Emergence of New World Order in the 19th and 20th Century: Mobility and Connections across the Asian Colonies through the Lens of Auto-Biographical Narratives and Travelogues

This proposal invites papers which investigate into ways in which written narratives emerging from the Asian colonies with special focus on India, China, Japan and South-East Asian countries in the 2nd half of the 19th and the entire 20th century articulate the unstable social and political conditions of their contexts and mobility while simultaneously envisioning the emergence of the new world orders and forms of Asian imagination. Genres such as autobiographical narratives, memoirs and travelogues chronicle the transformative experiences of their authors, particularly in relation to their status as colonized subjects, and often reflect a conscious intent to communicate these experiences to diverse strata across the communities and societies. These texts document not only the personal journeys of their narrators but also the broader potentialities of societies that underwent extensive reforms through anti-imperialist movements, foregrounding the interconnectedness of Asian colonial nation-states that despite their civilizational affinities were frequently divided by artificially imposed borders.

The narrative strategies whether personal or archival deployed by these writers often reflect their attempts to negotiate new cultural and linguistic realities. Then places are reimagined, contributing to the formation of a distinctive discourse of nation-building and anti-imperialist resistance in colonial contexts. 

The proposal look for papers which will explore into

1. Narrative genres illustrating historical connections between personal and collective memories that transcend, challenge the binaries of colonial propaganda and instead allowing for spaces of curiosity, empathy, and hospitality, enabling alignment with prevailing political ideologies or the subversion. 

2. Genres portraying the rise of print culture and the proliferation of literary forms like autobiographical texts and travelogues and how they occupied a unique intersection among various literary genres. 

3. Narratives describing colonial spaces, characterized by both the trauma of imperial domination and the vitality of anticolonial struggle that served as fertile ground for the emergence of dynamic narrative traditions, allowing authors from a wide range of social and political backgrounds to give expression to their lived experiences. 

4. Personal narratives that serve to dismantle enduring myths and stereotypes, facilitating critical reassessment. 

5. Narratives that invite readers into the personal and empirical worlds of texts that enable the previously unimagined realities by studying the connections that shaped the colonial world order. 

6. The seminar thus welcomes papers that examine varied world orders, power structures, colonial encounters under anti-imperialist struggle exploring alternative narratives surrounding these emerging world orders.