• Home
• » 2025 Conference Program

2025 Conference Program

SALA 2025 ANNUAL CONFERENCE SCHEDULE

RETHINKING SOUTH ASIA: POSTCOLONIALITY & DECOLONIAL FRAMES AND PRAXIS

Co-chairs: Amrita Ghosh, Arnab Dutta Roy and Rajorshi Das

SALA executive committee meeting
Friday, 17 January 2025

Use the Zoom link to join the conference panel discussions on January 18 & 19, 2025
https://ucf.zoom.us/j/95935292872?pwd=FOVCyTeAxXofWAUew5abrb5bhtIpUb.1

Meeting ID: 959 3529 2872
Passcode: 725287

Scroll down for links to the keynotes

DAY 1 SATURDAY, JANUARY 18

Time: 8:30– 9 am ET
(7:30 am CST, 1:30 pm GMT, 6:30 pm PKT, 7 pm IST, 7:30 pm BST, 9:30 pm SGT)

Conference Welcome: Maryse Jayasuriya, Professor, Saint Louis University, US

Time: 9:15-10:30 am ET
(8:15 am CST, 2:15 pm GMT, 7:15 pm PKT, 7:45 pm IST, 8:15 pm BST, 10:15 pm SGT)

1A: Decoloniality and Indigeneity

Chair: Amardeep Singh

From resistance to re-existence to co-existence: Decolonial (re-)cognition of Angami Naga shamanic therapeutic traditions in Avinuo Kire’s The Last Light of Glory Days.
Sampda Swaraj, Research Scholar, IIT-Roorkee, India

Decoding Precarity through Decolonial Lens: Semiotic Analysis of The Great Derangement and The Nutmeg’s Curse by Amitav Ghosh and A Naga Village Remembered by Estherine Kire.
Lakshminath Rabha, Assistant Professor, D.R. College, India

“Adivasi” as Catachresis: Postcolonial and Decolonial Engagements with South Asian Indigeneity.
Amardeep Singh, Professor, Lehigh University, US

1B: Rethinking Decoloniality

Chair: Sukriti Bhukkal

The Politics of Hindutva: Exploring the Appropriation of Decoloniality in Contemporary India.
Sukriti Bhukkal, Assistant Professor, Govt. PG College for Women, India.

Revisiting Decolonialism in South Asia: The Role of Pre-Colonial Christian Communities.
Clara A.B. Joseph, Professor, University of Calgary, Canada.

The Decolonial Exotic: Theorizing Post-Orientalism in Postmodern Bengali Fiction.
Dhee Sankar, Guest Lecturer in English, Sanskrit College & University, India.

Stars Said So: Soft Saffronisation and the Spiritual Grifter.
Payal Nagpal, PhD student, University of Calgary, Canada.

1C: Decolonizing Boundaries and Intersections

Chair: Maria Shawl

Redefining Postcolonial Resistance: The Hamletian Dilemma and Decolonization in Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator.
Maria Shawl, Research Scholar, SRM University, India.

(In)visible Intersections: Decolonizing Social Exclusion and Human Rights in Indian Graphic Narratives.
Rounak Gupta, PhD student, SRM University, India.

A Bengali Lady at England: A position of colonized woman in England.
Ananta Kar, Master’s student, Jadavpur University, India

Liminal Existence and the People of No Man’s Land: A Study of Border Culture from Sasim Kumar Barai’s novel Dersho Gaje Jibon (Life Within 150 Yards).
Juthika Biswas, PhD candidate, Amity University, Kolkata

1D: Vernacular and Decoloniality

Chair: Feba Rasheed

Beyond Modernity: What would a decolonial analysis of the vernacular look like?
Shvetal Vyas Pare, Associate Lecturer, Flinders University, Australia

Spatially Constructing the History of English in India.
Renuka Kannan, Ph.D. candidate, Central University of Tamil Nadu, India

Translating Bid’at: On the Limits of Comparison and Untranslatability.
Feba Rasheed, PhD candidate, University of Oregon, US

Fiction as History: R. D. Karve and the Vernacular Politics of Sexology in Post/Colonial India.
Rovel Sequeira, Assistant Professor, University of Michigan, US

Time: 10:45 am-12:00 pm ET
(9:45 am CST, 3:45 pm GMT, 8:45 pm PKT, 9:15 pm IST, 9:45 pm BST, 11:45 pm SGT)

2A: Caste and Knowledge Production

Chair: Arnab Dutta Roy

‘West’ being ‘theoretical Capital: Theorizing the ‘untheorized’ through ‘spatialized Ontology.’
Madhuvadhani M, PhD candidate, South Asian University, India

Re-Caste(ing) Caste via Imagined Encounters between Gandhi and Ambedkar.
Shaweta Nanda, Assistant Professor, Central University of Himachal Pradesh, India

Dalit Universalisms: Caste, Capitalism, & Identity Politics in Yashica Dutt’s Coming Out as Dalit.
Arnab Dutta Roy, Assistant Professor, Florida Gulf Coast University, US

2B: Geographies and Spaces

Chair: Gautam Joseph

Transactions across the Sea: Kacchilpattanam and the Fashioning of Urbanity in North Malabar.
Shyma P, Assistant Professor, Payyanur College, India

Goat as Critic: Decolonial Essays between Vaikom Muhammad Basheer’s Pathumma’s Goat and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.
Gautam Joseph, PhD student, National University of Singapore & King’s College London, UK and Singapore

Geography of Fear and Critical Poetic Cityscape: Maki Kureishi’s Poetry on Karachi.
Ayesha Perveen, Assistant Professor, Virtual University of Pakistan, Pakistan

2C: Postcolonial Northeast India and Decoloniality

Chair: Kalpana Bora

Making Sense of Manipur Violence through the Lens of Ethnic Homeland Politics and Hindutva.
Amom Malemnganba Singh, PhD student, Manipur University, India

Decolonial worlding and “in-betweenness” in Janice Pariat’s Everything the Light Touches.
Kalpana Bora, Assistant Professor, Cotton University, India

Un-writing Colonial Hill-Stations: Decolonial Futures and the Mountainscapes in Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss.
Rai Kamalini Mukherjee, PhD candidate, IIT-Guwahati, India

12:00-12:30 pm Recess

Time: 12:30 – 2:00 pm Keynote
(11:30 am CST, 5:30 pm GMT, 10:30 pm PKT, 11 pm IST, 11:30 pm BST)

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84893989076?pwd=jrm1DR6NNtsKv9RLsfmaZF1j3g0n7M.1

Meeting ID:
Passcode: 800261

On the Difference Between the Mughal Empire and British Colonial Rule in India and its Contemporary Significance. Gurminder Bhambra

Time: 2:15-3:30 pm
(1:15 pm CST, 7:15 pm GMT, 12:15 am PKT, 12:45 am IST, 1:15 am BST)

3A: Partition Narratives: Postcolonial/Decolonial, Gender, and Violence

Chair: Nalini Iyer

Iphigenia in Calcutta: Dislocated Families and Disposable Daughters.
Debali Mookerjea-Leonard, Professor, James Madison University, US

“How to belong as a woman?”: Narratives of remembrance and resilience in the light of the 1947 Partition of India.
Ragini Chakraborty, PhD candidate, University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign, US

Writing About Partition for Youth in the Diaspora.
Nalini Iyer, Professor, Seattle University, US

3B: Resilience and Care

Chair: Moumin Quazi

Disability: Challenges and Traumas of Becoming or Not Becoming Mother.
Sonia Sharmin, Lecturer, Augusta University, US

Challenging Intersectional Precarity: The Resilience of Dalit Women.
Talat, PhD student, NIT Patna, India

“A Dirty Joke.”
Moumin Quazi, Professor, Tarleton State University, US

3C: Decolonizing History, Memory and Materiality

Chair: Avishek Banerjee

Decoloniality and Selective Amnesia: A study of Anjum Hasan’s novel History’s Angel.
Vagesh Nandini, PhD candidate, IIT-Jodhpur, India

Resistance in Neo-Colonial Calcutta: Exploring the Naxalite Rebellion in Satyajit Ray’s Films.
Avishek Banerjee, PhD candidate, SRM University, India

Decolonising Indian history: Oral storytelling and cultural traditions in Parismita Singh’s The Hotel at the End of the World.
Deblina Rout, PhD candidate, IIT-Hyderabad, India

3D: Writing and Teaching Decolonial Futures

Chair: Soraya Zarook

Feeling Difference in the South Asian Writing Classroom: (Re)imagining Writing Pedagogy and its Affective (Dis)course.
Sonakshi Srivastava, Senior Writing Tutor, Ashoka University and Vrinda Chopra, Senior Writing Fellow, Ashoka University, India

Decolonising Tamil Studies: Towards a ‘New’ Literary Historiography.
Aadhavan Pazhani, PhD candidate, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

Sri Lankan Anglophone and Diasporic Poetry as Decolonial Praxis.
Soraya Zarook, Assistant Professor, Old Dominion University, US

Time: 3:45-5:00 pm ET
(2:45 pm CST, 8:45 pm GMT, 1:45 am PKT, 2:15 am IST, 2:45 am BST)

4A: Decoloniality and Alternate Modernity

Chair: Abhinaba Chatterjee

Decoloniality and Alternative Modernism in the novels of Amitav Ghosh.
Abhinaba Chatterjee, Research Scholar, Gurukul Kangri, India

Phanishwarnath Renu: Interrogating the literary archives of State and Region in post- colonial India.
Prabhakar Kumar, PhD candidate, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India

Lesser Lives: Working class Women in the Fiction of Post-liberalisation India.
Pradarshika Biswas, PhD candidate, IIT-Jodhpur, India

4B: Decoloniality, Climate, and Ecocriticism

Chair: Pavithra Tantrigoda

The Authority of the Dead and ‘Eco-critical Ethics of Witnessing’ in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost.
Pavithra Tantrigoda, Assistant Professor, University of Central Florida, US

Politics of Cli-Fi: Understanding Climate, Ecology and Social in Select South Asian Climate Fiction.
Elza Maria Baby, PhD student, IIT-Kanpur, India

Graphic Narratives by Tribal Artists: Decolonizing the Techno-scientific Narratives on Climate Change.
Anandita Saraswat, PhD student, IIT-Indore and Aratrika Das, Asst Professor, IIT-Indore, India

Qissa Khwani: Forging an Alternate Imaginary of the River’s Edge.
Mahwish Khalil, Instructor, Syracuse University, US

4C: Identities, Race and Religion

Chair: Musab Abdul Salam

Decoloniality in Düsseldorf: Mithu Sanyal’s Identitti and the Globality of Postcolonial Studies.
Hans-Georg Erney, Professor, Georgia Southern University, US

On Navigating Brownness, Islamophobia, and Settler-colonialism: Reading the Politics of Race in Omer Aziz’s Brown Boy.
Asma Sayed, Canada Research Chair, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Canada

A Destitute Muslim on the Margins of the Nation: Crisis of Mobility, Modernity and Citizenship in Megha Majumdar’s ‘A Burning’.
Md Asif Uzzaman, Research Scholar, IIT- Kanpur, India

Against Pluralism: Rethinking Religion in South Asian Anglophone Scholarship.
Musab Abdul Salam, PhD candidate, University of Oregon, US

Time: 5:15-6:30 pm
(4:15 pm CST, 10:15 pm GMT, 3:15 am PKT, 3:45 am IST, 4:15 am BST)

5A: The Ignored South Asia

Chair: Amrita Ghosh

Pashtuns in the Postcolony: Necropolitical Violence and the Question of Existence.
Muhammad Farooq, Assistant Professor, Seton Hall University, US

From Tagore’s Kabuliwala to SRK’s Pathaan: Construction of the Pathaan in Indian Imaginary.
Amrita Ghosh, Assistant Professor, University of Central Florida, US

The Paradoxes of Contemporary Bhutan in Kunzang Choden’s fiction.
Pooja Sancheti, Assistant Professor, IISER Pune, India

5B: Professionalization Panel

Chairs: Moumin Quazi & Aniruddha Mukhopadhyay

Nalini Iyer, Professor, Seattle University, US
Cynthia Leenerts, Associate Professor, East Stroudsberg University, US
Moumin Quazi, Professor, Tarleton State University, US
Aniruddha Mukhopadhyay, Associate Professor, Texas A&M University-Kingsville, US

SALA Business Meeting: 6:30-7:30 EST
(5:30 pm CST, 11:30 pm GMT, 4:30 am PKT, 5 am IST, 5:30 am BST, 7:30 am SGT)

DAY 2, JANUARY 19

Time: 9:15 am- 10.30 am
(8:15 am CST, 2:15 pm GMT, 7:15 pm PKT, 7:45 pm IST, 8:15 pm BST, 10:15 SGT)

1A: Human, Non-Human, and Planetary Connections

Chair: Nivedita Ghosh

Colonial Animal Perceptions and the Dogs of Contemporary India.
Nivedita Ghosh, Assistant Professor, Jesus and Mary College, India

Decolonizing Development: Indigenous Voices and Ecological Justice in Sheela Tomy’s Valli. Dharmendra Kumar, Assistant Professor, HNB Garhwal University, India

More than Humans: Questions Environmental Ethics and Planetarity in O.V. Vijayan’s Novels.
Dhanesh Mankulam, Assistant Professor, Christ University, India

1B: South Asian, World Literature: Intertextuality, Debates and Praxis

Chair: Aniket Roy

De(Colonial) Empowerment: Debates on “After World Literature” and Its Petrification.
Arindam Saha, PhD candidate, Pondicherry Central University, India

Marginality and Catastrophe: Reading the Voices of the Wounds in the selected works of Rabisankar Bal.
Aniket Roy, PhD candidate, IIT-Gandhinagar, India

The Spectrum of Queer Diaspora: Remediating Diaspora Discourses.
Anju Upendran, PhD candidate, Kannur University, India

IC: Rethinking Genres and Episteme: Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia

Chair: Swati Ganguly

“Writing a History of Future”: Reconfiguring Science Fiction and Postcoloniality.
Nandini Lohia, postgraduate student, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India

Decolonising Critical Spatial Temporal Frameworks in South Asian Literature.
Rupal Bansal, Ph.D. candidate, Nottingham Trent University, UK

Decolonizing knowledge production: Rabindranath’s essays on Visva-Bharatiindranath Tagore’s essays on Visva-Bharati.
Swati Ganguly, Professor of English, Visva-Bharati, India

1D: Neoliberal/Neocolonial Formations

Chair: Aakanksha D’Cruz

A Postcolonial Complicity: Syed Waliullah’s The Ugly Asian.
Ummey Haney Pinkey, Lecturer, Chittagong Independent University, Bangladesh

The Gendered Politics of Neoliberal Development in India: A Decolonial Feminist Critique of “Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao” (Save the daughter, Educate the daughter).
Aakanksha D’Cruz, PhD student, University of California, Irvine, US

#Metoo as a Tool of Resistance: When Regional Fictional Work Becomes Pan-Indian Representation.
Pritha Sarkar, Assistant Professor, XIM University Bhubaneshwar, India

Time: 10:45 am-12:00 pm ET
(9:45 am CST, 3:45 pm GMT, 8:45 pm PKT, 9:15 pm IST, 9:45 pm BST)

2A: Gender and Performance

Chair: Shanna Jain

The Indian Chick Lit Hero: A Return to Colonial Stereotypes?
Amrita Mitra, Assistant Professor, Banwarilal Bhalotia College, India.

Anxious Men: A Decolonial Queer Reading of Masculinity in Twentieth-Century South Asian Fiction.
Shanna Jain, PhD candidate, IIT Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India

Queer Garba and the Trope of the Tolerant Hindu family in Maja Ma.
Rajorshi Das, PhD candidate, University of Iowa, US

2B: Women’s Writing and the Region

Chair: Pennie Ticen

Manifesting the Postcolonial Space in Women’s Writing: ‘Regional’ Literature and the Quest for Identity.
Paloma Chaterji, Assistant Professor, Chinmaya Viswa Vidyapeeth, India

City, Body, and Heterotopias: Conceptualizing the Gendered Spaces in Aarachar by K R Meera.
Kavya E M, Doctoral Research Fellow, EFLU, Hyderabad, India.

Separate Categories and Hierarchical Dichotomies? Reframing Borders and Gender Roles as Porous and Multi-layered in Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand.
Pennie Ticen, Associate Professor, Virginia Military Institute, US

Who could be a Feminist? Contesting Historical Debates on Feminist Discourses in 19th and 20th century India.
Kanchan Panday, PhD candidate, Deakin University, Melbourne

2C: Rethinking Pre-Colonial Mythological and Textual Traditions

Chair: Billy Clem

“[F}inally Sita was returning to her normal . . . “: Sita as Decolonial Lover in Qurratulain Hyder’s Sita Betrayed.
Billy Clem, Professor, Waubonsee Community College, US

Materializing decolonial Mahabharata: Investigating Arjuna as a queer hero in Adishakti’s Brhannala (1998) and The Hare and the Tortoise (2007).
Sushmita Dey, PhD Candidate, IIT, Dhanbad, India

Tracing the Tradition of “Non-Western Enlightenment” in Urdu Poetry of Nazir Akbarabadi.
Mohd. Siddique Khan, PhD candidate, University of Lucknow, India

2D: Disaster and Resilience

Chair: Amit Baishya

Indigenous Resilience, Planetary Dystopia and the Politics of the Anthropocene in Amitav Ghosh’s The Living Mountain.
Neeharika Haloi, PhD candidate, Tezpur University, India

The Natural and the Necropolitical in Kaala Paani.
Turni Chakrabarti, Assistant Professor, O. P. Jindal Global University, India

Decolonial Engagement with the Past and Resistance to Bio- and Necropolitics in Rajat Chaudhuri’s The Butterfly Effect.
Md. Alamgir Hossain, Assistant Professor, University of Rajshahi, Bangladesh

“An Alien Visitation”: The Weird and the Aesthetics of Breathing in Siddhartha Deb’s The Light at the End of the World.
Amit Baishya, Associate Professor, University of Oklahoma, US

12:00-12:30 pm Recess

Time: 12:30-2.00 pm Keynote Discussion
(11:30 am CST, 5:30 pm GMT, 10:30 pm PKT, 11 pm IST, 11:30 pm BST)

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84893989076?pwd=jrm1DR6NNtsKv9RLsfmaZF1j3g0n7M.1

Meeting ID:
Passcode: 800261

“Out of Empire.” Tahmima Anam and Mirza Waheed

Time: 2:15 -3.30 pm ET
(1:15 pm CST, 7:15 pm GMT, 12:15 am PKT, 12:45 am IST, 1:15 am BST)

3A: Activism and Protests

Chair: Sahid Mondal

Students Strike Back: Youth Life and the Promise of Post-Colonial Pakistan.

Hashim Ali, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Illinois at Chicago, US

Shifting Paradigms of Protest: Contentious Actions and Critical Framings of Student Collectives in Post-Colonial India.

Soudh Ismail, PhD fellow, University of Hyderabad, India

Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh: Indexing Decolonial Aesthetics of Resistance.

Sahid Mondal, PhD student at Brandeis University, US

3B: Partition History and Spatiality

Chair: Afroj Jahan

Decolonising the Cover Illustration: Literary Marketplace and Partition Memories.

Afroj Jahan, PhD candidate, IIT-Roorkee

Centering the De-centered: The Partitioned Tales of Spatial Crisis.

Silpi Maitra, Assistant Professor, Falakata College, India

Interrogating the Insularity of Hegemonic Historical Narratives: Memory and Decolonial Dialogues through Select Dalit Partition Life Writings.

Biraj Biswas, Doctoral Research Scholar SRM University, India and Bidisha Pal, Assistant Professor, SRM University, India

“Border Thinking as Epistemic Disobedience: A reading of Phanishwar Nath Renu’s Juloos”

Sneha Sharma Assistant Professor, GGSIP University, India

3C: Queerness and Coloniality

Chair: Swati Gilotra

Queerness and the Limits of Pedagogy in Murder in Mahim (2017) by Jerry Pinto and Aligarh (2015) directed by Hansal Mehta.

Apoorv Pandey, PhD candidate, University of Rochester, US

Re-Reading Queer Identities in Sri Lanka in a New Light.

Shreeja Basu, Master’s student, Jadavpur University, US

Othering Sameness: Citizen/Traitor and Gender Performativity in Megha Majumdar’s A Burning.

Swati Gilotra, PhD candidate, University of Georgia, US

3D: Postcolonial Sri Lanka at a Testimonial Crossroads

Chair: Dinidu Karunanayake

Emerging Writers Bearing Witness: Possibilities and Challenges.
Maryse Jayasuriya, Professor, Saint Louis University, US

‘Homo photographers’: Queer object/body alignments and the impotent witnessing of war in The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.
Shermal Wijewardene, Senior Lecturer, University of Columbo, Sri Lanka

Scatological Witnessing and Sri Lanka’s Era of Terror.
Dinidu Karunanayake, Asst Professor, Elon University, US

3:45- 5:00 pm ET
(2:45 pm CST, 8:45 pm GMT, 1:45 am PKT, 2:15 am IST, 2:45 am BST)

4A: Graduate Student Hangout

Chair: Zachary Bordas

Zoom link: https://lsu.zoom.us/j/6242460860?omn=95689291953

4B: Food Politics and Rationality

Chair: Aryehi Bhushan

Meat Matters: Carnivorous Politics and Modi’s Hindutva.
Aryehi Bhushan, DPhil candidate, University of Oxford (Wolfson College), UK

Purity, Contamination and the Brahmanical Politics of Vegetarianism.
Sanjula Rajat, PhD candidate, University of Oregon, US

On Order, Rationality, and Morality in Tanuj Solanki’s Manjhi’s Mayhem.
Srikanth Mallavarapu, Associate Professor, Roanoke College, US

4C: Decoloniality and Feminist Critique

Chair: Madhulina Choudhury

The Precarious Fate of Postcolonial Feminism in Rituparno Ghosh’s Cinema.
Md Rezaul Haque, Adjunct Associate Professor, St. John’s University, US

‘Delinking’ Eurocentric Epistemes: Decoloniality as a Paradigm of Spiritual Feminism in The Circle of Karma.
Madhulina Choudhury, Assistant Professor, Mahapurusha Srimanta Sankaradeva Viswavidyalaya, India

Decolonizing the knowledge production around menstruation in Kolkata.
Udita Bose, Doctoral Researcher, Brunel University, UK

Time: 5.15- 6.30 pm ET
(4:15 pm CST, 10:15 pm GMT, 3:15 am PKT, 3:45 am IST, 4:15 am BST)

5A: Papal Roundtable: The Role of Literature in Formation

Chair: Cynthia Leenerts

Not only how to make a living but how to live: Literature as Mission and Vocation.
Robin Field, Professor, King’s College, Pennsylvania, US

Being Challenged by Other Voices in Public Reading Groups.
Maryse Jayasuriya, Professor, Saint Louis University, US

Seeing Through the Eyes of Another.
John Hawley, Professor Emeritus, Santa Clara University, US

Postcolonial Lit and the Papal Letter.
Nalini Iyer, Professor, Seattle University, US

Pedagogy, Social Justice, and the Catholic University Perspective.
Nidhi Shrivastava, Assistant Teaching Professor, Sacred Heart University, US

Finding ‘Companions’ in South Asian Books: A View from an Americanist. Brian Yothers, Professor, Saint Louis University, US

Pope Francis as Theorist: Postcoloniality in Letter on Formation; Ecocriticism in Laudato Si’ and Laudate Deum.
Cynthia Leenerts, Associate Professor, East Stroudsburg University, US.

5B: Subaltern Lives, Time, and Agency

Chair: Wafa Asher

The Becoming “Black” of India: Poor Lives Matter.
Sharmila Mukherjee, Associate Professor, Bronx Community College, CUNY, US

Braking Time: Dalit Temporality in Vemula Yellaiah’s novel Kakka.
Bonnie Zare, Professor, Virginia Tech, US (withdrawn)

The Erotics of Disgust and Subaltern Agency in Rashid Jahan’s Who.
Wafa Asher, PhD candidate, UChicago, US.

SALA Business Meeting: 6:30-7:30 EST
(5:30 pm CST, 11:30 pm GMT, 4:30 am PKT, 5 am IST, 5:30 am BST, 7:30 am SGT)