In The Visceral Logics of Decolonization, Neetu Khanna rightly contends that decolonization in the twenty-first century must undo the “emotive lessons in the habits of mind and memory of the postcolonial subject” (2020, 1). Because of the tenacity of neoliberal capitalism and global fascism, the twenty-first-century subject in contemporary novels, films, documentaries, and other media moves from one catastrophe to another all the while experiencing a range of unpleasant feelings such as envy, confusion, anxiety, boredom, and despair. Although unpleasantness is a prototypical state of being across the globe in the twenty-first century, writers and artists from the Global South treat unpleasantness as a malleable concept to draw attention to the unequal geopolitical and sociocultural relationship between the Global North and Global South and in turn stretch the spatial and temporal contours of violence.

Be it Nuruddin Farah, a Somali writer, who in his 2007 Anglophone novel Knots illuminates the unpleasantness experienced an expatriate Somali woman who travels from Canada to Somalia to grapple with long-forgotten yet deep-rooted guilt associated with family and homeland, or Han Kang who in her 2014 South Korean novel Human Acts critiques the South Korean military dictatorship by testing the politico-aesthetic limits of the novel form, or Mohammed Hanif, a British-Pakistani writer, who in his 2018 Anglophone novel Red Birds narrativizes the contrasting traumatic unpleasantness of an American soldier and a war-torn refugee to stage a satirical critique of the U.S. war on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq, or Shaunak Sen, an Indian filmmaker and video artist, who in his 2022 documentary All That Breathes brings together two Muslim brothers living in Delhi and ecologically vulnerable birds under one narrative roof to animate a conceptualization of minoritarian survival in the era of majoritarian fascism. 

This seminar seeks to facilitate robust conversations around two concepts, “southern” and “unpleasantness,” and examine the myriad ways in which they coalesce in contemporary texts. I invite papers that provincialize negative affects, feelings, and states of being by probing them from southern vantage points in southern languages and/or problematize the Global North perspectives on time, space, trauma, care, loss, and border. Presentations may consider, to borrow from Sianne Ngai, “affective ideologemes” that bring to the fore the difficulty of theorizing postcolonial, decolonial, and minoritarian realities that do not fit into neat categories such as ordinary and extraordinary, Anglophone and non-Anglophone, and thought and action (2005, 7). 

Abstracts should be between 250-300 word. Please include with submission a brief author bio. All inquiries can be sent to [email protected]. 

Khanna, Neetu. 2020. The Visceral Logics of Decolonization. Durham: Duke University Press, 

Ngai, Sianne. 2005. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.