Dear Indologists,

Below please find a CFP for the 2013 AAS conference in San Diego (21-24 March).  We welcome abstracts of 250 words from anyone interested in presenting a paper.  We envision having 4-5 papers on the panel, among which one will be from the panel conveners.  If interested, please submit an abstract to both Laura Desmond (ldesmond@stlawu.edu) and Anthony Cerulli (cerulli@hws.edu) by 6:00pm, Monday, 16 July. 

Thank you,

Laura Desmond, St. Lawrence University

Anthony Cerulli, Hobart & William Smith Colleges

NARRATIVE LITERATURE AND HISTORIOGRAPHY IN SOUTH ASIA (provisional title)

The proposed panel follows two lines of inquiry into the relationship between South Asian narrative literature and historiography. 

The first line examines emic models of history that are expressed and constituted by South Asian narrative texts.  Here papers might consider questions such as: To the extent that narrative literary works are historical acts, i.e. acts of saying something in a particular time and place, how do they represent themselves in relation to other forms of historical action?  To this end, panelists might probe the ways in which texts present their own historicality, as well as that of their subjects.  Are there markers or triggers in these works that allude to paratextual reality?  Are there markers to encourage certain kinds of historical interpretation or ways of hearing a story, while discouraging others?  In asking these and other related questions, this panel explores relationships set up by a text between its own narrative and paratextual reality, and the ways in which a particular text (or collection of texts) facilitates the ability of an audience to reproduce those relationships.  This line of inquiry enquires if some South Asian literary genres, periods, or bodies of literature link themselves more explicitly to paratextual reality than do others, and whether or not some genres lend themselves more readily to historical interpretation.  A paper might therefore look at the different ways that texts evince different degrees of interest in facticity.  How do these texts create “reality effects,” for example, to relate their own envisioned historicity or the historicity of the events they narrate?

If the first line of inquiry asks what questions of history are raised by South Asian narrative texts themselves, the second line seeks to explore how these texts might answer the questions that we today bring with us when we read them: How can South Asian literary/narrative genres best be engaged as useful sources for historians?  Does a wholly imaginative work of literature, if there can be such a thing, nevertheless contain data useful for the construction of something like a “historical record”?  We anticipate that this line of analysis would include reflection upon the assumptions, methods, and limits of modern historiography and how these might be not only challenged by the South Asian literary corpus, but also supplemented or otherwise reenvisioned.