runaway hit across the globe, drawing the teens in huge numbers. Kristen and Robert Pattison cast as Bela and Edward respectively became household names overnight. Simultaneously, the literary world intervened with rather ruthless criticism of the novels as badly written, and as poor appropriations of classical horror/gothic narratives. The novels have none of the complexities of Walpole or Radcliffe, and not even Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera or the more recent vampire series by Anne Price. Yet, none could deny their unprecedented popularity. While the Twilight sagas were creating a stir globally, another American soap, The Vampire Diaries, based on L. J. Smith’s novels (the first of the series was published in 1991), premiered on The CW Television Network on 10 September 2009 amid much hype and hoopla, and have successfully run into the fourth season this year. In fact, the Twilight series may be seen as putting to good commercial use the tremendous success of The Interview with the Vampire: the Vampire Chronicles (1994, based on Price’s 1976 novel) featuring a galaxy of Hollywood superstars and of course Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Price’s book became a bestseller, subsequent to the film’s box-office triumph. True Blood based on The Southern Vampire Mysteries (2001-2012, with the promise another novel in 2013) by Charlaine Harris, which have won a Golden Globe and an Emmy is still running successfully into its fifth season on HBO. This particular series created a sensation when the writer declared she conceived of her vampires as, ‘a minority that was trying to get equal rights’. In fact, it is not hard to recognize the novels’ debt to the rhetoric of the LGBT rights movement in America, and True Blood is often read as an allegory of queer desires, anxieties and politics. Interestingly enough, the success of this queer thread, perhaps, led Kevin Williamson, the producer of The Vampire Diaries to introduce a queer character recently. However, this again is not very new in American television history: The Lair, an explicitly queer vampire tale, had earned enviable viewership from the day it premiered on Here TV in 2007, but could not really sustain itself like True Blood. The critical response to The Lair has been largely negative, and Here TV has not announced a fourth season yet. While vampires monopolize cinema and television like never before, a large number of computer games, namely, Silent Hill and Doom, which are currently a rage amongst children as well as adults, are designed in a way that is reminiscent of horror films: the simulated labyrinths, murky settings, blood-curdling monsters and ghostly figures evoke in the player primal fears and anxieties, and her score depends upon how quickly she can eliminate them, and preserve herself. Again, notably, the paraphernalia conterminous with the celebration of Halloween is becoming increasingly ostentatious by the year in the United States. Indeed, horror, as history would evidence, has never really gone out of fashion. No matter how profound or flippant they may have been horror or gothic tales or anything even remotely associated with horror/terror have always been intriguing. In this paper, I would like to investigate this recent vampire boom in the American entertainment world and its success.
Sivanandan’s saga spans three generations of a poor peasant Tamil family based in the politically turbulent regions of Jaffna, in northern Sri Lanka. The novel is a product of the experience of forced displacement of the Sri Lankan author, who is now a leading social activist and writer based in London. The director of the Institute of Race Relations and the founding editor of their journal Race and Class, Sivanandan describes the conditions under which he was forced to migrate to England: “My parents’ house was attacked by a Sinhalese mob, my nephew had petrol thrown on him and burnt alive, and friends and relatives disappeared into refugee camps. I was a Tamil married to a Sinhalese with three children, and I could only see a future of hate stretching out before them.”
It is interesting to note that the novel, with its socialist leanings, seems to advance a notion of underclass masculinity, which is posited vis-à-vis a critique of bourgeois masculinity. Masculinity, especially among the bourgeoisie and aspirant social climbers, is often associated with material success, of having attained a certain class status and power. Sivanandan, in my reading, privileges a form of masculinity devoted to socialist ideologies, the discursive reach of which also includes women. The novel is populated with such male characters, and each of them is given sufficient narrative time; but none of them are viewed as gendered subjects. In this article, I shall focus on Rajan, a member of the Jaffna peasant family, who narrates the first two books of the novel to highlight Sivanandan’s notions of masculinity: Rajan, torn between strong left-leaning friends who think nothing less than a revolution could bring about change and his filial duties as the eldest son of a poor family, in my opinion, offers an excellent example of how men too feel helpless in the compulsion to preserve what is perceived as manly at a certain moment in history. Although Sivanandan does not reflect on this helplessness as a crisis of masculinity as such, it comes out in Rajan’s story, more so because it is narrated in the first person. At the same time, through Rajan’s story, Sivanandan also reaffirms certain hegemonic forms of masculinity.
Drawing my theoretical framework from the works of a wide range of cultural theorists − R W Connell (1987, 1993, 1996, 2005) , Judith Butler (1999), John Benyon (2002), George Mosse (1996), Michael Kimmel (1994, 2004, 2006), Caroline Ossella, Filippo Ossella and Radhika Chopra (2004, 2006), Pradeep Jeganathan (2000), Sanjay Srivastava (2014), and Jani de Silva (2009, 2015) − I shall locate When Memory Dies in the discourses of a perceived ‘crisis of masculinity’ in contemporary times, and examine how displacement from one’s own culture, can be more constricting than liberating in terms of seeing oneself as a having failed the test of manliness.
The production and reception of texts are historically and politically contingent, and cultural hegemonies shape canons in the academy and beyond. The publishing, marketing and circulation of texts are also instrumental in influencing their reception. Several authors have not found acceptance in the publishing industry for a long time; and several texts have been relegated to obscurity, having acquired labels such as ‘immoral’, ‘obscene’, ‘reactionary’ or ‘regressive’, owing to moral policing or censorship. Many of these texts which were marginalised have been revived in recent times, and the canon has been expanded to include voices less heard. Certain authors, however, continue to exist in a problematic relationship with the dominant canon, on account of their identity, writing style and ideology. Likewise, certain clusters of texts have formed parallel canons of ‘minor’ literatures, independent of or in an uneasy relationship with the dominant canon. As literary and cultural studies have become more democratized to include a range of texts which were not considered worthy of serious academic attention, multiple canons have emerged. These new canons have de-centred established ones. Changing reading practices have (re)turned attention to texts and genres once passed by, whereas canonical texts have been subjected to new contrapuntal readings. The very notion of the canon seems to have broken down, and ‘minor’ literatures have become the new focus of attention. However, texts from the margins (spheres outside the more established literature of the ‘mainstream’) still lack visibility and rarely find access to the publishing industry. This conference seeks to map the networks of power that exclude or include texts through canon formation from the nineteenth century to the present day and invites papers focusing on, but not limited to, the following areas:
a) Revival of forgotten or marginalised texts
b) Literature, censorship, and the publishing industry
c) Revisiting existing canons
d) Emergence of hierarchies within new canons of ‘minor’ literatures
e) Construction of centres and margins and the politics of canon formation, etc.
f) Reading practices, reinterpretations and transformation of the canon
g) Marginal identities and rejection of the canon
h) Dismissive critics and disgruntled authors
i) University syllabi, pedagogy and the canon
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