Postcolonial borders function less as fixed lines than as ideological and infrastructural apparatuses—visible, for instance, in contemporary border enforcement regimes and India’s northeastern border insurgencies. Homi Bhabha’s split between the pedagogical nation (a fixed origin) and the performative nation (an ongoing contest) names this shift: the border is where the nation is narrated into being. We call this narrative bordermaking. Narrative bordermaking builds on Gayatri Spivak’s account of “worlding,” by which colonial powers write peripheries into legibility on terms not their own. Spivak’s claim that the postcolonial world is increasingly organized around the demographic rather than the territorial is a critique that exposes comparative literature’s own center-periphery biases. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s call to move the colonial cultural center supplies the corrective: decolonial literature that relocates the border rather than inheriting it.

This seminar triangulates South Asia, Latin America, and East Africa’s Indian Ocean world in comparative conversation—not to flatten regional specificity into a single “Global South,” but to test where bordermaking names a shared condition and where it fractures. Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand treats the India-Pakistan border as porous and endlessly re-narratable. Amitav Ghosh, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor displace the territorial nation-state with an oceanic imaginary that predates and exceeds it. These texts challenge world-literary models—from Casanova’s Paris-centered Republic of Letters to Damrosch’s transnational circulation—still bound to terrestrial geography. We invite papers reading with or against these provocations across three lines of inquiry:

• Territorial Bordermaking: How did colonial cartography invent the ethnic, religious, and territorial categories which postcolonial states still govern by? How do partition and insurgent literatures, from South Asia to Africa, narrate that inheritance?
• Ecological Bordermaking: What happens to “border” once it names a sea, a language, an ecology, or a body? How do oceanic and archipelagic imaginaries—Gurnah’s Zanzibar, Owuor’s Indian Ocean, Ghosh’s Bay of Bengal—become formal, not just thematic?
• Formal Bordermaking: How do hybridity, code-switching, and genre-crossing perform border-crossing at the level of technique? What does it mean for a text—Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, which theorizes the border as a psychic and linguistic wound as much as a geopolitical line—to write from the border rather than about it?

We welcome papers on topics including, but not limited to:

• Oceanic and archipelagic imaginaries
• Ecological borders and extraction
• Gender, sexuality, and belonging at the border
• Migration, diaspora, and refugee narratives

Please direct queries and submit paper abstracts (200–250 words) with a brief bio (100 words) by September 22, 2026, to Anmol Sahni ([email protected]) and Swati Baruah ([email protected]).