This panel is meant to invite papers which examine memoirs, travelogues and archival documents written exclusively in various Asian languages about the Asian colonies including East and South-East Asia, West Asia and South Asia, written during the 20th century. Emerging alongside the growth of print culture and the proliferation of new literary forms and genres, autobiographical writings and travelogues intersect with elements of other genres, ultimately generating hybrid and dynamic modes of expression. The narratives would describe the unstable socio-political environments and geo-political boundaries while simultaneously narrating an emergence of a new world order and world imagination in Asia. These narratives arising exclusively from China, Japan, Korea, South-East Asia, South Asia and West Asia with the support of the archival documents and oral narratives, recount journeys across the continent, documenting narrators’ transformative experiences and their intent to share them with the society shaped by reform struggles and anti-imperialist movements. The genres acknowledge empirically and civilizationally connected colonial nation-states, now divided by newly drawn borders creating nation-states, highlighting how cross-border solidarities and shared histories persist despite political fragmentation. 

The panel is looking for research papers having multidisciplinary approach that 

• Deal with travelogue and memoirs in Asian languages
• The panel will welcome classified and declassified documents from governmental or personal archives written in English and other Asian languages.
• Describe the breaking of the boundaries between political propaganda and elements of curiosity and hospitality.
• Will closely read the Asian colonial spaces with their anti-imperialist struggle and colonial trauma and will illustrate how it creates a dynamic literary space for the narrators.
• Documentation of the reform movements, anti-imperialist struggles and most importantly the lived realities of societies undergoing rapid transformation
• Travel memoirs that in particular allow for human interactions that transcend reductive stereotypes, creating spaces where curiosity and hospitality coexist
• Narratives of mobility resisting political propaganda.
• Texts as testimonies of both trauma and resistance, demonstrating how they produced complex literary spaces in which narrators grappled with shifting power structures and evolving cultural identities.
• The panel will address multiple layers of personal memory, collective experience, historical documentation and archival documents
• The papers should be articulating both an individual's intimate perceptions and a broader socio-political consciousness.
• The panel also aims at having papers that would look into these genres as a form of document alternative history of cultural spaces as lived experiences with an understanding of space, people and milieus
• Critical analysis on travelogue and memoirs keeping the readers response in mind.