Dear Colleagues,

we would like to share this call for submissions to our panel on “Marginal Memories: Resistive Expressions of the Marginalized in South Asia” at this year’s European Conference on South Asian Studies (ECSAS) in Heidelberg (October 1-4, 2025).

The deadline for the submission of paper proposals is January 30, 2025. For details regarding the panel, submission and registration, please follow these links: https://ecsas2025.com/?s=marginal+memories&submit=Search

https://ecsas2025.com/call-for-panels/

 

Please feel free to circulate this call for papers with your friends, colleagues and students who do research related to these topics.

Yours,
Yogitha Shetty and Pauline Schuster-Löhlau

 

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Literary and performative expressions have been sites of resistance and celebration for the many marginal communities in South Asia. Through genres like oral songs, poetry, short stories, life narratives, and performative cultural practices like plays, rituals, etc., they have attempted to re-present themselves. Their relegated status in terms of caste, gender, religion, language and indigeneity is represented and contested through creative modes of articulations, thereby reshaping their selfhood at both individual and communitarian levels. An important analytical tool in this context is memory, with its capacity to connect past and present and to incorporate diverse materials/mediums. Concepts like “Public Memory” (C.L. Novetzke) and “Cultural Memory” (J. and A. Assmann) have helped us in understanding the communitarian phenomena with newer insights.

This panel invites works engaging with the literary and performative expressions of marginal groups in India and South Asia. It brings to the fore and deliberates upon the rich bodies of literature and cultural practices deployed as critical sites of dissent by various individuals and “publics”. We seek to explore the intersectional politics of aforesaid marginals and the way they lead to community formations relying on literary and cultural memories, thereby defying structures of power and repression. We invite papers exploring the following and related themes:

1. Memory as an alternative archive

2. Orality and writing as emancipatory expressions

3. Language hierarchies and contestations

4. Caste and communitarian assertions

5. Indigenous articulations

6. Gender and agency

7. Contesting geospatial imaginaries

8. Devotional/ritualistic practices of the marginal