English Literature and Central Asia
2017 NeMLA Conference
Baltimore, Maryland
March 23-26, 2017
Post-Colonial literary study has looked at many geographical areas in relation to literary representations in English: East Asia, South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. But it has often left out ‘areas,’ ambivalently named and mapped, between these poles, places whose political status was every-changing, overlapping, and ambivalent: the Caucasus, the vast Persian Culture area, and what we have only recently called “Central Asia”—as well as merchant or nomadic peoples (Armenians, Jews, Circassians, Nestorians) not easily cornered into a single space. European figures visited and wrote about these liminal places throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries: they set poems and novels in these places, and purported to know them. This panel purports to explore some of this cultural production, and hopes to compare some of the narratives not only against one another, but in the light of other genres: travel narrative and poem: translation and transcription, short fiction and reportage. This panel calls for papers that address "Southwest and Central Asia" and literature in English. Abstracts should be submitted by September 30, 2016 to: http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention.html.