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19TH TRIENNIAL
CONFERENCE: RUPTURED
COMMONS
Conference Program
July 11-15, 2022, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Table of Contents
NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................................................2
CONFERENCE SCHEDULE ....................................................................................................................................................4
MON. JULY 11......................................................................................................................................................................................................4
TUES. JULY 12 .....................................................................................................................................................................................................8
WED. JULY 13................................................................................................................................................................................................... 14
THURS. JULY 14 ............................................................................................................................................................................................... 15
FRI. JULY 15 .................................................................................................................................................................................................... 20
PAPER SUMMARIES .............................................................................................................................................................. 23
BIOGRAPHIES OF PRESENTERS..................................................................................................................................... 46
MAP OF TMU CAMPUS......................................................................................................................................................... 70
MAP OF TORONTO ................................................................................................................................................................ 71
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Notes and Acknowledgments
Land Acknowledgement
“Toronto is in the ‘Dish With One Spoon Territory’. The Dish With One Spoon is a treaty between the
Anishinaabe, Mississaugas and Haudenosaunee that bound them to share the territory and protect the land.
Subsequent Indigenous Nations and peoples, Europeans and all newcomers have been invited into this treaty
in the spirit of peace, friendship and respect.”
Online Conference Features
Please note that the conference program, biographies of presenters, a guide for chairs, panelists, and audience
members, map of TMU, map of Toronto, and a virtual book fair is available here.
Note on COVID-19 Safety Protocols
To limit the spread of COVID-19, attendees are encouraged, but not required to wear masks. Please
participate remotely if you are experiencing any viral symptoms.
Note on Talking Circle
Talking circles are inspired by Indigenous practice. These discussion circles will take the gathering outside
the colonial frame by ceding the claim to knowing and authority presumed by the lecturer at the front of the
room or by the panel of speakers who read papers and answer questions. Conversation or talking circles
provide time for each participant to share. This slowed down pace of discussion creates an atmosphere of
respect which also allows for emotional and spiritual ideas to enter into the discussion.
In the circle, everyone is equal and interconnected. You have a right to pass in the circle, but are encouraged
to share, because your voice, thoughts, ideas and opinions matter – this is how we learn to walk together in a
good way. When sharing, use “I” statements. We honour lived experience. Focus your positive attention on
the person sharing. Consider the possibility that there may be more for you to learn and benefit from, than
what you’re currently aware of, or have experienced.
Based on the teachings of Dr. Willie Ermine – Cree Elder, Ethicist & Assistant Professor at First Nations
University
Additional material provided by Jerri-Lynn Orr, Indigenous Curriculum Specialist, Lakehead University
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Proudly Sponsored By
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Conference Schedule
Mon. July 11
9am-10am Registration (also ongoing throughout the day)
TRSM Commons
10am-12pm Opening ceremony by Elder Joanne Dallaire (Toronto Metropolitan U) (TRS 1-067)
Keynote Address by Lillian Allen (OCAD U), “Ah Soh Wi Sey: A people’s poetics blazing through to
the heart of what matters”
The ‘commons’ for some has always felt like something we were allowed but had no ownership in;
immigrants, visitors, charity cases, the serviced, the accommodated. Even in the area of language,
cultural forms and genres we found ourselves othered. I’ll discuss a poetics as exemplified by the
spoken word and dub poetry movements which seized upon the inherent sovereignty of voice
(already paid for at the moment of creation) and over the last couple decades created a sparkling
new emerging and expanding commons to champion the voice of young people and misfits, to hold
these voices as community and to engage with each other, society, and the world. My keynote will
be a hybrid presentation utilizing pre-language and post language aesthetic in a poetic romp that
will demand both a listening of intellect and body.
Chair: Anne-Marie Lee-Loy (Toronto Metropolitan U)
12pm-1:00pm Lunch (Cara Commons)
1:00pm-2:15pm Parallel sessions 1-4
Session 1: Graduate Student Prize Panel 1 (TRS 1-073)
Chair: Michael Bucknor (U Alberta)
Jonathan Nash (Victoria U), “An Unbound Jungle: Stories of Community and Rupturing Enclosures
in ‘Camp de la lande’
Harismita Vaideswaran (U Delhi),“Fractured Familiarities, Ruptures of Recognition: Narrating
Affect and Space in Nigerian Civil War Fiction”
Shuyin Yu (Calgary U), “Gartic Phones and Zoom Rooms: On Internet Games, Poetic Imagery,
Laughing Again in Online Spaces an Age of Remote Teaching”
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Session 2: Migration and/as Rupture (TRS 1-075)
Chair: Shazia Rahman (U Dayton U)
Camille Isaacs (OCAD U), “Esi Edugyan’s Subjunctive Tense: Disrupting the Past to Consider What
Could Have Been”
Ankita Kaushik (Delhi), “Oral Narratives and Memory: Negotiating Identity and Sense of
Belongingness in Metropolitan Delhi”
Alfrena Jamie Pierre (U West Indies, Trinidad), “Paths to Healing: The Outworking of New World
Identities in George Lamming’s The Emigrants”
Session 3: Filming Disruption (TRS 1-077)
Chair: Asha VaraDharajan (Queens U)
Ajay K Chaubey and Manvi Sharma (National IT Uttarkhand), “The Ecological Face of “Rupture”:
Representation of the South Asian Climate Crisis in the Eco-documentaries with special reference to
The Weeping Apple and Char… The No Man’s Island”
Seema Jena (New York U), “Notions of Rupture and violations of the Commons with special
reference to the film, Bhopal: A Prayer For Rain (2014)”
Agnes Woolley (Birkbeck U), “Re-Orienting the Gaze: Visualising Refugees in Recent Film”
Session 4: Performance and Surveillance (TRS 2-003)
Chair: Jason Sandhar (U Western Ontario)
Shinjini Basu (Sir Gurudas Mahavidyalaya U), “A Rupture Redrawn: Intersection of the Commons
and the Prison in Jail Memoirs from Colonial and Post-Colonial India”
Ruth Epochi-Olise Etuwe (Alex Ekweme Federal U), “Clothing as Semiotic Resistance: An Appraisal
of the Yoruba ‘Amotekum’”
Sunu Rose Joseph & Shashikantha Koudur (National IT Karnataka), “Colonial Past and Cataclysmic
Future – Queer Environments of Anthropocene in An Unkindness of Ghosts and Tentacle”
2:15pm-2:30pm break
2:30pm-3:45pm Parallel sessions 5-8
Session 5: Grad Student Prize Panel 2 (TRS 1-073)
Chair: Henghameh Saroukhani (Saint Mary’s U)
Shirin Almousa (York U), “Reading the notion of the commons in Parable of the Sower and Orleans
through an intersectional lens”
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Lilika Kukiela (U Toronto), “Encountering Empires: Precarious Healings in Leslie Marmon Silko’s
Ceremony”
Eeva Langeveld and Rita Maricocchi (U Munster), “Narrating Entanglements of British Colonialism
and German National Socialism: Barbara Yelin’s Irmina as a Disruptive History”
Session 6: Indigenous Resurgence and Renewal (TRS1-075)
Chair: Muchativugwa Liberty Hove (North-West U)
Carolina Buffoli (U Edinburgh), “Colonial palimpsests: transgenerational trauma and the
problematization of the Gothic in contemporary indigenous writing in Canada and New Zealand”
Christine Lorre-Johnston (Sorbonne Nouvelle U), “Ruptured and Renewed Commons in Patricia
Grace’s Potiki”
Francesca Mussi (U Northumbria), “Healing the ruptures and restoring relations in Lee Maracle’s
Celia’s Song”
Session 7: Literary Animisms: Reinheriting the Commons I (TRS-077)
Chair: Sam Durrant (U Leeds)
Brendon Nicholls (U Leeds), “Towards an Environmental Commons: Indigenous Knowledges,
Shape-Shifting and Global Food Security”
Ishaan Selby (McMaster U), “Rupture Beyond The Human: Blackness, Animality and Property”
Ryan Topper (Western Oregon U), “Multidimensional Memory: Intra-Animate Testimony in Yvonne
Vera’s Writing”
Session 8: South Asian Ruptures (TRS 2-003)
Chair: Chandrima Chakraborty (McMaster U)
Aidan Bracebridge (Durham U), “Common knowledge?: Hegemony, rupture, and the Western
academy in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire”
Arshad Said Khan (U Alberta), “Muslim Graveyards and Post-Apocalyptic Delhi: Constructing
Radical Hijra Commons in Contemporary Indian Writings”
Saba Pirzadeh (Lahore U of Management Science), “(Post)colonial capitalism and ecological rupture
in Kamala Markandaya’s novels”
3:45pm-4:00pm break
4:00pm-5:15pm Parallel sessions 9-12
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Session 9: Post-apartheid Ruptures: Literature from Contemporary South Africa (TRS 1-073)
Chair: Isaac Ndlovu (U Venda)
Felicity Hand (UA Barcelona), “The Disruptive Aftermath of 1994: Reading Deon Meyer through The
New Apartheid”
J. Coplen Rose (U Toronto), “Kaleidoscopic Visions of South Africa: A Study of State and Station in
Imraan Coovadia’s Tales of the Metric System”
Sifiso Sibanda (North-West U), “Profuse bleeding of ruptured wounds as an albatross of
postapartheid South Africa: a consideration of Mda’s Black diamond”
Session 10: Indigenous Survivance (TRS 1-075)
Chair: Christine Lorre-Johnston (Sorbonne Nouvelle U)
Jennifer Henderson (Carleton U), “Upgrade life!” Rupture, Development, and Constellation on the
“Oblates Land”
Michaela Moura-Kocoglu (Florida International U), “To Carry Pain, To Heal Through Ceremony:
Genocidal Violence in First Nation, Métis, and Indigenous Australian Literature”
Shazia Rahman (U Dayton), “Disruptive Histories, Ruptured Places, and Indigenous Knowledges”
Session 11: National Identities and Environments (TRS 1-077)
Chair: John C. Ball (U New Brunswick)
Amitendu Bhattacharya (Birla Institute of Technology and Science), “To Fish or Cut Bait, That is the
Question”
Elizabeth Jackson (U West Indies St. Augustine), “Borders and Boundaries in Amitav Ghosh’s The
Shadow Lines and Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient”
Rakibul Hasan Khan (U Otago), “Globalization, Development, and Anthropogenic Violence:
Examining the Ruptured Commons in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness”
Session 12: South Asian Women’s Bodies (TRS 2-003)
Chair: Mariam Pirbhai (Wilfrid Laurier U)
Shashikala Assella (U Kelaniya), “Reimagining the past – retelling the common”
Soumya Kashyap (IIT Patna), “Just Come to Collect Your Baby”: Reterritorialisation, Neoliberal
Eugenics and Assisted Reproductive Technology in Select Indian Texts”
Asma Sayed and Jacqueline Walker (Kwantlen Polytechnical U), “Rupturing Heteropatriarchal
Systems: Farzana Doctor’s Seven as Literature of Protest and Activism”
5:15pm-5:30pm break
5:30pm-7:00pm Reception with reading by Mariam Pirbhai (Cara Commons)
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Tues. July 12
9:00am-10:30am keynote by Ruth Vanita (U Montana), “Animals Today: Torn Apart in Life and in
Death” (TRS 1-067)
In the context of the almost unimaginable scale on which humans now inflict suffering on animals,
this presentation revisits debates in the Sanskrit epics on the dharma of minimizing suffering. In
today’s globalized economy, huge numbers of animals are bred merely to be tortured and killed for
food, clothing and experimentation. More than 150 billion are killed for food alone each year. For
these beings, life and death are an unbroken series of ruptures.
While thinkers like Shelley, Thoreau and Gandhi considered violence against animals inseparable
from violence against humans, many others still formulate ideas of justice purely in terms of
humans, ignoring animal suffering. In the epics, many characters, male and female, rich and poor,
from supposedly low and supposedly high varnas, discuss how to minimize violence, assuming that
eradicating it is impossible. I suggest that the dharma of kindness to animals is the dharma most
available to all, without neither justice nor peace is possible.
Chair: Anna Guttman (Lakehead U)
10:30am-10:45am break
10:45am-12pm Parallel sessions 13-16
Session 13: Disruption and Dystopia (TRS 1-073)
Chair: Humaira Shoaib (U Waterloo)
Lihini Boteju (U Kelaniya), “Re-negotiating the Boundaries of Humanity: A Posthuman Study of
Globalization in the Series Altered Carbon”
Nicola Hunte (U West Indies, Cave Hill), “Regenerative Spaces in the Disaster and Dystopia of
Caribbean Speculative Fiction”
Shazia Sadaf (Carleton U), “Alternative Futures: Speculation in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction”
Session 14: Linguistic Disruptions (TRS 1-075)
Chair: Eva Ulrike Pirker (Heinrich Heine U Dusseldorf)
Rawan Althunyan (Durham U), “Disrupting Hegemonic Cultural Conventions: Language and
Representation in Abodeham The Belt and Almoahaimeed’s Munira’s Bottle and Where Pigeons
Don’t Fly”’
Mohd Asaduddin (Jamia Milia Islamia U), “Language as Connector, Language as Rupture:
Demonization and Erasure of Urdu in Contemporary India”
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Maloba Wekesa (U Nairobi), “Vernacular Media Fragmenting Nationalism and Government Fight
Back”
Session 15: Graphic Disruptions (TRS 1-077)
Chair: Jennifer Henderson (Carleton U)
Sayan Mukherjee (Dhirubhai Ambani IICT), “The Cost of Progress: Displacement and Destruction of
Communities in Indian Graphic Novels”
Gillian Roberts (Nottingham U), “Visualizing the Canada-US Border: Graphic Novel Adaptations of
Wayde Compton’s ‘The Blue Road’ and Thomas King’s ‘Borders’”
Terri Tomsky (U Alberta), “Guantánamo comics: representing and resisting regimes of
(in)visibility”
Session 16: Rupture, Remembrance, Return (TRS 2-003)
Chair: Prateeksha Pathak (York U)
Durba Mukherjee (IIT Kanpur), “Ruptured Identities: Interrogating the Ideas of India and Twentyfirst-Century Travelogues of Dom Moraes and Amitava Kumar”
Esther Pujolras-Noguer (U Lleida), “Ectopic Insiders, Mourning Memoirs: The Configuration of the
Trauma of Return in Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family and M.G. Vassanji’s And Home Was
Kariakoo”
Jason Sandhar (U Western Ontario), “‘Who’s Here to Tell Her Story?’: Remembering, Recovery, and
Rupture in Sunjeev Sahota’s China Room”
12pm-1pm Lunch (Cara Commons) and Mentors Lunch (Lounge)
1:00pm-2:30pm Parallel Talking Circles I 1-4
Circle I: Reconciliation in the Classroom (online)
Facilitator: Judith Leggatt (Lakehead U)
Questions to Consider:
1. What does reconciliation mean to you in the context of the land(s) where you live?
2. What possibilities do you see for reconciliation in a classroom setting?
3. What challenges or dangers might there be when attempting to enact reconciliation in the
classroom?
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Circle II: Pedagogy in the Anthropocene (TRS 1-073)
Facilitator: Susie O’Brien (McMaster U)
Questions to Consider:
1. How do you feel about the Anthropocene as a concept? What lines of thought does it open
up or shut down?
2. What teaching methods have you developed (or would you like to develop) to engage with
questions emerging from the postcolonial environmental humanities?
Circle III: Embodied teaching practices (TRS 1-075)
Facilitator: Henghameh Saroukhani (Saint Mary’s U)
Question to Consider:
1. What does embodied teaching mean to you?
2. How do you understand your body, in any sense (with all senses), in relation to your
teaching and your work?
3. Does the recognition of bodies (both yours and that of others) enable and/or provoke you
to teach, learn and research in different ways?
4. What does it mean to hold space for others in your teaching and research?
Circle IV: Affect and Feeling in the Classroom (TRS 1-077)
Facilitator: Veronica Austen (St. Jerome’s U)
Questions to Consider:
1. In “Thoughts on Teaching as a Practice of Love,” Sharon Marshall forwards a pedagogy of
love grounded in listening and in fostering students’ passions. For Marshall, this practice is
the way to nurture diversity, promote social justice, and encourage respect. How do you see
yourself creating your classroom as a space for emotion, be that a pedagogy of love or of
some other feeling?
2. What are the opportunities and what are the risks involved in creating the classroom as a
space of feeling? How do you manage the risks so that the opportunities can be realized?
3. In conceiving of the classroom as a space for affect and feeling, are we acknowledging that
the classroom is a space with permeable boundaries, that what happens to us outside of the
classroom affects us inside of the classroom and vice versa? If so, can our incorporation of
affect and feeling in the classroom make our classrooms spaces of action (whatever ‘action’
is to you)?
2:30pm-2:45pm break
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
2:45pm-4:00pm Parallel Sessions 17-20
Session 17: Borders and Boundaries (TRS 1-073)
Chair: Felicity Hand (UA Barcelona)
Tomi Adeaga (U Vienna), “Crossing Borders and Boundaries in Helon Habila’s The Travellers and
Tope Folarin’s A Particular Kind of Black Man”
Megan Fourqurean (U Leeds), “Mami Wata and Spirit Kinship as Fluid Social Commons”
Isaac Ndlovu (U Venda), “Breaching Borders and Imploding Boundaries: Mapping and
Re/establishing Morality in Deon Meyer’s Fever”
Session 18: Resistant Poetics (TRS 1-075)
Chair: Shuyin Yu (U Calgary)
Ghosun Baqeel (U York), “Postcolonial Iraq: Resistance and Healing through Poetry”
Isabella Lau (U Calgary), “I am Asian Canadian”: Poetic Innovations and the Resistant Voice of Asian
Canadian Writers”
Janet Neigh (Pennsylvania State U), “Mapping Lines of Connection between Caribbean Street
Poetics and a Digital Commons”
Session 19: War, Migration, and Ruptured Lives (TRS 1-077)
Chair: Jonathan Nash (U Victoria)
John C. Ball (U New Brunswick), “Risk and Responsibility in Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows”
Antara Chatterjee (IIESR Bhopal), “The Refugee ‘Boat’: Rupture, Crisis and Precarity in Amitav
Ghosh’s Gun Islandand Sharon Bala’s The Boat People”
Walter Perera (U Peradeniya), “From The Story of A Brief Marriage to A Passage North: A Paradigm
Shift in Anuk Arudpragasam’s Fiction?”
Session 20: Women and Activism (TRS 2-003)
Chair: Naomi Nkealah (U Witwatersrand)
Naomi Nkealah (U Witwatersrand), “Colonial disruptions and women’s resistance: Rupture as
enabling Indigenous African feminist activism”
Isaiah Ode (U Lagos), “Performing Activism For Change: Okoh’s Edewede and Osofisan’s
Morountondun As Paradigm”
Prateeksha Pathak (York U), “The Spectacle of Mourning: Analysing Women’s Activism in Kashmir”
4:00pm-4:15pm break
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
4:15pm-5:30pm Parallel Sessions 21-24
Session 21: Volatile Masculinities (TRS 1-073)
Chair: Camille Isaacs (OCAD U)
Sara Ali (U Waikato), “I’m a victim of jealousy”: Urban Pakistani Masculinity in Mohsin Hamid’s
Moth Smoke”
Michael Bucknor (U Alberta), “Canadian Civility’ as Violation: The Volatile and Vital Contracts of
Caribbean/Canadian Men of Colour”
Basmah Rahman (Queens U), “Canadian Classroom Commons: Examining Social Ruptures in David
Chariandy’s Brother”
Session 22: Reading Dionne Brand (TRS 1-075)
Chair: Veronica Austen (St. Jerome’s U)
Safa Kouki (U Montreal), “Refugee Camps as Temporal and Geo-Traumatic Ruptures in Dionne
Brand’s What We All Long For”
Eva Ulrike Pirker (Heinrich Heine U Dusseldorf), “Bodies, Dreams, Bonds: Re-Reading Dionne
Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon”
Humaira Shoaib (U Waterloo), “Constructing Indeterminant Diaspora Identities through Mystery
Migrants in Wayde Compton’s “1,360ft3 (38.5m3)” and Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For”
Session 23: Imagined Communities (TRS 1-077)
Chair: Maloba Wekesa (U Nairobi)
Diksha Beniwal (IIT Kanpur), “Migration and Modernity: Rupturing of the Indian Nationalist
Imagination”
Doris Hambuch (United Arab Emirates U), “The Caribbean Nation as Imagined Community”
Alex Wanjala (U Nairobi), “Disruptions in the Notions of Home, Family and Nation in Postcolonial
Kenya as Portrayed in Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dust”
Session 24: Literary Animisms: Re-inheriting the Commons II (TRS 2-003)
Chair: Neil Kortenaar (U Toronto)
Philip Dickinson (U Lancaster), “Animism and Opacity: Land of Look Behind”
Sam Durrant (U Leeds), “All of us playing together’: Inheriting Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance”
Asha VaraDharajan (Queens U), “Heterodox “Animism”: Reclaiming the Commons in Helen
Oyeyemi’s Fiction”
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
7pm-8:30pm Evening literary reading
Featuring: Randy Lundy, Liz Howard, Sarah Olutola , MC Sarah Dowling
Page One Café
106 Mutual St. Unit #8
Drinks and pizza provided!
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Wed. July 13
9:00am-10:30am keynote by Susie O’Brien (McMaster U), “‘Somehow, a City’”: Unsettling Urban
Resilience Narratives” (TRS 1-067)
This paper explores the theme of the ruptured commons as it plays out in the imagination of
Toronto as a resilient city. After considering the ways in which Toronto’s First Resilience Strategy
(developed in 2019 as part of the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities Project), mobilizes
myths of nature, community and diversity towards a vision of settler colonial urban futurity, I will
consider the alternate visions of urban futurity presented in David Chariandy’s 2017 novel Brother
and Leanna Betasamosake Simpson’s short story, “Big Water.” These stories, I suggest, challenge
dominant definitions of both social-ecological and psycho-social resilience, offering in their place
modes of collective thriving based on multispecies relationality, decolonial resistance and creative
imagination.
Chair: Karina Vernon (U Toronto)
10:30am-10:45am break
10:45am-12:15pm ACLALS Grad Student Prize Ceremony and General Meeting (TRS 1-067)
12:15pm- free time during which attendees may explore Toronto, attend a play, or visit Niagara
Falls
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Thurs. July 14
9:00am-10:30am keynote by Cajetan Iheka (Yale U), “Uncommon Ruptures” (TRS 1-067)
The colonial logic underpinning the commonwealth and the literatures that the term enframes
effaced multiplicity for the rule of the singular, for the uncommon common. And when it comes to
the commons, the shared features of space that made it inhabitable, colonialism and its neocolonial
manifestations engendered destruction, but more importantly activated the hyper-separation of
humans from nonhuman beings, therefore eroding the fundamental principle of ecological
relationality. In this lecture, I describe colonialism’s instantiation of a violent common in its erasure
of heterogeneity, and the rupture of the human-nonhuman bind that undergirds indigenous
societies from Africa to the Americas to Asia, resulting in ecological trauma. I then use the writer
Aminatta Forna’s latest novel Happiness to illustrate how decolonial artists have sought to revise a
monolithic common for a pluriverse of difference while reinstating the commonality between
humans and nonhumans that the colonial process ruptured.
Chair: Feisal Kirumira (U Alberta)
10:30am-10:45am break
10:45am-12:00pm Parallel Sessions 25-28
Session 25: Disrupting Death (TRS 1-073)
Chair: Doris Hambuch (United Arab Emirates U)
Karen Sanderson Cole (U West Indies, St. Augustine), “Publicly Private: Negotiating the Personal
through Narrative Rupture in Glynne Manley: Truth Be Told: Michael Manley in Conversation”
Debamitra Kar (Women’s College, Calcutta), “Creating the Spectacle of Death: Democracy and its
Ruptures”
Sylvia Terzian (St. Jerome’s University), “Radical Rethinking of Ars Moriendi in Rawi Hage’s Beirut
Hellfire Society”
Session 26: Tragedy of the Commons? (TRS 1-075)
Chair: Jill Planche (Toronto Metropolitan U)
Cheryl Lousley (Lakehead U), “History Lessons & Political Ecologies: Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous
Conditions and the Tragedy of the Commons”
Prateek Paul (Columbia U), “Explosion, Implosion, and Aftermath: COVID and the Commons During
the Second Wave in India”
Moumita Roy (Jamia Millia Islamia U), “Green Thought in South Asia: Resisting Neo-Imperialism
through Literature”
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Session 27: Historical Ruptures (TRS 1-077)
Chair: Simone Alexander (Seton Hall U)
Clara A.B. Joseph (U Calgary), “Rupture Games Colonizers Played in 17th Century India: Christians
versus Christians”
Alexander Sarra-Davis (U Toronto), ““Dreams of Intervention: Reception as Rewriting in Ruth
Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being”
Owen Seda (Tshwane U Technology), “Solipsistic breakthroughs or stymying collectives? Historical
duels in August Wilson’s Radio Golf”
Session 28: Gendered Violence (TRS 2-003)
Chair: Sarah Olutola (Lakehead U)
Maab Alkurdi (U Waterloo), “Lucy’s Oppression Conveyed”
Onaopemipo Fayose (North-west U), “Apartheid and the Politics of Identity in selected South
African Narratives”
Tehmina Pirzada (Texas A & M Qatar), “Girlhood and Narrative Ethics in Home Fire and Girl”
12:00pm-1pm Lunch w/Reading by Farzana Doctor (Cara Common)
1:00pm-2:15 pm Parallel Sessions 29-32
Session 29: Theatre as Disruption (TRS 1-073)
Chair: J. Coplen Rose (U Toronto)
Alicia Fahey (Capilano U), “Tsawalk: Rupturing the Colonial Mythology of the First World War in
Redpatch”
Elisabeth Knittelfelder (U Vienna), ““Performing the Archive: Backspacing Black Female Erasure in
Koleka Putuma’s Hullo, Bu-bye, Koko, Come In and in the work of Mojisola Adebayo”
Jill Planche (Toronto Metropolitan U), “Discovering the ‘in-common’ in Magnet Theatre’s Every Year,
Every Day, I am Walking”
Session 30: Publication and Circulation (TRS 1-075)
Chair: Sylvia Terzain (St. Jerome’s U)
Irikidzayi Manase (U Free State), “Imagining the human and ecological conditions in futurist South
Africa of 27 April 2034”
Roopa Philip (Jyoti Nivas College), “Globalisation, Beauty, and the Woman: A Study of
Contemporary Women’s Magazines in India”
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Tara Senanayake (U Peradeniya), “Of silences, omissions, and dust in the reader’s eyes: the Politics
of Publication in Sri Lankan Anglophone Fiction Post-1983”
Session 31: Classrooms and Curricula (TRS 1-077)
Chair: Terri Tomsky (U Alberta)
Chandrima Chakraborty (McMaster U), “Remembering as Rupture: South Asian Diasporic Literature
in a Canadian Classroom”
Michael Chapman (Durban UT), “#RhodesMustFall: On Literary Attachment and the Rupturing
Event”
Jyotishman Kalita (IIT Mandi), “Reclaiming the Commons Through Folklore: An Ecocritical
Illustration from Communities of North East India”
Session 32: Indigenous Speculative Fictions (TRS 2-003)
Chair: Janet Neigh (Pennsylvania State U)
Denise Handlarski (Trent U), “Teaching, learning, and reading during a climate crisis”
Heike Harting (U Montreal), “From Global Health to Planetary Health Commons in Cheri Dimaline’s
The Marrow Thieves and Anicka Yi’s ‘You Can Call Me F’”
Paola Della Valle (U Turin), “Chris Baker’s Kokupu Dreams: A Man’s Mission in a Disrupted PostPandemic World”
2:15pm-2:30pm break
2:30 pm-4:00 pm Parallel Talking Circles II 5-8
Circle V: Indigenizing the Classroom (TRS 1-073)
Facilitator: Jennifer Meness (Toronto Metropolitan U)
Questions to Consider:
1.
2.
3.
4.
What kinds of Indigenizing strategies have you experienced or employed in your classes?
What were the results? Were the strategies successful? How did you know?
Did you receive any push back from your students? If so, how did you handle them?
What tips or suggestions do you have for educators looking to Indigenize learning for their
students?
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Circle VI: Teaching Place (online)
Facilitator: Neil Ten Kortenaar (U Toronto)
Questions to Consider:
1. How do we teach students to locate themselves and the classroom in the context of the
literature we teach, which is often national or global?
2. How do we make them appreciate what was here, in this space, before? How this place has
been shaped? What this place is now?
3. How do we respect the memories the place carries? What has been forgotten and must be
recovered?
Circle VII: Teaching anti-racism (TRS 1-075)
Facilitator: Asma Sayed (Kwantlen Polytechnical U)
Questions to Consider:
1. How do you understand these terms: racism, anti-racism, racial justice?
2. How can we make racial justice a central tenet of all equity work in our institutions and
communities?
3. How can we best address racism, foster anti-racism, and dismantle structural and systemic
hierarchies in our institutions and communities?
4. How do we ensure that our anti-racist work is intersectional?
Circle VIII: Experiential Learning (TRS 1-077)
Facilitator: Laura Moss (U British Columbia)
Questions to Consider:
Work-integrated learning, experiential learning, Co-op programs, and/ or community-engaged
learning variously focus on the development of practical skills and productive community
engagement for students. This session will be a space to share ideas, concerns, and best practices
about experiential learning.
1. How do they work in your institution? What skills critically emerge from co-curricular
experiences?
2. Are you concerned about turning the classroom into a utilitarian training zone in the
neoliberal institution? Or, do you think it is vital for universities to think creatively about
career preparation for students?
3. What is the relationship between postcolonial studies and professional development?
4:00pm-4:15pm break
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
4:15pm-5:30pm Parallel Sessions 33-36
Session 33: Colonized Territories (TRS 1-073)
Chair: Basmah Rahman (Queens U)
Jill Didur (Concordia U), “Unearthing the Plantationocene in Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse”
Stephanie Oliver (U Alberta), “Rupturing the “Pulmonary Commons”: Toxic Strangulations in Rita
Wong’s Poetry”
Session 34 Disrupted Communities (TRS 1-075)
Chair: Megan Fourquerean (U Leeds)
Veronica Austen (St. Jerome’s U), “‘You Can’t Beat Ructions and Eruptions’: Living with ‘This
Presence’ of La Soufriére”
Anavisha Banerjee (U Delhi), “Contested Borders of Northeast India: Indira Goswami’s The Moth
Eaten Howdah of the Tusker and the Identity Politics of Women”
Kristine Kelly (Case Western Reserve U), “A Work, or a Walk, in Process: Associative Practice in
Ivan Vladislavi’s Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked”
Session 35: Reckoning, Repairing, Reworlding: The (In)humanities, Artistic Practices, and Planetary
Crisis (TRS 1-075)
Chair: Susie O’Brien (McMaster U)
Jesse Arsenault (Concordia U), “The Insect Poetics of Planetary Crisis”
Susan Spearey (Brock U), “Nurturing what might still be:” interrupting transgenerational trauma,
disrupting legacies of wastelanding, and enacting reparative reworlding in Michael Christie’s
Greenwood”
Helene Strauss (U Free State), “Dangerous, Ugly Air’: documentary activism, extractive trauma, and
the aesthetics of respiration in Dying for Gold”
Session 36: The Future of USACLALS (TRS 2-003)
Chair: Anna Guttman (Lakehead U)
7:00pm-10pm Conference dinner
U Toronto Faculty Club
41 Wilcocks St.
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Fri. July 15
9:00-10:30am Executive Meeting (TRS 3-164)
10:45am-12:00pm Parallel Sessions 37-40
Session 37: South African Histories (TRS 1-073)
Chair: Kristine Kelly (Case Western Reserve U)
Miki Flockeman (U Western Cape), “Disruptive mournings: Commemorative Performances of the
Marikana Massacre as Affective Critique of a Nation in Crisis”
Shubhanku Kochar (Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha U), “Good Fences make Good Neighbours:
Critiquing the Idea of Enclosures with reference to Robinson Crusoe and Foe”
Alero Uwawah Agbonkonkon-Ogbeide & Sam Erevbenagie Usadolo (Durban U Technology), “Our
Universe, Our Common: Preserving ‘Us’ Through the Theatre”
Session 38: Capitalism and Identity (TRS 1-075)
Chair: Lara El Mekkawi (U Waterloo)
Jack Davies (U California Santa Cruz), “The Rupture of Capital: An Intellectual History of the
Commons Today”
Liberty Muchativugwa Hove (North-West U), “Phoenixes of splendour from the ashes of
imperialism: Rupture and suture as modes of literary representation in Magona, Ngugi and
Soyinka”
Vandana Shankar Saxena (U Malaya), “Uneven Terrains: Land, memory, and capitalism on the
peripheries”
Session 39: Beyond the Human (TRS 1-077)
Chair: Philip Dickinson (Lancaster U)
Raquel Baker (California State U), “Shared Paths/Ruptured Selves: Imagining Liberation in HBO’s
Westworld”
Angelie Multani (IIT Delhi), “In our image”
Ruta Šlapkauskaité (Vilnius U), “Posthuman Comedy and the Maternal in Richard Flanagan’s The
Living Sea of Waking Dreams”
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Session 40: Disrupted Identities (TRS 2-003)
Chair: Radhika Mohanaram (Cardiff U)
Ramanpreet Kaur (U Western Ontario) “The Politics of Self-Representation and Representation: A
Comparative Analysis of Piro’s Kafian and Swarajbir’s Shairee”
Feisal Kirumira (U Alberta), “Reasserting African Indigeneity to Disrupt Colonial Post-Tribal
Nationhood in (B)Uganada”
12-pm-1:30pm Lunch and Book launches (Cara Commons)
1:30pm-3:15pm Parallel Sessions 41-43
Session 41: Health and Illness (TRS 1-073)
Chair: Elizabeth Jackson (U West Indies St. Augustine)
Nitika Gulati (U Delhi), “Rethinking Schizophrenia: Ruptured Narrative in Reshma Valliappan’s
Fallen Standing”
Aditi Krishna (Dalai Lama Institute of Higher Ed), “I think, therefore I am; I think, I feel, therefore
listen to me. A narrative of living with mental illness”
Mousana Nightingale Chowdhury (Cotton U), “Ruptures or Continuities? Identity and the Projected
Space in Emma Healey’s Elizabeth Is Missing”
Geraldine Skeete (U West Indies), “The Ruptures of Illness and Food as Metaphor for Healing in
Caribbean Short Fiction”
Session 42: Transcultural Transgression (TRS 1-075)
Chair: Ruta Šlapkauskaité (Vilnius U)
Silvia Anastasijevic (Goethe U), “The Other Within: Humorous Transgressions in The Infidel”
Nuha Askar (Goethe U), “Transgressive Modes of Broder Crossing”
Asli Ergün (Goethe U), “Disrupting Divisions & Transgressing Boundaries in Gautam Malkani’s
Londonstani”
Michelle Stork (Goethe U), “Narrating Overlapping Geographies and Border-Crossings in the
Transcultural Road Novel”
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Session 43: Reconciliation and Reckoning in Action in TMU’s Faculty of Arts (TRS 1-077)
Moderator:
Panelists:
Hyacinth Simpson (Toronto Metropolitan U)
Pamela Sugiman, Dean of Arts (TMU)
Amy Peng, Associate Dean of Arts, Teaching and Learning (TMU)
Melanie Knight, Advisor to the Dean of Arts on Blackness and Black Diasporic
Education (TMU)
Megan Scribe, Assistant Professor (TMU)
Sam Tecle, Assistant Professor (TMU)
Siobhan Alexis, Student (TMU)
Jolen Kayseas, Student (TMU)
3:15pm-3:30pm break
3:30pm-5:30pm Keynote by Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm (U Toronto), “Present Tense: Ruptures,
Disruptions/ReGeneration and Reconciling the Books” (TRS 1-067)
Over the past year the recovery of the corpses of thousands of Indigenous children at the sites of
“Indian Residential Schools” shocked Canadians, who quickly moved on, while Indigenous people
have continued experiencing collective grief, trauma, and out/rage, leaving us struggling to navigate
the fraught and dangerous spaces of an imagin/ed/ary “commons” that not only excludes us, but
has been the site of purposeful systemic violence and erasure. In this “commons” our presence is a
source of constant tension. Although Indigenous inclusion is a necessary step in “reconciliation,” we
remain Other, symbolic, a constant reminder of the lies of colonial capitalism, and, often, targets. As
one of few Indigenous faculty, I am perceived by some as disruptive and, if not difficult and/or
deficient, then at the very least, an annoyance disrupting an imagined future that did not include
contending with me and all that I represent to colonial society: depressing histories better ignored,
fault that is a burden to carry, threats to status quo comfort and stability. So, what does “commons”
mean when Indigenous presence provokes and divides, resulting in some people lashing out,
thereby ensuring that such spaces remain dangerous and fraught? What if we relocate, re-envision,
and 22egenerate this space not merely to include Indigenous peoples, but to ensure we retain our
position at the centre?
Chair: Hyacinth Simpson (Toronto Metropolitan U)
Closing ceremony by Elder Joanne Dallaire (Toronto Metropolitan U)
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Paper Summaries
Tomi Adeaga (U Vienna), “Crossing Borders and Boundaries in Helon Habila’s The
Travellers and Tope Folarin’s A Particular Kind of Black Man”
Movements across borders and boundaries are driven by factors that are exemplified in the
narratives of Nigerian authors, Helon Habila’s The Travellers (2019), and Tope Folarin’s A Particular
Kind of Black Man (2019). This paper examines migration and the struggle to overcome racial and
cultural challenges in their new locations.
Alero Uwawah Agbonkonkon-Ogbeide & Sam Erevbenagie Usadolo (Durban U Technology),
“Our Universe, Our Common: Preserving ‘Us’ Through the Theatre”
The theatre remains a potent development tool. The magnitude of its essence finds relevance when
it is especially applied in community development and is democratised in such a manner as to
require the input of everyone involved in the process. We contend in this paper that where
collective responsibility is adequately encouraged and manifested, theatre reflects sustainable
development.
Sara Ali (U Waikato), “I’m a victim of jealousy”: Urban Pakistani Masculinity in Mohsin
Hamid’s Moth Smoke”
Examining Mohsin Hamid’s novel Moth Smoke, this paper explores the role desire to achieve
hegemonic masculinity, masculine rivalry and homoerotic desires play in protagonist Daru’s
identity crisis and social decline in a class-controlled urban Pakistan.
Maab Alkurdi (U Waterloo), “Lucy’s Oppression Conveyed”
With attention to a close reading of the text, I show how Bettina Judd’s “The Inauguration of
Experiments: December 1845” (Judd 19) reveals a horrifying practice during the slavery era in
America, namely, medical experiments conducted on enslaved female bodies without anesthesia.
The poem describes Lucy’s encounter of such violence.
Shirin Almousa (York U), “Reading the notion of the commons in Parable of the
Sower and Orleans through an intersectional lens”
This paper examines the representations of the commons in two climate change novels, Parable of
the Sower by Octavia Butler and Orleans by Sherri Smith. Both novels offer new perspectives in
tackling the topic of commons through intersectional approach and its entanglement with other
forms of marginality.
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Rawan Althunyan (Durham U), “Disrupting Hegemonic Cultural Conventions: Language and
Representation in Abodeham The Belt and Almoahaimeed’s Munira’s Bottle and Where
Pigeons Don’t Fly”’
My paper grapples with representations of boundaries and transgression and how language and
silence shape these representations. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s perspective of language as a
sociohistorical phenomenon and French feminists’ debates of ‘écriture féminine’, I will explore to
which extent language can rupture cultural norms in the works of two male Saudi authors.
Silvia Anastasijevic (Goethe U), “The Other Within: Humorous Transgressions in The Infidel”
The Infidel, which revolves around a Muslim man whose discovery of his Jewish heritage triggers an
identity crisis, transcends the dualism between the self and Other that is often present in ethnic
humor by showing how ethnic or cultural identities and communities are not given, but learned,
performed, and assumed.
Jesse Arsenault (Concordia U), “The Insect Poetics of Planetary Crisis”
The paper looks at insect narratives to offer a “meditation on the possible forms organismic and
societal symbiosis can take” in multispecies worlds with uncertain futures (Jackson 2020, p. 128).
The paper examines the mutual vulnerability of human and pestiferous life to animate strategies for
survivability and multispecies flourishing.
Mohd Asaduddin (Jamia Milia Islamia U), “Language as Connector, Language as Rupture:
Demonization and Erasure of Urdu in Contemporary India”
Urdu is facing right wing prejudice because of its identification with the Muslim community. Hindu
nationalist ideologues are bent upon erasing all traces of this language from national life and thus
excising a part of the composite culture and history of India, putting in jeopardy the lives and
livelihoods of its speakers, and ultimately leading to a cultural genocide.
Nuha Askar (Goethe U), “Transgressive Modes of Broder Crossing”
This paper argues that Rawi Hage’s Beirut Hellfire Society (2018) presents uncommon modes of
border crossing that go beyond theodicy and obscenity. Sexual transgression and cremation can
also be performative vehicles to undo both the pedagogy (Bhabha) of the nation and the ingrained
ethnoreligious bigotries, which represent internal metaphorical borders.
Shashikala Assella (U Kelaniya), “Reimagining the past – retelling the common”
This paper strives to understand and unpack Divakaruni’s attempt at re-narrating the myths
in Palace of Illusions (2008) and The Forest of Enchantments (2019), to disrupt the established
popular narrative and how the reimagined and decentred narratives of female figures offer new
frameworks to understand borders of truth and myth.
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Veronica Austen (St. Jerome’s U), “‘You Can’t Beat Ructions and Eruptions’: Living with ‘This
Presence’ of La Soufriére”
Exploring literary responses to the 1979 and 2021 eruptions of St. Vincent’s La Soufrière, this paper
discusses the figuration of the volcano as body/human and asks what humanizing the volcano and
volcano-izing humans say about the experience of living with a volcano and its perpetual promise of
rupture.
Raquel Baker (California State U), “Shared Paths/Ruptured Selves: Imagining Liberation in
HBO’s Westworld”
AfroCyberPunk is a style of science fiction that examines the ruptures inherent at the intersections
of race, technology, and subjectivity. In this paper, I explore what the key Black female narrators of
HBOs cyberpunk series Westworld – Maeve and Charlotte/Dolores – have to tell us about selfmaking practices in contemporary screen-mediated cultures
Ghosun Baqeel (U York), “Postcolonial Iraq: Resistance and Healing through Poetry”
Muzzafar al-Nawwab’s poem “Sweiheb’s Wound” illustrates how poetry and literature were
mobilized in Iraq to resist and try to heal the ruptures that postcolonialism was bringing. Iraq had
struggled to maintain its cultural, social and national identity but this poem among others offered a
rallying cry that remains relevant today.
John C. Ball (U New Brunswick), “Risk and Responsibility in Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt
Shadows”
At a time of heightened awareness of conflicts and trade-offs between individual freedom and
collective sacrifice to mitigate collective risk, this paper reads Kamila Shamsie’s transnational,
intergenerational novel Burnt Shadows as articulating, through its characters’ risk calculations and
risk-taking actions, a vision of a post-9/11 commons that is breaking apart.
Anavisha Banerjee (U Delhi), “Contested Borders of Northeast India: Indira Goswami’s
The Moth Eaten Howdah of the Tusker and the Identity Politics of Women”
My paper will focus on Indira Goswami’s novel, The Moth Eaten Howdah of the Tusker (2004) and
look at the position of women, especially Assamese women. Their identity and status will be
analysed with reference to their caste and gender politics.
Shinjini Basu (Sir Gurudas Mahavidyalaya U), “A Rupture Redrawn: Intersection of the
Commons and the Prison in Jail Memoirs from Colonial and Post-Colonial India”
Reading memoirs of political prisoners from India, I argue that marks of social exclusion and
structural violence of the commons are carried over, to determine how the prisoner’s body
negotiates with this un-common space. One would also argue the prison is not only a disciplinary
domain; it be redrawn as an extension of the exceptional powers of the State.
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Diksha Beniwal (IIT Kanpur), “Migration and Modernity: Rupturing of the Indian Nationalist
Imagination”
Paper begins with Jadhav’s family’s migration to the city of Mumbai, tracing their attempt to acquire
English education and jobs with the British. The memoir ruptures Nationalism as an upper caste
movement which excludes dalit voices, and the paper highlights an alternative reality of dalit
narratives as they struggle in pursuit of casteless modernity.
Amitendu Bhattacharya (Birla Institute of Technology and Science), “To Fish or Cut Bait,
That is the Question”
The paper focuses on the influence of British colonialism in the shaping of modern Bengali identity
and sensibility, and studies the elite bhadralok’s fetishization of hilsa fish. It reads selected Bengali
texts as allegories of the Anthropocene for their depiction of hilsa fishing and consumption as
causing social inequity and ecological damage in deltaic Bengal.
Lihini Boteju (U Kelaniya), “Re-negotiating the Boundaries of Humanity: A Posthuman Study
of Globalization in the Series Altered Carbon”
This study attempts to explore the ways in which the Netflix series Altered Carbon portrays the
ambivalent relations between humanity and posthumanity, representing the paradoxical workings
of globalization that efforts to create a utopia of a global human community via a dystopian vision
of posthuman centres of power.
Aidan Bracebridge (Durham U), “Common knowledge?: Hegemony, rupture, and the Western
academy in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire”
Focusing on Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006) and Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017), my paper
explores the literary treatment of Western universities’ roles in both producing and disrupting the
commonization of hegemonic, neocolonial epistemologies, and the disparate manifestations of
these institutions’ influence across South Asian, British, and North American contexts.
Michael Bucknor (U Alberta), “Canadian Civility’ as Violation: The Volatile and Vital
Contracts of Caribbean/Canadian Men of Colour”
Proposing black Canadian effrontery as a response to what, Daniel Coleman, has long
conceptualized as “white Canadian civility,” I explore the rhetorical, representational, institutional,
and familial sources of violation to black male subjects in Canada. This paper investigates both the
quotidian ruination and re-humanization of men of colour through the lens of intimacy.
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Carolina Buffoli (U Edinburgh), “Colonial palimpsests: transgenerational trauma and the
problematization of the Gothic in contemporary indigenous writing in Canada and New
Zealand”
This paper explores the transnational comparison of two contemporary novels by indigenous
writers engaging with the Gothic genre in an act of counter-colonial and counter-Eurocentric
resistance to address the disruptive histories and aftermaths of imperialism and colonial contact.
Chandrima Chakraborty (McMaster U), “Remembering as Rupture: South Asian Diasporic
Literature in a Canadian Classroom”
Remembrance pedagogy can create openings for conversations on legacies of the 1985 Air India
bombings that are being erased by official forms of remembering in Canada. Teaching South Asian
history through the lens of a “Canadian tragedy” that resonates with few, helps to historicize the
presence of racialized students in the classroom.
Michael Chapman (Durban UT), “#RhodesMustFall: On Literary Attachment and the
Rupturing Event”
In South Africa, the year 2015 witnessed the rupturing event of #RhodesMustFall. My purpose is
not, as it might be in Critique, to position literature in illustration of a state of the nation event;
rather, it is to reflect on how literary thinking or imagining may respond to such a rupturing event.
Antara Chatterjee (IIESR Bhopal), “The Refugee ‘Boat’: Rupture, Crisis and Precarity in
Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island and Sharon Bala’s The Boat People”
This essay will examine the fictional refugee narratives in two recent novels Amitav Ghosh’s Gun
Island and Sharon Bala’s The Boat People. Both novels address the conference’s central theme of
rupture and ruptured commons. I will use critical frameworks of postcolonial crisis, rupture,
precarity, nation and borders in my analysis.
Ajay K Chaubey and Manvi Sharma (National IT Uttarkhand), “The Ecological Face of
“Rupture”: Representation of the South Asian Climate Crisis in the Eco-documentaries with
special reference to The Weeping Apple and Char… The No Man’s Island”
The present paper is a humble attempt to investigate how both eco-documentaries act as what film
scholar Ed Tan describes as “emotion machines”, engaging with viewer’s emotions, as well as
raising awareness through the purgation of emotion in the minds of the audiences.
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Karen Sanderson Cole (U West Indies, St. Augustine), “Publicly Private: Negotiating the
Personal through Narrative Rupture in Glynne Manley: Truth Be Told: Michael Manley in
Conversation”
“Publicly Private: Negotiating the Personal through Narrative Rupture in Glynne Manley: Truth Be
Told: Michael Manley in Conversation” examines the auto/biographical memoir of Michael Manley as
told through interviews. Of interest are the narrative strategies suggestive of opportunities within
rupture for spiritual growth and healing even in the face of certain death.
Jack Davies (U California Santa Cruz), “The Rupture of Capital: An Intellectual History of the
Commons Today”
This paper attempts a critical intellectual history of remarkable salience of the commons,
particularly since 1990, in our analysis of global capitalism, settler colonialism, and financialization.
It historicizes and reinterprets this tendency as a fascination with the possibility of transition: with
the rupture not of the commons, but capital.
Philip Dickinson (U Lancaster), “Animism and Opacity: Land of Look Behind”
This presentation explores Alan Greenberg’s 1982 film Land of Look Behind, notable for its striking
images of postcolonial Jamaica and Rastafarian culture in the wake of Bob Marley’s death. The
paper proposes an aesthetic of ‘opacity’ that diverges from the logics of enclosure and some
versions of ‘new’ animist ethics.
Jill Didur (Concordia U), “Unearthing the Plantationocene in Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s
Curse”
Conscious of the neglect of embodied politics in more recent engagements with the plantation
archive and the Plantationocene, this paper turns to Amitav Ghosh’s book of personal essays, The
Nutmeg’s Curse, to explore the possibilities of the personal essay for tracking forward the
plantation’s “racially and economically ordered space, which violently structured differentiated life”
and its contemporary aftermath.
Sam Durrant (U Leeds), “All of us playing together’: Inheriting Kim Scott’s That Deadman
Dance”
Scott’s narrator’s Noongar name means ‘all of us playing together’. His renarration of First Contact
challenges us to reinherit the commons as a space of transperspectival possibility in which we learn
each other’s dances and misrecognise each other as djanaks, ancestors from over the seas.
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Asli Ergün (Goethe U), “Disrupting Divisions & Transgressing Boundaries in Gautam
Malkani’s Londonstani”
The enduring coexistence of non-homogenous communities and evolving ordinariness of
transcultural identities in Londonstani set new imaginaries for contemporary societies. As multidirectional transgressions of cultural boundaries are encouraged, both, a constant engagement with
one’s own sense of belonging is required while simultaneously opportunities for identity formation
are vastly extended.
Ruth Epochi-Olise Etuwe (Alex Ekweme Federal U), “Clothing as Semiotic Resistance: An
Appraisal of the Yoruba ‘Amotekum’”
Clothes are a significant source of self-expression; both of individuality and agency as well as an
identification and communication tool. The Amotekun costume stands as an index of identity and a
non-violent performative weapon that is presently used to redefine the insecurity challenges in
Southwest, Nigeria.
Alicia Fahey (Capilano U), “Tsawalk: Rupturing the Colonial Mythology of the First World
War in Redpatch”
Raes Calvert and Sean Harris Oliver’s play Redpatch contextualizes the First World War and its
ruptures in the broader histories of colonialism in Canada. At Vimy Ridge, Indigenous soldier
Private Woodrow experiences a moment of ontological crisis that effectually destabilizes the
formative mythology of Vimy Ridge.
Onaopemipo Fayose (North-west U), “Apartheid and the Politics of Identity in selected South
African Narratives”
In South Africa, identity is still a contentious topic, and the spectre of rape looms large, especially
from women’s precarity. Rape and racism are common occurrences and societal ills that require a
more nuanced examination to find the rainbow nation’s identity difficulties.
Miki Flockeman (U Western Cape), “Disruptive mournings: Commemorative Performances of
the Marikana Massacre as Affective Critique of a Nation in Crisis”
In tracking performative commemorations of the Marikana Massacre in 2012 when South African
police killed 34 striking miners (and fellow citizens), I show how these performances open up a
form of affective critique which pushes through and ruptures other public discourses attempting to
‘explain’ how and why the event happened.
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Megan Fourqurean (U Leeds), “Mami Wata and Spirit Kinship as Fluid Social Commons”
This paper examines the role of Mami Wata worship as a form of indigenous theory of gender and
identity. Akwaeke Emezi’s novel The Death of Vivek Oji serves as a medium through which to
imagine expressions of gender nonconformity that prioritise an individual’s shared social,
historical, and geographical environment.
Nitika Gulati (U Delhi), “Rethinking Schizophrenia: Ruptured Narrative in Reshma
Valliappan’s Fallen Standing”
The proposed paper will examine Reshma Valliappan’s Fallen, Standing: My Life as a Schizophrenist,
for its disruption of the stigma and silence surrounding mental illness, as represented in its
ruptured narrative form, and its challenge to the punitive care mandated by medico-legal systems.
Doris Hambuch (United Arab Emirates U), “The Caribbean Nation as Imagined Community”
This presentation advocates a more inclusive cross-Caribbean discourse. With a focus on Caribbean
thinkers who do acknowledge their colleagues from the Dutch parts of the region, and in agreement
with Dutch Caribbean critics that the latter have much to offer to the discourse at hand, I argue that
attempts to counter hierarchies may lead the way to heal ruptures.
Felicity Hand (UA Barcelona), “The Disruptive Aftermath of 1994: Reading Deon Meyer
through The New Apartheid”
This paper reads three of Deon Meyer’s novels through Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh’s chapter on
punishment from his recent publication, The New Apartheid (2021). I claim that crime fiction
represents the contemporary political novel in South Africa and Meyer’s work depicts the failure of
the state to overcome the legacies of apartheid.
Denise Handlarski (Trent U), “Teaching, learning, and reading during a climate crisis”
This paper argues that part of challenging climate anxiety in classrooms has to do with the
curriculum itself. Through examining texts like The Marrow Thieves (Dimaline), Gun Island (Ghosh),
and the poetry and fiction of Olive Senior, this paper explores how text and context function
together in the climate-aware classroom.
Heike Harting (U Montreal), “From Global Health to Planetary Health Commons in Cheri
Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves and Anicka Yi’s ‘You Can Call Me F’”
Drawing from postcolonial and indigenous concepts of the commons and decolonial commoning,
this paper argues that such narratives of “planetary health commons” as Dimaline and Yi’s imagine
how to inhabit the planet in common, mediate relational subjectivities and spaces to produce a
shared common, while unsettling the hegemony of global health.
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Jennifer Henderson (Carleton U), “Upgrade life!” Rupture, Development, and Constellation
on the “Oblates Land”
The Deschâtelets monastery is at the centre of 26 acres of land by the Rideau River called the
Oblates Land, from which priests of the Order of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate were sent to run
residential schools. Today, it is at the centre of an urban development called “Greystone Village,” for
which the repurposed monastery is to provide an aura of ‘heritage’ architecture.
Liberty Muchativugwa Hove (North-West U), “Phoenixes of splendour from the ashes of
imperialism: Rupture and suture as modes of literary representation in Magona, Ngugi and
Soyinka”
I examine how Magona, Ngugi and Soyinka engage with profound disruptions of shared spaces,
routines and economies. Reading the three texts all produced in 2021, one encounters the dramatic,
the ironic, the satiric, the allegoric and voyeuristic styles where each writer develops rupture and
suture as modes of literary representation.
Nicola Hunte (U West Indies, Cave Hill), “Regenerative Spaces in the Disaster and Dystopia of
Caribbean Speculative Fiction”
This paper will examine the treatment of disaster and dystopic societies in the short fiction of three
Caribbean speculative writers to highlight the ways that trauma gives rise to regenerative or
redemptive responses in Caribbean literature, through the critical lens of Wilson Harris’s
discussion of the cross-cultural imagination.
Camille Isaacs (OCAD U), “Esi Edugyan’s Subjunctive Tense: Disrupting the Past to Consider
What Could Have Been”
This paper will explore the use of the subjunctive in Edugyan’s fiction, and how she disrupts the
past in order to not just alter our perceptions of the present, but also as an act of protest.
Elizabeth Jackson (U West Indies St. Augustine), “Borders and Boundaries in Amitav
Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines and Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient”
“Borders and Boundaries in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines and Michael Ondaatje’s The English
Patient” compares the ways in which both novels emphasize the artificial and divisive nature of
national borders and national identities.
Seema Jena (New York U), “Notions of Rupture and violations of the Commons with special
reference to the film, Bhopal: A Prayer For Rain (2014)”
How we as a generation, need to overcome the collective denialism and our resilience to these
ruptures and become committed to morally uplifting and urging for a radical restructuring of global
power with regard to crisis/ruptures.
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Clara A.B. Joseph (U Calgary), “Rupture Games Colonizers Played in 17 th Century India:
Christians versus Christians”
Through close readings and historical analyses of primary sources, this paper revisits events in the
early period of European colonialism in India that demonstrate how and why native Christians
challenged rupturing games of the colonizers. The paper, thus, aims to unsettle postcolonial
presumptions about colonization as a Christian event.
Sunu Rose Joseph & Shashikantha Koudur (National IT Karnataka), “Colonial Past and
Cataclysmic Future – Queer Environments of Anthropocene in An Unkindness of
Ghosts and Tentacle”
The paper is an exploration braiding together the colonial past and the unpredictable futures
alongside gender in the context of the two selected works of fiction, transcending beyond the
heteronormative expectations by investigating the ideas of queerness in framing the recourses to
face climate change.
Jyotishman Kalita (IIT Mandi), “Reclaiming the Commons Through Folklore: An Ecocritical
Illustration from Communities of North East India”
This paper suggests a way of reclaiming the commons through an ecocritical study of folklore; and
for that purpose, provides an analysis of the representation of commons in the folklore of
communities from North East India. The analysis provides four possible positions of alternative
perspectives to commons and interventions thereof.
Debamitra Kar (Women’s College, Calcutta), “Creating the Spectacle of Death: Democracy
and its Ruptures”
Genocidal violence seen as ruptures in democracy is arguably a systemic means of consolidating
state power. It is an expression of the law outside law that originates from the experience of
colonization, and is used to subordinate the minority community. The paper studies the cases of
Nelli massacre and Godhra riots through primary texts of documentary and memoir.
Soumya Kashyap (IIT Patna), “Just Come to Collect Your Baby”: Reterritorialisation,
Neoliberal Eugenics and Assisted Reproductive Technology in Select Indian Texts”
The paper critiques the unequivocal acceptance of medical technology as it re-asserts the status
quo rather than defying it. ARTs have reinforced and normalised the notion of ‘wombs for rent’ and
‘baby factories’, transforming the body of Indian women into an active site of reproductive
exploitation.
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Ramanpreet Kaur (U Western Ontario) “The Politics of Self-Representation and
Representation: A Comparative Analysis of Piro’s Kafian and Swarajbir’s Shairee”
This paper analyzes the politics of self-representation and representation through the lenses of
caste and gender in life writings of Piro, a nineteenth-century Punjabi poet, dancing girl, and
consort of the head of a marginal religious sect and Swarajbir’s play Shairee (2004).
Ankita Kaushik (Delhi), “Oral Narratives and Memory: Negotiating Identity and Sense of
Belongingness in Metropolitan Delhi”
This paper aims to look at how the oral testimonies of people settled near the river Yamuna and
visual photographs evoke memories which become sites of bringing out multiple perspectives or
stories/narratives about the role of the Yamuna in the everyday life of the migrants in Delhi.
Kristine Kelly (Case Western Reserve U), “A Work, or a Walk, in Process: Associative Practice
in Ivan Vladislavi’s Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked”
This paper suggests that Vladislavic’s Portrait with Keys, through its assembled form and emphasis
on itinerant ways of reading the city of Johannesburg, exemplifies the creative, connective, and
unruly work of associative reading and writing practices that resist exerting power or engaging in
practices of oversight.
Arshad Said Khan (U Alberta), “Muslim Graveyards and Post-Apocalyptic Delhi: Constructing
Radical Hijra Commons in Contemporary Indian Writings”
This paper examines literary representations of Hijra commons in contemporary India. Hijras are a
South Asia specific subaltern transfeminine group. This paper explores how hijra commons as
discussed in certain literary works speak back from the margins, and construct alternative political
frameworks to dissent against Hindu nationalism, besides forging solidarities.
Rakibul Hasan Khan (U Otago), “Globalization, Development, and Anthropogenic Violence:
Examining the Ruptured Commons in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness”
I examine the effects of the ruptured commons in Arundhati Roy’s novel The Ministry of Utmost
Happiness. I argue that the people at the margins are the immediate victims of the ruptured
commons in present India as a result of the anthropogenic violence of developmental activities
influenced by neoliberal globalization.
Feisal Kirumira (U Alberta), “Reasserting African Indigeneity to Disrupt Colonial Post-Tribal
Nationhood in (B)Uganada”
This paper critically examines the re-turn to Baganda indigeneity as a way of reasserting African
sovereignty of selfhood and nationhood to disrupt the colonial commons of inter-tribal
universality. Disrupting the commons of a colonizing Protectorate was the indispensable first step
towards (B)Ugandan independence of the self and the nation.
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Elisabeth Knittelfelder (U Vienna), ““Performing the Archive: Backspacing Black Female
Erasure in Koleka Putuma’s Hullo, Bu-bye, Koko, Come In and in the work of Mojisola
Adebayo”
This paper discusses the intersection of epistemic violence and the Black female body and the
performance of the archive as disrupting the erasure of womxn of colour in the plays Hullo, Bu-Bye,
Koko, Come In (2021) by Koleka Putuma and The Interrogation of Sandra Bland (2017) by Mojisola
Adebayo.
Shubhanku Kochar (Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha U), “Good Fences make Good
Neighbours: Critiquing the Idea of Enclosures with reference to Robinson Crusoe and Foe”
The paper examines the concept of closed spaces verses open and public spaces with reference to
Robinson Crusoe and Foe. The paper highlights how land use explicates one’s belief system with
reference to one’s environment and how it creates binaries of white and non-white, man and
women, man and environment.
Safa Kouki (U Montreal), “Refugee Camps as Temporal and Geo-Traumatic Ruptures in
Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For”
This paper studies What We All Long For’s (Dionne Brand, 2005) insurgent character “Quy” who
breaches the linear structure of the novel and, accordingly, navigates the narrative and the world
on a parallel plane.
Aditi Krishna (Dalai Lama Institute of Higher Ed), “I think, therefore I am; I think, I feel,
therefore listen to me. A narrative of living with mental illness”
In her memoir, No Straight Thing Was Ever Made (2021) Urvashi Bahuguna writes poignantly about
the daily struggles of living with diagnosed depression and the invisibilization of it in our society.
How does then, a body with an invisible illness, become a site of resistance in continuing to live
through the struggles of the day? Bahuguna transcribes her resistance in the form of her story, a
telling of it becomes a form of resistance. Her memoir becomes the site of resistance in the
narrative of the normal.
Lilika Kukiela (U Toronto), “Encountering Empires: Precarious Healings in Leslie Marmon
Silko’s Ceremony”
This paper examines the possibilities and precarities of healing from empire(s) through cross-racial
and transnational relations. It specifically looks at Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony as a novel that
sets up common sites of imperial violence for Japanese and Laguna Pueblo people during World
War II.
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Eeva Langeveld and Rita Maricocchi (U Munster), “Narrating Entanglements of British
Colonialism and German National Socialism: Barbara Yelin’s Irmina as a Disruptive History”
This paper concerns representations of disruptive transnational histories in 1930s Europe as
narrated in the comic Irmina (2014) by Barbara Yelin. We investigate to what extent British
imperial history and German Nazi history are represented as an interlinked common memory space
through the book’s narration of experiences of migration and discrimination.
Isabella Lau (U Calgary), “I am Asian Canadian”: Poetic Innovations and the Resistant Voice
of Asian Canadian Writers”
My paper introduces Asian Canadian poetry as a medium for minority writers to break the silence.
By examining the innovative poetic practices of Chinese-Canadian poet Rita Wong, I contend that
Wong’s poetic innovations permeate and deconstruct the anglicized literary tradition in
mainstream Canadian writing.
Christine Lorre-Johnston (Sorbonne Nouvelle U), “Ruptured and Renewed Commons in
Patricia Grace’s Potiki”
Relying on Elinor Ostrom’s definition of commons, this paper proposes a reading of Patricia
Grace’s Potiki (1986) as a novel that marks a rupture followed by a renewal of what commons
means to a Māori community. In times of global ecological concern, the novel resonates well beyond
its New Zealand context.
Cheryl Lousley (Lakehead U), “History Lessons & Political Ecologies: Tsitsi
Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions and the Tragedy of the Commons”
Dangarembga’s 1989 novel Nervous Conditions offers critical insight into environment and
development conversations, particularly Garrett Hardin’s discredited “tragedy of the commons”
parable, when considered in relation to the 1986 Harare, Zimbabwe, public hearings of the World
Commission on Environment and Development, whose 1987 report “Our Common Future”
launched sustainable development.
Irikidzayi Manase (U Free State), “Imagining the human and ecological conditions in futurist
South Africa of 27 April 2034”
The paper analyses speculative stories from the South Africa Sunday Times Lifestyle Magazine of 27
April 2014 set in 2034 to critically unpack imaginings of the human condition and senses of the
nation as a shared common in the larger human-animal and non-human paradigm of the near
future.
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Michaela Moura-Kocoglu (Florida International U), “To Carry Pain, To Heal Through
Ceremony: Genocidal Violence in First Nation, Métis, and Indigenous Australian Literature”
This paper examines genocidal violence as well as modes of un-silencing and survival in Indigenous
literature. The storytelling of Indigenous Australian, First Nations and Métis women writers
counters the pathologizing image of Indigenous women as victims by manifesting survivance
(Vizenor) in the face of pervasive and systemic abuse and trauma.
Durba Mukherjee (IIT Kanpur), “Ruptured Identities: Interrogating the Ideas of India and
Twenty-first-Century Travelogues of Dom Moraes and Amitava Kumar”
This paper explores the twenty-first-century return-travelogues by Dom Moraes and Amitava
Kumar. These writers offer an alternative to the predominant reception of diasporic narratives or
those by twentieth-century writers about India, that metaphorically represent India, and explore
their affiliation to India through the lens of a “felt-community” of the marginalized.
Sayan Mukherjee (Dhirubhai Ambani IICT), “The Cost of Progress: Displacement and
Destruction of Communities in Indian Graphic Novels”
This paper takes a closer look at Indian graphic novels, such as Orijit Sen’s River of Stories, in order
to scrutinize the manner in which displacement of communities is depicted within them. The paper
will also attempt to identify the ramifications that such acts have upon individuals within a
community.
Angelie Multani (IIT Delhi), “In our image”
This paper will look at the novels ‘Never Let Me Go’ (Kazuo Ishiguro: 2005) and ‘Machines Like Me’
(Ian McEwan: 2019) and examine how these texts open up questions of humanity and what it
means to be human and to be recognized as human.
Francesca Mussi (U Northumbria), “Healing the ruptures and restoring relations in Lee
Maracle’s Celia’s Song”
Drawing on analysis of Carol Rose Goldeneagle Daniels’s 2015 novel Bearskin Diary, this paper
argues that storytelling, ceremony, and traditional ways play a crucial role in healing the ruptures
to Indigenous lifeways caused by settler-colonial policies, and in restoring healthy relations
between Indigenous bodies, minds, and spirits and the more-than-human world.
Jonathan Nash (Victoria U), “An Unbound Jungle: Stories of Community and Rupturing
Enclosures in ‘Camp de la lande’
This presentation explores how the residents of ‘Camp de la lande’ built a common through selfmade communities of care and solidarity. I argue that its residents alongside volunteers ruptured
the borders of the enclosure and in doing so enacted alternative ways of being together.
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Isaac Ndlovu (U Venda), “Breaching Borders and Imploding Boundaries: Mapping and
Re/establishing Morality in Deon Meyer’s Fever”
My paper utilizes Jordan Petersen’s insight that borders, boundaries, rules and life’s limitations are
the conditions for human existence in examining Deon Meyers’ Fever. The post-apocalyptic world
depicted by Meyer shows survivors creating a new community. In the novel, sociality which limits
the individual’s freedoms is the very condition for the individual’s thriving.
Janet Neigh (Pennsylvania State U), “Mapping Lines of Connection between Caribbean Street
Poetics and a Digital Commons”
Through an analysis of the online Caribbean literary journal Pree, this presentation expands our
understanding of dub poets’ influence by examining how their preoccupations with both the
technology of sound and the street as a site of protest anticipate the poetic possibilities and
limitations of a ruptured digital commons.
Brendon Nicholls (U Leeds), “Towards an Environmental Commons: Indigenous Knowledges,
Shape-Shifting and Global Food Security”
Indigenous Southern African shape-shifting combatted 19th century colonial food insecurity, which
has since become more globally systematic. Taken seriously, non-human embodiments exceed our
insular species self-interest, and guide us toward a metamorphic environmental commons in which
all actors – both sentient and inert – express a genuine political stake.
Mousana Nightingale Chowdhury (Cotton U), “Ruptures or Continuities? Identity and the
Projected Space in Emma Healey’s Elizabeth Is Missing”
The paper draws on epistemic bases of memory studies and theories of projected spaces to
understand identities that are based less on narrative capabilities and recollection of memories and
more on phenomenological experiences.
Naomi Nkealah (U Witwatersrand), “Colonial disruptions and women’s resistance: Rupture
as enabling Indigenous African feminist activism”
In this paper, I look at the ways in which colonialism disrupted African women’s socio-economic
practices and how in turn women’s resistance to these disruptions brought to visibility indigenous
African feminist activism. I argue that colonial disruptions and African women’s feminist activism
share a knotted relationship.
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Isaiah Ode (U Lagos), “Performing Activism For Change: Okoh’s Edewede and
Osofisan’s Morountondun As Paradigm”
The author shall critically review protests and activism as products of political, social and cultural
concerns. The work shall adopt the literary method of research to discuss how Okoh’s Edewede and
Osofisan’s Moruntodun reflect the political and socio-cultural state of Nigeria in recent times and
recommend the effective way forward.
Stephanie Oliver (U Alberta), “Rupturing the “Pulmonary Commons”: Toxic Strangulations in
Rita Wong’s Poetry”
Expanding studies of undercurrent and the hydrocommons, this paper analyzes Wong’s
“pulmonary commons” as a reciprocal realm inextricably linked to water. Tracing large-scale toxic
strangulations’ impact breathing, Wong’s images of airborne toxins and breath-interrupting syntax
rupture the unconscious realm of breathing and expose how “settler atmospherics” (Simmons
2017) works in Canada.
Prateeksha Pathak (York U), “The Spectacle of Mourning: Analysing Women’s Activism in
Kashmir”
The violent insurgency and counter-insurgency movements in Kashmir led to mass killings, torture,
and enforced disappearance of many Kashmiri men. These forced disappearances compelled
women to occupy public spaces and resist through collective mourning. My paper will analyse these
counter-memories of Kashmiri women that gradually interrogate the state-sponsored narrative and
dismantle popular perceptions.
Prateek Paul (Columbia U), “Explosion, Implosion, and Aftermath: COVID and the Commons
During the Second Wave in India”
This paper aims to understand the tragedy of the (ruptured) commons in COVID-struck India. It
argues that the second wave had a radical impact on one’s understanding of ownership of and
access to—the two notions of ‘public’—and control over public spaces, resources and institutions in
India.
Walter Perera (U Peradeniya), “From The Story of A Brief Marriage to A Passage North: A
Paradigm Shift in Anuk Arudpragasam’s Fiction?”
If Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage was commended for being apolitical, A
Passage North is palpably ideologically driven in approach. The current study tracks this trajectory,
posits a possible rationale for the transformation, and assesses the gains and losses in effecting
such a paradigm shift.
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Roopa Philip (Jyoti Nivas College), “Globalisation, Beauty, and the Woman: A Study of
Contemporary Women’s Magazines in India”
While the images and language women’s lifestyle magazines in India speak of empowerment and
agency, it is necessary to analyse and critically examine them in relation to patriarchy, race, nation,
religion and capitalism. The language of feminism, gender justice and equality can be and is coopted
by the structures of power and money.
Alfrena Jamie Pierre (U West Indies, Trinidad), “Paths to Healing: The Outworking of New
World Identities in George Lamming’s The Emigrants”
This paper examines the psychological fracture of African Caribbean descended peoples which has
resulted from a history of slavery. The examination is undertaken through the analysis of the
character Dickson in Lamming’s novel The Emigrants and argues that the fracture of African
Caribbean peoples is deep-seated, but that there are always paths to healing for these hurts.
Eva Ulrike Pirker (Heinrich Heine U Dusseldorf), “Bodies, Dreams, Bonds: Re-Reading
Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon”
This paper proposes a ‘planetary’ approach to and re-reading of Dionne Brand’s novel At the Full
and Change of the Moon (1999). It argues that Brand’s work projects transcultural relations, and
that it (re)produces and (re)presents, but also calls into question, affiliative orders beyond
conventional ideas of ‘the commons’.
Tehmina Pirzada (Texas A & M Qatar), “Girlhood and Narrative Ethics in Home Fire and Girl”
This paper examines the novels Home Fire and Girl through a focus on narrative ethics and girlhood,
explicating how the girl protagonists reimagine coming-of-age in a world ruptured by horrific acts
of violence committed in the name of state and religion, forcing the girls to use their language as a
tactic for survival.
Saba Pirzadeh (Lahore U of Management Science), “(Post)colonial capitalism and ecological
rupture in Kamala Markandaya’s novels”
Investigating the rupture of the ecological commons from a literary lens, this paper analyzes
Kamala Markandaya’s novels Nectar in a Sieve (1954) and The Coffer Dams (1969) to establish the
ways that (post)colonial capitalism appropriates terra and aquatic commons in India for wealth
accumulation.
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Jill Planche (Toronto Metropolitan U), “Discovering the ‘in-common’ in Magnet
Theatre’s Every Year, Every Day, I am Walking”
Can we disrupt existing frameworks and protocols of Western capitalist thinking about the
“commons” by imagining its etymological “common”? I engage Deleuze’s “minor” or immanent
theatre with Magnet Theatre’s physical theatre to argue theatre is the ultimate common space to
create new imaginations essential to step outside ourselves toward empathy.
Esther Pujolras-Noguer (U Lleida), “Ectopic Insiders, Mourning Memoirs: The Configuration
of the Trauma of Return in Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family and M.G. Vassanji’s And
Home Was Kariakoo”
This paper explores two different ways of articulating the trauma of return through acts of
mourning as evinced in the memoirs of Ondaatje and Vassanji. Ondaatje’s Running in the Family and
Vassanji’s And Home Was Kariakoo are the products of “ectopic insiders” who struggle to register
their emotional home displacement.
Basmah Rahman (Queens U), “Canadian Classroom Commons: Examining Social Ruptures in
David Chariandy’s Brother”
Canadian Classroom Commons: Examining Social Ruptures in David Chariandy’s Brother scrutinizes
forms of celebrated citizenship promoted in Canada’s public education system. Using Brother as a
primary case-study, Rahman argues that the prioritization of individualized resilience in normative
models inherently restricts alternative resilience models that center proactive community support
for BIPOC youth.
Shazia Rahman (U Dayton), “Disruptive Histories, Ruptured Places, and Indigenous
Knowledges”
Uzma Aslam Khan’s novel The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali (2019) represents nonhuman
characters such as winds that speak for the island and promulgate a type of archipelagic thinking
that opens up possibilities for thinking through Andamanese Indigenous notions of time.
Gillian Roberts (Nottingham U), “Visualizing the Canada-US Border: Graphic Novel
Adaptations of Wayde Compton’s ‘The Blue Road’ and Thomas King’s ‘Borders’”
This paper examines the recent graphic novel adaptations of Wayde Compton’s The Blue Road and
Thomas King’s Borders short prose texts concerned with the settler-colonial border between
Canada and the United States that have been visually enhanced in their new incarnations, enabling
further scrutiny of the border’s colonial violence.
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
J. Coplen Rose (U Toronto), “Kaleidoscopic Visions of South Africa: A Study of State and
Station in Imraan Coovadia’s Tales of the Metric System”
This article explores the narrative structure of Imraan Coovadia’s Tales of the Metric System. The
novel recounts major events in recent South African history from a range of individual perspectives.
This structure foregrounds the links between individual identity, nationalism, and the trauma
created by apartheid violence.
Moumita Roy (Jamia Millia Islamia U), “Green Thought in South Asia: Resisting NeoImperialism through Literature”
The paper aims at exploring new writings in South Asia resisting neo-imperialist projects rupturing
ecological balance with an urgency to revisit ecocritical thoughts under the postcolonial rubric. It
revisits thinkers on ‘planetarity’ and postcolonial ecocriticism owing their allegiance to the global
south to evoke an urgency at contesting ‘tragedy’, ‘trauma’ and ‘transition’ in times of pandemic.
Shazia Sadaf (Carleton U), “Alternative Futures: Speculation in Contemporary Pakistani
Fiction”
This paper will examine Muhammad Hanif’s Red Birds and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West as examples of
distinct “anti-utopias” that present a competing futurity with the utopias/dystopias of Western
speculative fiction. Hanif’s foresight, however, is less conciliatory and optimistic than Hamid’s, and
this paper compares the two different approaches.
Jason Sandhar (U Western Ontario), “‘Who’s Here to Tell Her Story?’: Remembering,
Recovery, and Rupture in Sunjeev Sahota’s China Room”
Sunjeev Sahota’s 2021 novel, China Room, features two stories, set 70 years apart, about a family
farm in Punjab. This paper argues that Sahota’s juxtaposition of these two stories urges us to
rethink the connections and ruptures between memory and trauma, (present) self and (ancestral)
other, and origin and return.
Alexander Sara-Davis (U Toronto), “Dreams of Intervention: Reception as Rewriting in Ruth
Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being”
When postcolonial fiction builds narratives out of experience, questions of authenticity and ethics
haunt any escape that authors or readers desire from their fiction’s historical context. This paper
argues A Tale for the Time Being offers readers and writers a path towards radical futures through
radical readership.
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Vandana Shankar Saxena (U Malaya), “Uneven Terrains: Land, memory, and capitalism on
the peripheries”
Through the discussion of Between Lives, the last novel written by Malaysia’s prominent novelist,
K.S. Maniam, the paper explores the history of Malaysia’s development over the course of the last
twentieth century as it integrated itself within the structures of the world capitalist system and the
human and environmental cost such progress entailed.
Asma Sayed and Jacqueline Walker (Kwantlen Polytechnical U), “Rupturing
Heteropatriarchal Systems: Farzana Doctor’s Seven as Literature of Protest and Activism”
This paper explores physical and social ruptures surrounding multigenerational gendered-violence,
in Farzana Doctor’s novel, Seven. Using critical hope as our theoretical framework, we argue that
khatna, or rupturing of the female body, can be understood as a means of securing patriarchal
power through women’s systematic disempowerment.
Owen Seda (Tshwane U Technology), “Solipsistic breakthroughs or stymying collectives?
Historical duels in August Wilson’s Radio Golf”
The paper analyzes Wilson’s Radio Golf, a play that demonstrates Du Bois’s “double consciousness”
and Mazrui’s “crisis of transclass man”. Historical duels play out among the principal characters to
show history not always as linear progression but rather, a crisis of reading on the basis of
individual positionality.
Ishaan Selby (McMaster U), “Rupture Beyond The Human: Blackness, Animality and
Property”
This paper explores the potential of Black abolition and animal abolition to come together in a
common critique of the property form. It further focuses on the failure of that coming together
uniting two senses of rupture: the rupture of a common project and the rupture of the dominant
order.
Tara Senanayake (U Peradeniya), “Of silences, omissions, and dust in the reader’s eyes: the
Politics of Publication in Sri Lankan Anglophone Fiction Post-1983”
This paper probes the “silences”, “omissions” and the distortions of truth in the post-colonial Sri
Lankan English text. Some texts packed with post truths triumph in international markets while the
projects of resident writers to give voice to the silenced fails as (consciously or unconsciously) the
politics of representation has fallen victim to the politics of publication.
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Humaira Shoaib (U Waterloo), “Constructing Indeterminant Diaspora Identities through
Mystery Migrants in Wayde Compton’s “1,360ft3 (38.5m3)” and Dionne Brand’s What We All
Long For”
This paper studies indeterminacy created by literary authors in diaspora identity of characters by
the use of mystery under Stuart Hall’s framework of diaspora identity representation.
Sifiso Sibanda (North-West U), “Profuse bleeding of ruptured wounds as an albatross of
postapartheid South Africa: a consideration of Mda’s Black diamond”
In this paper, I consider how Mda’s Black diamond embellishes post-apartheid South Africa. I
further examine a litany of evidence in his novel that reveals a grim picture of what Mda seems to
repress in the text. Tumi and friends enjoy a lavish lifestyle whereas the majority languish in
indigence
Geraldine Skeete (U West Indies), “The Ruptures of Illness and Food as Metaphor for Healing
in Caribbean Short Fiction”
This paper takes a look at how food is metaphorically a succour for the sick, both sufferer and
survivor of cancer, and their kin in Caribbean short stories by Barbara Jenkins and Sharon Millar.
The preparation and consumption of pastelles and guava jelly provide emotional healing and
coping with cancer.
Ruta Šlapkauskaité (Vilnius U), “Posthuman Comedy and the Maternal in Richard
Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams”
The paper examines the comic thrust of Australian author Richard Flanagan’s novel The Living Sea
of Waking Dreams (2020) in relation to how it figures motherhood as a trope for environmental
collapse.
Susan Spearey (Brock U), “Nurturing what might still be:” interrupting transgenerational
trauma, disrupting legacies of wastelanding, and enacting reparative reworlding in Michael
Christie’s Greenwood”
This paper reads Michael Christie’s 2019 multi-generational family saga Greenwood in dialogue
with Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble (2016); examining how Greenwood maps
intergenerational devastations and resurgences in both human and non-human worlds around
what Haraway describes as “intentional kin making across deep damage and significant difference”
(2016).
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Michelle Stork (Goethe U), “Narrating Overlapping Geographies and Border-Crossings in the
Transcultural Road Novel”
This paper reads Jamal Mahjoub’s 2021 The Fugitives as an example of a border-crossing road
narrative. The analysis explores how the road trip narrative negotiates overlapping geographies
and the transgression of cultural boundaries, since the novel imaginatively approximates and
compares the U.S. and the Sudan.
Helene Strauss (U Free State), “Dangerous, Ugly Air’: documentary activism, extractive
trauma, and the aesthetics of respiration in Dying for Gold”
This paper considers how the documentary film Dying for Gold (dir. Meyburgh and Pakleppa, 2018)
disrupts the South African mining industry’s historical manufacture of multiple intersectional
traumas. The paper locates in the film’s complexly layered ‘respiratory aesthetics’ important
lessons for redrawing lines of non-extractive relational interdependence.
Sylvia Terzian (St. Jerome’s University), “Radical Rethinking of Ars Moriendi in Rawi
Hage’s Beirut Hellfire Society”
In his novel, Beirut Hellfire Society, Rawi Hage explores the concept of a ‘good death’. Hage disrupts
prevailing assumptions about life’s proper end—about who should die, when and where, and under
what circumstances, and, in doing so, forces a radical rethinking of death.
Terri Tomsky (U Alberta), “Guantánamo comics: representing and resisting regimes of
(in)visibility”
Focusing on Sarah Mirk’s comic, Guantánamo Voices: True Accounts from the World’s Most Infamous
Prison (2020), this paper analyzes the comic form as critical to revealing the state’s regime of
(in)visibility, which hides its violence. The paper explores how this (in)visibility facilitates the
racist, neoimperial norms that enable Guantánamo to persist.
Ryan Topper (Western Oregon U), “Multidimensional Memory: Intra-Animate Testimony in
Yvonne Vera’s Writing”
In this presentation I analyze Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning and The Stone Virgins in light of her
unpublished scholarship and place this analysis in dialogue with influential theories of posttraumatic testimony and cultural memory.
Harismita Vaideswaran (U Delhi),“Fractured Familiarities, Ruptures of Recognition:
Narrating Affect and Space in Nigerian Civil War Fiction”
A close textual reading of Anthonia C. Kalu’s Broken Lives and Other Stories and Chimamanda
Ngozi Adiche’s Half of a Yellow Sun will illustrate the ways in which affective transformations
wrought by wartime are narrated in fiction, and how frames of recognition rupture, and are
sustained, by individuals contemplating wartime violence.
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Paola Della Valle (U Turin), “Chris Baker’s Kokupu Dreams: A Man’s Mission in a Disrupted
Post-Pandemic World”
The global pandemic, with its far-reaching disruptions, has forced us to rethink the world we live in.
The paper explores Chris Baker’s novel Kokopu Dreams (2000), which focuses on the life of the few
survivals of a pandemic in Aotearoa New Zealand and sounds somehow prophetic today, in the
aftermath of the Covid 19 crisis.
Asha Varadharajan (Queens U), “Heterodox “Animism”: Reclaiming the Commons in Helen
Oyeyemi’s Fiction”
This paper explores Helen Oyeyemi’s heterodox approach to “animism.” I argue that Oyeyemi’s
fictions, because of their fearless and sly embrace and appropriation of multiple lineages, serve to
heal colonial deracination of cultures, turning the violence of rupture into the art of reclamation
and the vision of a new “commons.”
Alex Wanjala (U Nairobi), “Disruptions in the Notions of Home, Family and Nation in
Postcolonial Kenya as Portrayed in Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dust”
The paper focuses on Yvonne Owuor’s novel Dust (2014), and examines its depiction of the colonial
and the postcolonial history of the country in order to illustrate how the trauma linked to the
disruption of the social fabric of nationhood that has impacted upon the lives of the members of the
family of Aggrey Nyipir Oganda.
Maloba Wekesa (U Nairobi), “Vernacular Media Fragmenting Nationalism and Government
Fight Back”
A discussion of power dynamics that exist between the Kenyan Government’s effort to promote
national cohesion amid the threat of fragmentation by vernacular media houses which promote
tribal pride content. The discussion is led through the lenses of critical discourse analysis viewing
language as a tool of power aggregation.
Agnes Woolley (Birkbeck U), “Re-Orienting the Gaze: Visualising Refugees in Recent Film”
This paper explores a selection of visual works that together suggest a shifting refugee imaginary,
one which tackles head-on the complex optics of the human rights regime and positions refugees as
active agents rather than passive objects of pity.
Shuyin Yu (Calgary U), “Gartic Phones and Zoom Rooms: On Internet Games, Poetic Imagery,
Laughing Again in Online Spaces an Age of Remote Teaching”
The use of games has become a core component of my pedagogy while teaching virtually. This
presentation examines how the introduction of games (such as Gartic Phone) in the classroom
helps to curate inviting, interactive, and fun spaces, regardless of in-person or virtual teaching.
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Biographies of Presenters
Tomi Adeaga (U Vienna) Tomi Adeaga teaches African literature at the Department of African
Studies, Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies of the University of Vienna, Austria. She
translated Olympe Bhêly – Quénum’s C’était à Tigony into As She Was Discovering Tigony (2017).
She co-edited Payback and Other Stories – An Anthology of African and African Diaspora Short
Stories (2018). She published Translating and Publishing African Language(s) and Literature(s):
Examples from Nigeria, Ghana and Germany (2006). She published: “Colonialism and Sexuality in
Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North and Peter Kimani’s Dance of the Jakaranda,” in
Journal of the African Literature Association (JALA) (2020).
Alero Uwawah Agbonkonkon-Ogbeide (Durban U Technology) Alero Uwawah AgbonkonkonOgbeide is a Theatre practitioner. She is a PhD student at Durban University of Technology, Durban,
South Africa. Her interest is in Theatre Studies, especially Theatre for Development and Deaf
Theatre.
Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm (U Toronto) Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm is a member of the Chippewas of
Nawash Unceded First Nation, Saugeen Ojibway Nation on the Saugeen Peninsula in Ontario.
publications encompass poetry, fiction, non-fiction, radio plays, television and film, libretti, graphic
novels, and spoken word. Her teaching and creative work is firmly decolonial, a practice of cultural
resurgence, affirmation and survivance. Her 2015 book of short stories, The Stone Collection, was a
finalist for the Sarton Literary Book Awards, and her collaborative recording A Constellation of
Bones was a nominee for a 2008 Canadian Aboriginal Music Award. She has also served as Poet
Laureate for Owen Sound and North Grey. Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm is the founding editor (now
managing editor) of Kegedonce Press, one of four established Indigenous-run publishing houses in
Canada.
Sara Ali (U Waikato) Sara Ali is currently a PhD candidate at University of Waikato. Her doctoral
research is focused on exploring how masculine identities are constructed and presented in
Pakistani anglophone fiction. Her poetry has been published in New Zealand's literary journals and
she has received a Graduate Student Paper Prize at South Asian Literary Association's 2020 Annual
Conference.
Maab Alkurdi (U Waterloo) Maab Alkurdi completed her first MA in English Language from the
University of Jordan, her second MA in English Literature from the University of Waterloo and is
currently a PhD student at the latter. She is the recipient of UW's Beltz Prize in Literature (2021) as
well as the RhetCanada’s Michael Purves-Smith Student Paper Award (2021). Maab’s research
interests include Rhetorics, Life Writings and Counterstories as well as Critical Race Theory and of
course Creative Writing.
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Lillian Allen (OCAD U) Lillian Allen is a professor of creative writing at Ontario College of Art and
Design University. Two time JUNO Award winner and trailblazer in the field of spoken word and
dub poetry, Allen artistically explores the aesthetics of old and new sounds in music to create her
distinctive leading edge brand of Canadian reggae with new world sounds in her poetry recordings,
with her powerful reggae dub poetry/spoken word recordings including ANXIETY (2012), her
ground breaking first solo Juno award-winning album, Revolutionary Tea Party, a Ms. Magazine
Landmark Album, followed by another Juno winner, Conditions Critical. Allen is a recognized
authority and activist on issues of diversity in culture, cultural equity, cross cultural collaborations,
and the power of arts in education. She has also held the post of distinguished Writer-in-Residence
at Canada’s Queen’s University and University of Windsor.
Shirin Almousa (York U) Shirin Almousa is a PhD candidate in the department of English and
Related Literature at the University of York in England. Her research is concerned with the
questions of human and nonhuman relationships and their intersections with other social issues
such as race, gender, and class in selected African American novels. Her interests broadly revolve
around ecocritical, neo-materialist studies, environmental justice, and social inequalities.
Rawan Althunyan (Durham U) Rawan Althunyan is a PhD student in English at Durham
University and is interested in contemporary World Literatures and Postcolonial theory. Her
research scope is focused on the intersectionality of silence in regard to gender, race and diaspora
which are anchored to power dynamics. Her study takes a comparative approach working on
selected novels by both male and female Saudi and Nigerian novelists. She is also a lecturer at
IMSIU in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Silvia Anastasijevic (Goethe U) Silvia Anastasijevic is a PhD candidate and a member of the
adjunct faculty at the Department of New Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at GoetheUniversity in Frankfurt, Germany. Her dissertation focuses on the forms and functions of
transcultural humor in the Anglophone world, and incorporates examples from traditional to digital
media.
Jesse Arsenault (Concordia U) Jesse Arseneault is an assistant professor of English at Concordia
University, specializing in multispecies studies, South African cultural studies, and postcolonialism.
Mohd Asaduddin (Jamia Milia Islamia U) Author, critic and translator in several language, Mohd
Asadudddin writes on literature, language politics and translation studies. He is currently Dean,
Faculty of Humanities & Languages, Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, and Advisor to the
Vice Chancellor. He was Fulbright Scholar- in-Residence at Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA,
during 2008-2009. Earlier he was a Charles Wallace Trust Fellow at the British Centre for Literary
Translation at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, in 2000. He was a visiting
professor/scholar in several Indian and foreign universities. Among his books are: Complete
Premchand Stories,(Penguin Random House, 4 volumes,2017), Premchand in World
Languages (Routledge, 2016), Filming Fiction: Tagore, Premchand and Ray (Oxford U Press,
2012), A Life in Words(Penguin, 2012), and The Penguin Book of Classic Urdu Stories (2006) He has
received several awards for his translation. He is also the Chairperson of the Indian Association for
Commonwealth Literature & Language Studies (IACLALS).
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Shashikala Assella (U Kelaniya) Shashikala Muthumal Assella is a Senior Lecturer at the
Department of English, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka. She holds a PhD on contemporary South
Asian American women’s fiction from the University of Nottingham, UK and has published and
presented her research on South Asian diasporic women’s fiction and identity in edited volumes
and conferences. Her research and teaching interests include women's writing, postcolonial fiction,
diasporic literature, cultural studies and textual and visual representations of Asian popular
culture.
Nuha Askar (Goethe U) Nuha Askar is a PhD candidate at Goethe University in Frankfurt,
Germany. She studied Anglophone Literatures, Cultures and Media at Goethe University and
graduated with a Master degree in 2019. Her fully funded PhD project is entitled “Beyond the Single
Story of the ‘Arab Nation’: Narrating Internal Dissent in Anglophone Middle Eastern Literature”. It
examines internal struggles in the Middle East in contemporary anglophone narratives of, namely,
Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. She has been a guest speaker at several fora sharing her refuge experience
and her texts published in German newspapers and collected on her blog: www.nuhaaskar.com.
Veronica Austen (St. Jerome’s U) Dr. Veronica Austen is an Associate Professor in the Department
of English at St. Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo. She specializes in Canadian and
Caribbean literatures. Her main project at present is a SSHRC-funded exploration how
representations of the visual arts are deployed in contemporary Canadian literature to navigate
experiences of (un)belonging.
Raquel Baker (California State U) Raquel Baker earned a PhD in English Literary Studies from
The University of Iowa, specializing in Postcolonial Studies and 20 and 21 st-century African
literatures in English. Baker received a BA in Psychology from San Francisco State University and an
MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College. Baker is an Assistant Professor of Postcolonial and
Transnational Literatures at California State University Channel Islands and teaches creative
writing, literature, and Africana Studies, with a focus on representations of liberatory
consciousness and speculative Black Futures. An attendee of UNISA’s 2020 Decoloniality Summer
School, Baker is developing a decolonial framework in her creative practices.
John C. Ball (U New Brunswick) John C. Ball is professor of English at the University of New
Brunswick in Fredericton. He is author of Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the
Transnational Metropolis (University of Toronto Press) and Satire and the Postcolonial
Novel (Routledge), and a long-serving editor of Studies in Canadian Literature. He has published
recently in ARIEL, Commonwealth Essays and Studies, and the Journal of Jewish Identities, and is on
the ACLALS 2022 organizing committee.
Anavisha Banerjee (U Delhi) Dr. Anavisha Banerjee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of
English, Bharati College (University of Delhi). She has been awarded her PhD degree from the
Department of English, University of Delhi in 2019 and her thesis deals with the position of women
in nineteenth century colonial Bengal. Her area of interests includes gender studies and plays of
Shakespeare. She was also the Treasurer of “The Shakespeare Society of India (SSI). She has
presented many papers in national and international conferences. Moreover, she has published
chapters in books, book reviews in journals and research articles in peer reviewed interdisciplinary
and international journals.
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Ghosun Baqeel (U York) Ghosun Baaqeel has a background in teaching English, and her early
career saw her working as an English teacher at several schools in Saudi Arabia. In 2014, she
earned the degree of Master of Art in English from Arkansas State University, USA, and in 2020
received an MA in English Literature and Postcolonial Studies from the University of Kent, UK. She
is currently a lecturer in English Literature in Taif University, Saudi Arabia and is studying for a PhD
at the University of York, UK. Her PhD research topic is Globalism, Postcolonialism, and Double
Consciousness in Iraqi Poetry.
Shinjini Basu (Sir Gurudas Mahavidyalaya U) Dr Shinjini Basu works as an Assistant Professor in
the Department of English, Sir Gurudas Mahavidyalaya, Kolkata. She did her Ph. D. from the Centre
for English Studies (CES), JNU on the relation between crime and colonial modernity. Her areas of
interest are literary theories and colonial and post-colonial studies. She has published articles in
national and international journals as well as book chapters on translation, post-colonial novel,
colonial and post-colonial politics, contemporary theories and culture studies.
Diksha Beniwal (IIT Kanpur) I, Diksha Beniwal, am currently a PhD scholar at the Indian Institute
of Technology, Kanpur, India. My research areas include postcolonial literature, Dalit studies, and
Dalit literature. I am currently working on the rise of the Dalit middle class and the study of the
ways in which it differs from, and is similar to, the Indian middle class that emerged under the
British rule. One of my papers titled "Dalit Middle Class and the Crisis of Colonial Modernity: A
Study of Ajay Navaria’s Yes Sir" is being published by SAGE's journal 'Contemporary Voice of Dalit'
later this year.
Amitendu Bhattacharya (Birla Institute of Technology and Science) Amitendu Bhattacharya is
Assistant Professor of Literary Studies at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, K.K.
Birla Goa Campus, India.
Lihini Boteju (U Kelaniya) Lihini Boteju is an Assistant Lecturer at the Department of English of
the Faculty of Humanities, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka. She received her Bachelor of Arts
(Honours) degree in English Studies from the Department of English from the University of
Kelaniya. She particularly has interest in teaching and researching in the areas of speculative
fiction, science fiction and cultural studies.
Aidan Bracebridge (Durham U) Aidan Bracebridge is a Wolfson Foundation funded PhD student
in the English Studies department at Durham University in the UK. His research focuses on
representations of the Western academy in the contemporary South Asian novel, examining literary
depictions of Western academic institutions, these institutions’ positions within neocolonialism and
globalisation, and the ways South Asian literature written in English is inflected by their influence.
Aidan is also the Academic Officer at University College Durham, recently organising the
interdisciplinary Durham Castle Conference 2021: Power, Privilege, and Possible Futures, which
addressed wide-ranging themes of inequality and decolonisation, on and beyond the British
campus.
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Michael Bucknor (U Alberta) Associate Professor at the Mona Campus, UWI, Michael A. Bucknor
has been a Canadian Commonwealth Scholar (Western University) and a Du Bois-Mandela-Rodney
Post-doctoral Fellow (University of Michigan) and an Institute of Jamaica’s Gold Musgrave Medal
winner for Eminence in the field of Literature. A Senior Editor of the Journal of West Indian
Literature, he is past Chair of ACLALS, and co-editor with Alison Donnell of The Routledge
Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature. Widely published in number of international
journals, he carries out research on Austin Clarke, Caribbean-Canadian writing, postcolonial
literatures and theory, African diaspora studies, masculinities and popular culture.
Carolina Buffoli (U Edinburgh) Carolina Buffoli is a PhD student and tutor of English Literature at
the University of Edinburgh. Her research interest focuses on contemporary Anglophone
literatures, trauma studies and the Gothic. Her doctoral project addresses the comparative analysis
of how contemporary postcolonial and Scottish novels engage with the Gothic discourse to confront
the legacies of colonialism, foregrounding issues around narrative, cultural memory, silences and
(social) shame.
Chandrima Chakraborty (McMaster U) Chandrima Chakraborty is Professor in the Department of
English and Cultural Studies and Director of the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster University,
Canada. Her research is on public memory, nationalist history, masculinity, and religion, with a
focus on the literatures and cultures of South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. Her publications
include, Masculinity, Asceticism, Hinduism: Past and Present Imaginings of India (2011), Mapping
South Asian Masculinities: Men and Political Crises (2015), and Remembering Air India: The Art of
Public Mourning (co-edited 2017). She is currently working on a co-edited book on COVID-19 and
anti-Asian racism in Canada.
Michael Chapman (Durban UT) Michael Chapman is a researcher-in-residence at the Durban
University of Technology and an emeritus professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. His
publications include Southern African Literatures and, most recently, On Literary Attachment in
South Africa: Tough Love. Chapman is editor-in-chief of Current Writing, the official journal of
SAACLALS (the Southern African Association for Commonwealth Literature and Languages).
Antara Chatterjee (IIESR Bhopal) Antara Chatterjee works at the Department of Humanities and
Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal, India. Her research
interests include South Asian literatures, Partition studies, trauma and memory, environmental and
medical humanities. She has received funding from the University Grants Commission, India, the
Indian Institute of Advanced Study, the Charles Wallace India Trust, the Indian Council of Historical
Research and Tata Trusts. She has published in South Asian Review, Humanities, and in an edited
collection The South Asian Short Story (Palgrave). Her co-edited book Pandemics and Epidemics in
Cultural Representation is forthcoming from Springer in 2022.
Ajay K Chaubey (National IT Uttarkhand) Dr. Ajay K Chaubey is an Assistant Professor of English
at the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Uttarakhand.
His publications include V S Naipaul (2015), Salman Rushdie (2016) and a trilogy on South Asian
Diaspora (2018, 2019 & 2020). Dr. Chaubey loves to explore the unexplored and nuanced territory
of travel narratives on South Asia. He has widely published his essays, interviews, and book reviews
in national and international journals, magazines, and anthologies and presented papers on V S
Naipaul and Dalit Literary discourse in India.
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�ACLALS 19th Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons Conference Program
Mousana Nightingale Chowdhury (Cotton U) I am a Postgraduate in English Literature, with
specializations in American Literature and Film Studies. I have attended many National and
International Webinars and Conferences on Literature and Theory. I am currently working as a PhD
scholar at Cotton University, India. I have also worked as a part-time peer reviewer for Indian ejournals.
Karen Sanderson Cole (U West Indies, St. Augustine) Dr. Karen Sanderson Cole is a lecturer in
the Modern Languages and Linguistics Department of the University of the West Indies, St.
Augustine. Her special area of focus is Caribbean political auto/biographies .
Jack Davies (U California Santa Cruz) Jack Davies is a PhD Candidate in the History of
Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz and holds a Master of Arts from the Center
for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies at the American University of Beirut. He studies the history of
the theory of the settler colony, particularly its lineage in political economy and its contemporary
expressions in relation to North America, Australia, and Palestine. He has published on finance and
authoritarianism and on human rights discourse in refugee status determination. His dissertation is
titled, “The Wages of Settlers: Towards a Materialist Theory of the Settler Colony”.
Philip Dickinson (U Lancaster) Philip Dickinson is a Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies and World
Literature at Lancaster University. He has published and forthcoming work in a range of venues
including Angelaki, New Formations, Interventions, and the Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial
Novel. His monograph, Romanticism and Aesthetic Life in Postcolonial Writing, came out with
Palgrave in 2018, and his co-edited special issue of New Formations on 'Animism in a Planetary
Frame' appears in 2021. He is currently working on a book about enclosure.
Jill Didur (Concordia U) Dr. Jill Didur is Associate Dean and Professor in English, Faculty of Arts
and Science, Concordia University, Montreal. She is the author of Unsettling Partition: Literature,
Gender, Memory, and co-editor of Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial
Approaches. She currently holds a SSHRC Insight Grant, Greening Narrative (2014-2022), that
explores how locative and mobile media applications can enhance our understanding of the
relationship between the discourses of natural history, globalization, and contemporary
perceptions of the environment and sustainability. She is also completing a book about imperialism,
gardening, and the environment in postcolonial literature and travel writing.
Farzana Doctor Farzana Doctor is a writer, activist, and psychotherapist. Born in Zambia, Farzana
immigrated to Canada in 1971. While being a social worker, Farzana also enjoys writing with some
of her notable works including Stealing Narseen, Six Metres of Pavement, All Inclusive, Seven, and You
Still Look The Same. Farzana explores various themes in her writing such as loss, relationships,
community, healing, racism, LGBT rights, disasporic identity and feminism.
Sarah Dowling (U Toronto) Sarah Dowling is the author of Translingual Poetics: Writing
Personhood under Settler Colonialism, which received an honorable mention for the American
Studies Association’s Lora Romero Prize. In addition, Sarah has published three poetry
collections: Security Posture, DOWN, and Entering Sappho, which was a finalist for the Derek
Walcott Poetry Prize. Sarah teaches in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Victoria College at
the University of Toronto, and is currently writing a book about lying down in contemporary
literature.
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Sam Durrant (U Leeds) Sam Durrant is Associate Professor of Postcolonial Literature at the
University of Leeds. He is the author of Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning: J.M.
Coetzee, Wilson Harris and Toni Morrison and of several co-edited collections of essays, most
recently Refugee Imaginaries (EUP 2020), and together with Philip Dickinson, a double issue of New
Formations on ‘Animism in a Planetary Frame’. He is currently working on a book on animism,
literature and film, provisionally entitled Channelling Other Spirits: Literature, Animism and the
Mimetic Imperative.
Asli Ergün (Goethe U) Asli Ergün is a PhD student at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. She
majored in English Studies, Philosophy and Education at Goethe University and holds a state
examination for teachers. Her dissertation “Discovering Europe’s Convivial and Transcultural
Ordinary in a Multipolar World” examines social imaginaries from the British and European context
that turn away from migratory exceptionalism and appreciate novel modes of the ordinary.
Ruth Epochi-Olise Etuwe (Alex Ekweme Federal U) Epochi-Olise Etuwe Ruth studied at the
University of Ibadan, where she holds a B.A. [Hons.], M.A. and Ph.D; a director, actor and theatre
manager. She is currently a Senior Lecturer of Drama and Theatre at the Alex Ekwueme Federal
University, Ndufu-Alike (AE-FUNAI), Ebonyi State, Nigeria. Epochi-Olise is a Fellow of the Ife
Institute of Advanced Studies (IIAS), whose research and teaching interests cuts across Dramatic
Literature, Theatre Studies Carnival Arts, Gender/Performance Studies and Children’s Theatre. She
has published academic papers in reputable local and international journals as well as reviewed
and co-edited articles in national and international journals.
Onaopemipo Fayose (North-West U) My name is Onaopemipo Abigail Fayose; I am a postgraduate (Masters of Arts in English) student of North-West University, Mafikeng, South Africa. My
interest areas include ecocriticism, protest fiction, feminism and postcolonial literature. As a
student, I intend to expand my knowledge in these fields and add to the growing body of knowledge
to climb the ladder in the research fields.
Miki Flockeman (U Western Cape) Miki Flockemann is Extraordinary Professor in the Dept of
English at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Her publications include comparative
studies of diasporic writings from South Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean with an emphasis
on transitional aesthetics. She has also published extensively on contemporary South African
theatre trends with a recent emphasis on the transformative and decolonial potentiality of affective
performance aesthetics.
Megan E. Fourqurean (U Leeds) Megan E. Fourqurean is a postgraduate researcher at the
University of Leeds. Her research explores the intersection of gender identity and indigenous
religion in West Africa and the diaspora. Her current doctoral thesis focuses on the political and
theoretical impact of contemporary Mami Wata worship on constructions of gender and sexuality
in recent Nigerian fiction. Megan approaches her work from an interdisciplinary perspective,
incorporating the environmental and medical humanities into her research along with the fields of
history, anthropology, sociology, postcolonial studies, queer theory and diaspora studies.
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Nitika Gulati (U Delhi) Nitika Gulati is Junior Research Fellow, Ph.D. at the Department of English,
University of Delhi. She served as an Assistant Professor at College of Technology and Engineering,
Udaipur from 2018-2021. She pursued her B.A. Hons. and M.A. in English from University of Delhi.
She recently completed a collaborative research project on English Skills for Employability as its
Principal Investigator. Her research areas include mental health literature, feminist literature and
English Language Teaching.
Anna Guttman (Lakehead U) Dr. Anna Guttman is a full professor in the department of English at
Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario. She is the chair of the Association for Commonwealth
Language and Literature Studies, the oldest and largest international organization dedicated to the
study of postcolonial literature. She is also the author of Writing Indians and Jews: Metaphorics of
Jewishness in South Asian Literature (2013) and The Nation of India in Contemporary Indian
Literature (2007) and co-editor of The Global Literary Field (2006). She publishes in a variety of
areas, including gender and sexuality studies, globalization studies, and popular culture.
Doris Hambuch (United Arab Emirates U) Doris Hambuch is Associate Professor in the
Department of Languages and Literature at United Arab Emirates University. Her publications
include essays on Caribbean literature, ecocriticism, film analysis, and trans-cultural feminism. She
is a contributor to the Greenwood Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies and to the Routledge Who’s
Who in Contemporary Women’s Writing. She edited special issue 6.2 of Imaginations: Journal of
Cross-Cultural Image Studieson Caribbean cinema. Her current research focuses on polyglot art
practices. Her collection All That Depends (2019) combines poetry and photography.
Felicity Hand (UA Barcelona) Felicity Hand is senior lecturer in the English Department of the
Autonomous University of Barcelona. She teaches post-colonial literature and history and culture
of Britain and the U.S. She has published articles on various Indian Ocean writers including
M.G.Vassanji, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Lindsey Collen and has recently
edited a volume of essays on the South African Indian playwright Ashwin Singh, Durban Dialogues
Dissected (2020). She is the co-director of the research group Ratnakara which explores the
literatures and cultures of the South West Indian Ocean. The group’s current project is: Rhizomatic
Communities: Myths of Belonging in the Indian Ocean World. Felicity is also the editor of the
electronic journal IndiaLogs.
Denise Handlarski (Trent U) Dr. Denise Handlarski is an Assistant Professor at the Trent School
of Education. She has a PhD in postcolonial literature, a background in gender studies, and
experience in formal and community education settings. Dr. Handlarski’s work is on History and
literature/reading in the classroom, critical race theory and gender studies, and wellbeing/spirituality in education.
Heike Harting (U Montreal) Heike Härting is an associate professor of English literature a the
Université de Montreal. She specializes in postcolonial, globalization and planetary cultural and
literary studies. She is the founder and co-director of the Centre de recherche des études littéraires
et culturelles sur la planétarité (CELCP) and the principal investigator of the FRQSC funded
research team grant Cultural and Literary Planetary Studies: Practice, Epistemologies, and
Transformative Pedagogies. She has published on postcolonial and contemporary Canadian writing,
planetary epistemologies of reading, narratives of global humanitarianism, violence and warfare,
and is presently working on pandemics and "planetary health humanities."
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Jennifer Henderson (Carleton U) Jennifer Henderson is a professor in the Department of English
and the School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies at Carleton University. She is the author
of Settler Feminism and Race-Making in Canada and the co-editor of Reconciling Canada: Critical
Perspectives on the Culture of Redress. Her recent publications concern genre conventions in the
settler-colonial management of historical reckoning.
Muchativugwa Liberty Hove (North-West U) Muchativugwa Hove is a Full Professor in English
Language & Literature and formerly a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Limpopo, South
Africa. He is Deputy Director in the School for Literature and Language Education. Current research
interests are in nation and narration, critical literary theory, cultural metissage and applied
language studies, especially curriculum renewal through the decolonisation project, curriculum
theory and pedagogics of teaching English. Muchativugwa Hove is a National Research Foundation
(NRF) C rated researcher with more than 35 articles in national and international journals, 12 book
chapters, 6 co-edited books and an edited book on auto/biography.
Liz Howard (U Toronto) Liz Howard earned her Honours Bachelor of Science with High
Distinction from the University of Toronto and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of
Guelph. She has completed creative writing and Indigenous arts residencies at various institutions
such as McGill University, University of Calgary, and Sheridan College. She is an adjunct professor
and lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. Her collection Infinite Citizen
of the Shaking Tent won the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize. Her second collection, Letters in a Bruised
Cosmos, was released in June 2021.
Nicola Hunte (U West Indies, Cave Hill) Nicola Hunte is a lecturer in the Literatures in English
discipline at the Cave Hill campus of the University of the West Indies. With her interest in the
creative arts, she serves as the editor of POU, Cave Hill’s journal of creative writing as well as on the
Frank Collymore Literary Endowment committee for the promotion of literary arts in Barbados.
Her research interests are the critical works of Guyanese writer/theorist Wilson Harris and
speculative fiction from the Caribbean and African cultural diaspora.
Cajetan Iheka (Yale U) Cajetan Iheka is an Associate Professor of English researching and teaching
in the fields of on African and Caribbean literatures, ecocriticism, ecomedia, and world literature.
He is the author or editor of four books. His first monograph, Naturalizing Africa: Ecological
Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature (Cambridge UP 2018), won the
2019 Ecocriticism Book Award of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and
the 2020 African Literature Association First Book Prize. Most recently, he completed African
Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (Duke UP 2021). He is the editor of Teaching
Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media (MLA 2021), and co-editor of African Migration
Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space (Rochester UP 2018) and Environmental Transformations, a
special issue of African Literature Today (ALT 38, 2020).
Camille Isaacs (OCAD U) Camille Isaacs is an Associate Professor of English at OCAD University in
Toronto, specializing in postcolonial, and black diasporic literatures, particularly the Caribbean and
Canada. She has considered the transmission of affect through social media for African women in
the diaspora: “Mediating Women’s Globalized Existence through Social Media in the Work of
Adichie and Bulawayo” was published by Safundi. In addition, her edited volume, Austin Clarke:
Essays on His Works, gathered critical essays on Clarke’s work. Her current research considers aging
and memory in Caribbean literature.
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Elizabeth Jackson (U West Indies) Dr Elizabeth Jackson is a Senior Lecturer in Literatures in
English at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine (Trinidad) campus. She has published
two single-authored books, and a third is forthcoming: Feminism and Contemporary Indian Women’s
Writing (Palgrave Macmillan 2010), Muslim Indian Women Writing in English: Class Privilege, Gender
Disadvantage, Minority Status (Peter Lang 2017), and Beyond Diaspora: Global Childhoods and
Cosmopolitan Identities in Literature (forthcoming with Brill). She is also the author of numerous
articles in academic journals, including the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, ARIEL, and Women:
A Cultural Review, among others.
Seema Jena (New York U) Seema Jena. Founder/Editor of the first South Asian literature Journal
titled DASKHAT. Award winning playwright of the play, ‘No Place in Paradise’ and winner of the
Jonathan Cape award for the Most promising Black British Writer. Author of the books, Voice and
Vision of Anita Desai, and Narrative Frameworks in Indian Women’s Writing and Text, Film, Theory.
Currently working on a documentary titled, Ganga: River and Goddess.
Clara A.B. Joseph (U Calgary) Clara A.B. Joseph is professor of English and adjunct professor of
Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Calgary. She has co-edited four collections of
essays. She is also the author of four monographs: The Agent in the Margin: Nayantara Sahgal’s
Gandhian Fiction (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier UP 2008), The Face of the Other (A Long
Poem)(Brisbane: Interactive Press 2016), Dandelions for Bhabha (Brisbane: Interactive Press 2018),
and Christianity in India: The Anti-Colonial Turn (London and New York; Routledge 2019). She coordinates the Postcolonial Studies Research Group at the University of Calgary.
Sunu Rose Joseph (National IT Karnataka) Sunu Rose Joseph is a full time PhD candidate in
English Literature at National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, India, working in the
area of Environmental Humanities. She has two International Conference Papers at Durham
University and EFLU Hyderabad to her credit. She has over 5 years of professional experience in
academics and industry.
Jyotishman Kalita (IIT Mandi) The author is a doctoral candidate at School of Humanities and
Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi and Assistant Professor of English at Gauhati
University, Assam, India. The author’s research areas include ecocritical theory, speciesism,
ecocritical pedagogy, climate fiction and folklore. The author seeks to facilitate transitions from
ecocritical theory to ecocritical practices through pedagogy and encourage crossdisciplinarity in
ecocritical theory.
Debamitra Kar (Women’s College, Calcutta) Debamitra Kar is an Assistant Professor at the
Department of English at Women’s College, Calcutta, India. She has been awarded a Ph.D. for her
work on ‘Conflict zone Literature’ under the department of English, University of Calcutta. Her area
of interest includes Conflict Management, Trauma Studies, New Historicism, and Performance
Theory.
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Soumya Kashyap (IIT Patna) Soumya Kashyap is an Institute fellow (PhD) and Teaching Assistant
in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences Patna (India). She has presented paper in
prestigious international forum such as “Contemporary Women’s writing and the Medical
Humanities”, organized by School of Advanced Study, London. Her article on ‘mothers-to-be’
appeared in Feminism in India and review article on Artificial Reproductive Technology has
appeared recently in Journal of Literature and Science. For her PhD dissertation, she is working
broadly in the field of Medical Humanities with a focus on the issues of infertility and maternal
health as reflected in Indian Women’s writing.
Ramanpreet Kaur (U Western O) Ramanpreet Kaur is a Ph.D. student in the Department of
Comparative Literature. She is writing her dissertation on gender politics in the androcentric
historiography of Punjabi theatre. Her research interests are Postcolonial literature and theory,
Indian theatre, and history of Punjab. In addition to her research, she develops tools, games, and
interactive methods for teaching Hindi and Punjabi.
Ankita Kaushik (U Delhi) Ankita Kaushik, Doctoral Research Scholar, Department of English,
University of Delhi. My doctoral research focuses on the idea of sustainability, cosmopolitanism and
migrant communities settled near river Yamuna in the city of Delhi. Other areas that I have worked
in are contemporary cultural and literary theory, with special focus on oral history and archives,
urban studies, cosmopolitan theory, popular music and nationalism.
Kristine Kelly (Case Western Reserve U) Kristine Kelly teaches in SAGES, the general education
program at Case Western Reserve University. As a researcher and teacher, her interests range from
electronic literature and digital media studies to British colonial, post-colonial, and contemporary
Anglophone literature and cultures, especially related to travel and mobility.
Arshad Said Khan (U Alberta) Arshad Said Khan is a PhD candidate at the department of English
and Film Studies, University of Alberta. He is currently writing his dissertation on representations
and self-representations of the Indian hijra subject. Khan previously attended Yale University as a
Fulbright scholar. He is interested in how Southern gender variant identities challenge and
reimagine ideas of citizenship and nationalism.
Rakibul Hasan Khan (U Otago) Rakibul Hasan Khan is pursuing his PhD in English at the
University of Otago, New Zealand. He received an MPhil, MA, and BA (Honours) in English from the
University of Rajshahi, Bangladesh. He taught at two universities in Bangladesh for eleven years
before moving to New Zealand in 2020 for further study. He has published a number of research
articles, and presented papers at international conferences. Postcolonialism, eco-postcolonialism,
and globalization studies are his main areas of research interest.
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Feisal Kirumira (U Alberta) Feisal is a doctoral student at the University of Alberta. His area of
interest is curriculum studies with an emphasis on antiracist pedagogy informed by African
wisdom, with a slice of philosophical hermeneutics. His dissertation is entitled: Desecration of Black
Resilience Through Post-Secondary Racial Restructuring: Toward Kigandan-inspired Extricare
Inquiry. Preveiously he was Special Advisor to the Dean, Augustana Campus, University of Alberta
(on international student programming), and the Faculty Advisor for the Diversity Working Group,
Afro-Youth Club, Muslim Students Association, and the Asian Pacific Students Club at Augustana
Campus. Feisal was also a member of the Alberta Antiracism Advisory Council (2019 – 2021), and a
member of the City of Edmonton Antiracism Advisory Committee.
Elisabeth Knittelfelder (U Vienna) Elisabeth Knittelfelder holds a PhD in English and American
Studies from the University of Graz and is an awardee of the Marietta Blau Scholarship. She spent
extensive research periods at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in South Africa and at
Potsdam University in Germany. Her work exists at the convergence of literary studies, cultural
studies, and performance studies, global feminism, decoloniality, Black studies, and dramaturgies of
cruelty and trauma. Her current research explores the nexus of intersections between
necrocapitalism, crisis, and violence towards aspects of (global) migration, (colonial) border
epistemologies, climate justice, and (decolonised) trauma studies.
Shubhanku Kochar (Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha U) Dr. Shubhanku Kochar is currently
working as an Assistant Professor at University School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Guru
Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, Delhi. His areas of interest include African and African
Diasporic Literature along with Environmental literary criticism. He has written a novel
titled Everything Will Be Alright. His scholarly publications include Treatment of Violence: A Reading
of Toni Morrison’s Selected Fiction and An Ecocritical Reading of Alice Walker’s Selected Works and
numerous research papers in national and international journals. His latest book Environmental
Post-Colonialism: A Literary Response was published in 2021. His forthcoming book, Refrigerated
Cultures: A Literary Perspective will be published by Vernon Press.
Neil ten Kortenaar (U Toronto) Neil ten Kortenaar is a professor at the University of Toronto
Scarborough, where he teaches African, Caribbean, and South Asian literature. He is the author
of Self-Nation Text in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Postcolonial Literature and the Impact of
Literacy, and Debt Law Realism: Nigerian Novelists Imagine the State at Independence.
Shashikantha Koudur (National IT Karnataka) Shashikantha Koudur is a Professor in
Humanities at the National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal with over 20 years of
academic experience, He has supervised 3 successful PhD candidates and have a significant number
of publications and other achievements in research to his credit.
Safa Kouki (U Montreal) Safa Kouki is affiliated with the Research Center for Planetary Literary
and Cultural Studies at the University of Montreal. She recently defended her PhD thesis (jointly
funded by the Tunisian Ministry of Higher Education and the University of Montreal), which
undertook a critical assessment of what she calls “refugee camp literature” as both a cultural
commodity and a literary and interdisciplinary genre on its own terms. Her research interests
include postcolonial literatures and theories, literary and cultural perspectives on planetarity, and
the so-called “refugee question.”
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Aditi Krishna (Dalai Lama Institute of Higher Ed) Aditi Krishna is a research scholar working on
the ethic of care and intersectionality of philosophy and literature. She ahs finished her MPhil from
the department of English, The University of Delhi. Her dissertation was titled “Facets of Care: A
Study of Care Relations in Contemporary Indian Stories” where she explored the nexus between
mental health, care and Levinasian ethics. She is currently working on her Ph.D. proposal while
teaching at The Dalai Lama Institute of Higher Education, Bagladore, India.
Lilika Kukiela (U Toronto) Lilika Kukiela is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at the
University of Toronto. Her SSHRC-funded dissertation focuses on how imperial and post-imperial
Japan signifies in post-1945 multi-ethnic American literature that resists and complicates one’s
relations to American empire.
Eeva Langeveld (U Munster) Eeva Langeveld is a recent graduate of the MA National and
Transnational Studies at the University of Münster and is currently conducting field studies in
Helsinki (Finland) for the MA Social Anthropology. Her academic interests lie with memory studies,
postcolonial history, and children’s literature.
Isabella Lau (U Calgary) I am a M.A. student at the University of Calgary and non-fiction editor at
filling Station Publication Society. My research interests are Asian Canadian Literature, diaspora
studies, language and cultural studies, and postcolonial theories. Most of my works are critical
research projects on Asian representation in literature, and postcolonial and cultural studies. I am
currently working as a graduate research assistant at the U of C Department of English.
Anne-Marie Lee-Loy (Toronto Metropolitan U) Anne-Marie Lee-Loy is the current Chair of the
Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her research considers the
construction and usage of "Chineseness" as a socio-cultural political identity primarily in the AngloCaribbean, but also in dialogue with the Americas more generally. She is the author of Searching for
Mr. Chin: Constructions of Nation and the Chinese in West Indian Literature.
Judith Leggatt (Lakehead U) Judith Leggatt is an Associate Professor in the English department at
Lakehead University, Canada, where she teaches Indigenous literature and science fiction. She has
published articles on a variety of topics, including Indigenous science fiction, tricksters in
Indigenous literature, and Indigenous comics. Together with Monica Flegel, she has coauthored Superhero Culture Wars: Politics, Marketing and Social Justice in Marvel
Comics (Bloomsbury 2021).
Christine Lorre-Johnston (Sorbonne Nouvelle U) Christine Lorre-Johnston is a Senior Lecturer in
English at Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris. Her research focuses on Canadian and New
Zealand literature, women’s writing, and the genre of the short story. Recent publications include
Space and Place in Alice Munro’s Short Stories: ‘A Book with Maps in It’(2018), ‘Unsettling Oceania,’ a
special issue of Commonwealth Essays and Studies (2018), and ‘Afterlives of the Bible’, a special
issue of the Journal of New Zealand Literature (2018). She is the current Editor of Commonwealth
Essays and Studies, and a CNRS Research Fellow in 2020-22.
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Cheryl Lousley (Lakehead U) Cheryl Lousley is Associate Professor in English and
Interdisciplinary Studies at Lakehead University with a focus on contemporary Canadian,
postcolonial, and global environmental justice writing and cultural studies. Her research appears
in The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literary
Theory, Globalizations, Resilience, Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities, Popular
Representations of Development, among other places. She is a Past President of the Association for
Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada (ALECC) and the founding series editor for
the Environmental Humanities book series published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press since 2007.
Randy Lundy (U Toronto) Randy Lundy is Cree, Norwegian, and Irish and is a member of the
Barren Lands First Nation. Randy’s notable works include poetry books titled Blackbird
Song and Field Notes for the Self. He currently serves as editor for the Oksana Poetry and Poetics
series. Randy Lundy joined the English Department at University of Toronto, Scarborough.
Irikidzayi Manase (U Free State) Irikidzayi Manase is a Professor of English Studies and Academic
Head of Department at the University of the Free Sate, South Africa, and current Chair of SAACLAS.
His areas of research are the city and youth in Southern Africa and Africa, African literatures,
speculative fiction and African futures. He recently guest edited the October 2021 Current
Writingjournal issue in honour of Michael Wessels and Journal of Literary Studies special issue on
African literatures about old and new contagions and being human in times of viral infections, and
is finalising co-editing a Literary Geographies special issue on African Futures.
Rita Maricocchi (U Munster) Rita Maricocchi is a research assistant and PhD student at the Chair
of English, Postcolonial and Media Studies at the University of Münster. Her current PhD project
focuses on intersections of the Anglophone and Germanophone in the (postcolonial) German
literary and cultural sphere. Additional research interests include postcolonial comics, multilingual
literature, and decolonization movements.
Laura Moss (U British Columbia) Laura Moss is Professor of Canadian and African Literatures at
the University of British Columbia. She held the Brenda and David McLean Chair in Canadian
Studies from 2019-21 and served as the editor of the scholarly journal Canadian Literature: A
Quarterly of Criticism and Review from 2015-20. In addition to five edited books on literary history,
postcolonialism, and Canadian writing, Moss has published research on GMO seed practices, TRCs
in South Africa and Canada, narrative competence and the medical humanities, literary pedagogy,
public arts policy in Canada, and public memorials. She is currently the Associate Dean, Students in
the Faculty of Arts at UBC.
Michaela Moura-Kocoglu (Florida International U) Michaela Moura-Koçoğlu earned her Ph.D. in
Postcolonial Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Goethe-University in Frankfurt, Germany. She
teaches Feminist Theory, Gender and Genocide, as well as courses on Gender Violence and Global
Women’s Writing at Florida International University in Miami, USA. Her research interests include
Studies in Gender Violence and Trauma; Women and Genocide; Indigenous Feminism; Online
Violence Against Women; and Trans-Indigenous Literary Studies. Dr. Moura-Koçoğlu’s most recent
article “Decolonizing Gender Roles in Pacific Women’s Writing: Indigenous Feminist Theories and
the Reconceptualization of Women’s Authority” was published in the journal Contemporary
Women’s Writing (2017).
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Durba Mukherjee (IIT Kanpur) Durba Mukherjee is a part-time Senior Research Fellow in the
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and a fulltime assistant professor at Kalimpong College, West Bengal. The topic of her doctoral dissertation is
‘The Portrayals of India as a Physical Space: Narratives of Indian Return Migrants after
Independence’ and her broader field of research includes Indian middle-class self-fashioning, travel
writing, autobiographical texts, and narratives of home.
Sayan Mukherjee (Dhirubhai Ambani IICT) Sayan Mukherjee is a Ph.D. student at the Dhirubhai
Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology in Gandhinagar. He completed his
Master’s Degree in English from the English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad, and
his Bachelor’s Degree in English from the University in Kolkata. His research interests include
graphic narratives, visual arts, and culture studies.
Angelie Multani (IIT Delhi) Angelie Multani is Professor of Literature at the Department of
Humanities & Social Sciences, IIT Delhi. She is interested in theatre, contemporary fiction and
Indian writing in English. She has published extensively on the plays of Mahesh Dattani, and also on
Fantasy Literature and the Indian novel in English.
Francesca Mussi (U Northumbria) Francesca Mussi is a Leverhulme ECR Fellow in the
Department of Humanities at Northumbria University. Her current research project examines how
Indigenous literature can complement and challenge the work carried out by the Indian Residential
School Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Canada 2008-2015) by contributing to ongoing
discourses of healing, justice, and Indigenous resurgence. This research builds on her first
monograph, Literary Legacies of the South African TRC: Fictional Journeys into Trauma, Truth and
Reconciliation (Palgrave 2020) which explores the intersections between trauma, memory,
reconciliation, and narrative within the context of the South African TRC.
Jonathan Nash (Victoria U) Jonathan Nash is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at the
University of Victoria, and he studies contemporary refugee writing.
Isaac Ndlovu (U Venda) Isaac Ndlovu teaches in the Department of English, Media Studies and
Linguistics at the University of Venda, South Africa. His research interests are African narratives of
crime and imprisonment, contemporary South African and Zimbabwean fiction and life writing. His
recent publications are: “Writing and Reading Zimbabwe in the Global Literary Market: A Case of
Four Novelists” in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2020); “Rewriting the Colonial Gaze? Black
Middle Class Constructions of Africa in Sihle Khumalo’s Travel Writing” in Auto/Biography
Studies (2020) and “Writing in and about Prison, Childhood Albinism and Human Temporality in
Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory” in the Journal of Literary Studies (2018).
Janet Neigh (Pennsylvania State U) Janet Neigh is an Associate Professor of English at the Erie
campus of Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of Recalling Recitation in the Americas:
Borderless Curriculum, Performance Poetry, and Reading (University of Toronto Press, 2017).
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Brendon Nicholls (U Leeds) Brendon Nicholls is Associate Professor in Postcolonial African
Studies (University of Leeds). Nicholls is author of a monograph, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Gender, and
the Ethics of Postcolonial Reading, and an edited collection on Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People. His
articles appear in the Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie, Modern Fiction Studies, Research in
African Literatures, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, African Identities and Cultural Critique. His
ACLALS paper forthcoming in New Formations. Nicholls serves on the Worldwide Universities
Network Global Africa Group Steering Committee.
Naomi Nkealah (U Witwatersrand) Naomi Nkealah is a senior lecturer of English in the Division
of Languages, Literacies and Literatures in the School of Education at the University of the
Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Her research specializes in the re-theorisation of African feminisms
for contemporary African scholarship and the exploration of representations of gendered violence
and women’s empowerment in African women’s literature. Her most recent publication is the
book Gendered Violence and Human Rights in Black World Literature and Film (Routledge, 2021), coedited with distinguished professor, Obioma Nnaemeka.
Susie O'Brien (McMaster U) Susie O’Brien is a professor of English and Cultural Studies. Her
teaching and research focus on postcolonial environmental humanities. SSHRC-funded research
includes participation as a co-investigator in an MCRI (Major Collaborative Research Initiative) on
Globalization and Autonomy (2002-2007), and individual projects focused on postcolonialism and
the environment (2001-2004) and a study of the concept of resilience in postcolonial culture and
ecology (2009-2012). She is also a collaborator on a project funded by the Spanish Ministry of
Economy and Competitiveness (2016-2019) on narratives of resilience. Her publications focus on
postcolonial ecology, the slow and local food movements, risk and resilience. She is currently
working on a book, tentatively titled Unsettling Resilience Stories, which analyzes the usefulness and
the limitations of the concept of resilience through an anti-colonial ecocritical lens.
Isaiah Ode (U Lagos) Isaiah Ode is my name. I hail from Edo State, Nigeria. I have an M.A degree in
Theatre Arts from the University of Lagos; B.A from the University of Benin, and Nigeria Certificate
in Education, College of Education, Agbor, Delta State, Nigeria. I am a member of NANTAP, SONTA
and WAACLALS. I am a creative and determined person with a humble personality. I am a poet, an
actor, director and freelance teacher. I am passionate about affecting positive change, hence my
desire for knowledge to achieve that.
Stephanie Oliver (U Alberta) Dr. Stephanie Oliver is an Assistant Professor of English specializing
in contemporary Canadian and diasporic literature at the University of Alberta’s Augustana campus.
Her research interests include literary representations of smell and diaspora, sensory encounters
with oil, and the poetics and ethics of breathing in settler atmospheres.
Sarah Olutola (Lakehead U) Sarah Olutola, also known as Sarah Raughley, is currently a professor
in the English Department at Lakehead University. Sarah is an emerging Young Adult fiction writer,
with notable works including The Bones of Ruin, Legacy of Light, and Seige of Shadows. Sarah has
been nominated for the Aurora Award for Best YA Novel. Her research covers representation of
race and gender in popular media culture, youth culture, and postcolonialism.
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Prateeksha Pathak (York U) Prateeksha Pathak is a graduate student at York University, Canada.
Her project examines the role of tangible heritage in preserving the culture and untold stories of
displaced communities from Jammu and Kashmir. She also runs a digital archive 'Kashmir Untold'.
Her research interests include material culture, memory studies, diasporic literature, migration and
displacement and culture studies.
Prateek Paul (Columbia U) Prateek Paul is a PhD student in the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and
African Studies (MESAAS) department at Columbia University. He pursued his MPhil research on
the urbanity of caste in Hindi Dalit literature, in the Department of English at Delhi University. He
has previously been Writing Faculty at Ashoka University, where his course, "Writing the City",
scrutinised variegated ideas, practices, and strategies of reading and writing about/in the city. For
his PhD research, he aims to study the contemporary Dalit public sphere and its print culture in a
bid to analyse Dalit urbanism(s) in the neo-liberal Indian city.
Senath Walter Perera (U Peradeniya) Senath Walter Perera is Professor Emeritus (English) at
the University of Peradeniya. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of New Brunswick on a
Commonwealth Scholarship and subsequently secured Fulbright Fellowships to Virginia Tech and
Cornell. His publications are primarily on Postcolonialism and Sri Lankan Literature. He has
edited The Sri Lanka Journal of the Humanities, Phoenix and Navasilu and is Bibliography
representative in Sri Lanka for JCL. The current Chair of SLACLALS, he has also chaired the
Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia), the Gratiaen Trust and been on the Advisory Board of
SARE and the DSC prize for South Asian Literature.
Roopa Philip (Jyoti Nivas College) I am employed as assistant professor at the department of
English, Jyoti Nivas College Autonomous (Bangalore) since 2008. I completed my PhD (2013) from
JNU, Delhi. My areas of research interest and focus are gender studies, women’s writing, revisionist
writing and Indian Literatures.
Alfrena Jamie Pierre (U West Indies, Trinidad) Alfrena Jamie Pierre is a Ph.D. Candidate in
Literatures in English at The University of the West Indies in Trinidad. In 2021 she presented “Who
are We? Explorations of Self in Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s “Mother Poem” and George
Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin” at the 39th West Indian Literature Conference. Her paper, “The
God Question in George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin” was published in volume IV of the
journal Meditating and Mediating Change: State ̶ Society ̶ Religion. Ms. Pierre’s research interests
include, representations of Christianity in literature, George Lamming, Caribbean poetics, identity
and trauma.
Mariam Pirbhai Mariam Pirbhai is a creative writer and academic. She is a professor of English at
Wilfrid Laurier University and is the former president of the Canadian Association for
Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (CACLALS). Some of notable works by Mariam
include Outside People and Other Stories, and Isolated Incident. Mariam is currently working on two
new projects, one that is scheduled to be published by Fall 2023.
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Eva Ulrike Pirker (Heinrich Heine U Dusseldorf) Eva Ulrike Pirker is a senior lecturer in
Anglophone Studies and coordinates the programme of the Centre for Translation Studies
(ctsdus@hhu.de) at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. She has published widely on
anglophone and postcolonial literatures and arts. Her research focuses on historical culture,
cultural translation and formal approaches to cultural narratives. Currently, she works on
generational experiences in 'postmigrant' situations.
Tehmina Pirzada (Texas A&M Qatar) Dr. Tehmina Pirzada is an Assistant Professor of English at
Texas A&M at Qatar. She specializes in the cultural constructions of Muslim girlhood and Muslim
adolescence in the material, visual, and digital cultures of the 20th and 21st centuries. Her work has
appeared in South Asian Review, Journal of Language, Literature, and Culture Studies, and Journal of
South Asian Popular Culture amongst others.
Saba Pirzadeh (Lahore U of Management Science) Saba Pirzadeh is assistant professor of
English at Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan. Her research examines violence,
natural degradation, socio-ecological justice, and ethics of representation in literary texts. In 2019,
she was a research fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich. Her
work has been published in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and
Environment, ISLE, Parergon, Interventions, and the Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and
Environmental Communication and The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene.
Jill Planche (Toronto Metropolitan U) Jill Planche is an academic with a professional background
in arts in Canada. Education: PhD English Literature (York U, 2007) and PhD Interdisciplinary
Humanities (Brock U, 2020) – focused on the space of theatre and its role in South Africa’s socialpolitical-economic discourse explored through Deleuze’s minoritarian conceptualization, feminist
decolonial geography and primary research of contemporary theatre practice in South Africa.
Currently, Jill is an independent scholar and sessional instructor (Ryerson U and Brock U). Research
interests include postcolonial/decolonial literature; ‘minor’ theatre’s role in contemporary
discourse in South Africa and Canada; decolonizing knowledges; posthumanism; the Anthropocene,
and social justice.
Esther Pujolras-Noguer (U Lleida) Esther Pujolràs-Noguer is a Serra-Húnter Fellow in
postcolonial literature at the Universitat de Lleida. She is the co-director of the research
group, Ratnakara, which specializes in the study of Indian Ocean literatures and cultures. Her
research interests revolve around the convergence of gender and ethnicity and the representation
of trauma. She is a member of the funded research project Rhizomatic Communities: Myths of
Belonging in the Indian Ocean World and has published on Indian Ocean writers such as Abdulrazak
Gurnah and M.G. Vassanji. She is the co-editor of Relations and Networks in South African Indian
Writing, published by Brill Rodopi.
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Basmah Rahman (Queens U) Basmah Rahman is a Ph.D. student at Queen’s University in the
Department of English Language and Literatures. Her research focuses on Canadian Black,
Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) literature and intersections of identity representation
within public education systems. As an Ontario high school teacher and an English Language
Learner’s instructor, Basmah prioritizes inclusive literacy models to further student engagement
and representation in classrooms. Furthermore, she is interested in decolonial and anti-oppression
teaching pedagogies that centre community engagement. Basmah hopes that her research will help
develop primary and secondary educational curriculums, specifically teacher resources, and
undergraduate humanities courses.
Shazia Rahman (U Dayton) Shazia Rahman is Associate Professor of English specializing in
Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Dayton. She is the guest editor of a forthcoming special
issue of South Asian Review volume 42.4 titled “The Environment of South Asia.” Her book Place and
Postcolonial Ecofeminism: Pakistani Women’s Literary and Cinematic Fictions (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2019; Lahore: Folio Books, 2021) analyzes Pakistani women’s cinematic and
literary fictions to amplify their environmental ways of belonging that counter religious
nationalism. Rahman’s articles have appeared in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, ISLE:
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and Environmental Communication among
others.
Gillian Roberts (Nottingham U) Gillian Roberts is Professor of Contemporary Literature and
Culture in the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham. She is
the author of Prizing Literature: the Celebration and Circulation of National Culture (2011)
and Discrepant Parallels: Cultural Implications of the Canada-US Border (2015); co-editor of Parallel
Encounters: Culture at the Canada-US Border (2014); and editor of Reading between the Borderlines:
Cultural Production and Consumption at the 49th Parallel (2018). She is currently completing a
monograph on postcolonial film adaptation for Edinburgh University Press.
J. Coplen Rose (U Toronto) Dr. J. Coplen Rose currently works as an educator and scholar in
Toronto, Canada. He teaches postcolonial studies, fantasy fiction, and introductory courses devoted
to critical writing and reading. Coplen’s research interests include South African theatre and
literature, science fiction and fantasy, and trauma studies. He is planning to return to South Africa
in 2022 to expand the scope of his research project on Imraan Coovadia. Coplen also serves on the
Executive Council of the Canadian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies.
Moumita Roy (Jamia Millia Islamia U) Moumita ‘Megh’ Roy is a PhD scholar at the Department of
English, Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi. She is a member of the IACLALS. She takes a
keen interest in diaspora, race, ethnic and postcolonial studies. She is also an alumna to Calcutta
University and Delhi University in India.
Shazia Sadaf (Carleton U) Shazia Sadaf teaches Human Rights and Social Justice in the Institute of
Interdisciplinary Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Her research interest lies in the
intersectional areas of War on Terror Studies, human rights discourse, and post-9/11 Anglophone
literature. Shazia holds a doctorate in English in postcolonial literature from Western University,
Canada, and a masters in English Literature & Language from King’s College London. Shazia has
several published articles and book chapters and is currently working on a monograph on Pakistani
speculative fiction.
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Jason Sandhar (U Western Ontario) Jason Sandhar teaches postcolonial ecocriticism, literary
theory, and critical race studies at Western University. Recent publications have appeared
in Interventions, Postcolonial Animalities (Routledge 2020), and The Journal of Commonwealth
Literature.
Henghameh Saroukhani (St. Mary's U) Henghameh Saroukhani is Associate Professor in
Literatures and Cultures of the Black Atlantic at Saint Mary’s University. She has published widely
on twentieth and twenty-first-century black British and black Atlantic literature. She is co-editor of
a recently published special issue on Andrea Levy (ARIEL 2022) and a forthcoming special issue on
the Windrush scandal (Wasafiri 2023). She is currently finishing a monograph on the cosmopolitics
of contemporary black British writing.
Alexander Sarra-Davis (U Toronto) Alexander Sarra-Davis is a 6th-year PhD candidate at the
University of Toronto who is interested in the intersection of agency within fiction and the ethics of
literary representation. His dissertation investigates the role of self-representation in novels, and
specifically what postcolonial authors have to gain from including versions of themselves as
characters in their own work. He has previously presented on topics including parallels between
authorship and surveillance as well as the responsibility of author in contemporary, postcolonial
fiction.
Vandana Shankar Saxena (U Malaya) Vandana Saxena teaches English literature at Universiti
Malaya. She has taught in Universities in India, Malaysia and Vietnam. Her major research interests
are South and Southeast Asian literature, popular culture, new media and creative writing. These
interests are reflected in her numerous publications and presentations. She published her
book Memory and Nation-building: WWII in Malaysian literature' in 2021.
Asma Sayed (Kwantlen Polytechnical U) Dr. Asma Sayed is Canada Research Chair in South Asian
Literary and Cultural Studies at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Canada. Her interdisciplinary
research focuses on Indian Ocean Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and South Asian diaspora in Canada.
Owen Seda (Tshwane U Technology) Owen Seda is Associate Professor in the Department of
Performing Arts at Tshwane University of Technology in Pretoria, South Africa. He has taught at the
University of Zimbabwe, Africa University, the University of Botswana and the University of
Pretoria and has been a Commonwealth Scholar and a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence in the
Department of Theatre at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Owen has co-edited
three books and published numerous academic journal articles and book chapters.
Ishaan Selby (McMaster U) Ishaan is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Cultural
Studies at McMaster University. He is interested in critical theory, animal studies, abolition and
Marxism. He is dissertation project seeks to think together animal studies and Black studies as
engagements with the critique of property. When not reading and writing theory, he can be found
thinking way too much about Batman and the X-Men.
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Tara Senanayake (U Peradeniya) Tara Senanayake is a Lecturer in English at the University of
Peradeniya, where she teaches literature and theory as well as English as a Second Language. Her
work interrogates the construction of identities, nostalgia and memory. Her research interests
include areas of Discourse Analysis, Sri Lankan English, Pedagogy of Teaching English as a Second
Language, Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature. A contributor to the Literary Encyclopedia,
Tara’s latest research was published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in Gendered Ways of
Transnational Un-Belonging from a Comparative Literature Perspective (2019). An Executive
Committee Member of the Sri Lankan ACLALS, Tara is currently reading for her PhD at King’s
College in London.
Manvi Sharma (National IT Uttarkhand) Manvi Sharma is a Research Scholar (English) at the
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Uttarakhand,
India. Currently working on the representation of Climate Change in Popular Culture, she has a
Research paper entitled Climate Change in India: A Wakeup Call from Bollywood to her credit. Her
areas of interests include Environmental Humanities, Popular Culture, Film Studies and PostApocalyptic Fiction, and Literature of the Indian Diaspora, etc.
Humaira Shoaib (U Waterloo) Ms. Humaira Shoaib is currently enrolled in the PhD English
program at the University of Waterloo. Her critical essays have been published in peer-reviewed
journals and she has presented in many conferences. Before joining the PhD program at the
University of Waterloo, she had been teaching English Studies at the University of the Punjab,
Pakistan. Her research interests include Critical Muslim Studies with a focus on Islamophobia,
Diaspora Studies and Post-colonial studies.
Sifiso Sibanda (North-West U) Dr Sifiso Sibanda, English Lecturer at North-West University, South
Africa.
Hyacinth Simpson (Toronto Metropolitan U) Dr. Hyacinth Simpson is an Associate Professor in
the Department of English and the Dimensions Faculty Chair at Toronto Metropolitan University,
Canada. She specializes in Caribbean, Caribbean diaspora, postcolonial and Black studies in both
her teaching and publications. From 2005-2014, she was Editor of MaComère, the peer-reviewed
journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers & Scholars, which won the Horizon Award
(Council of Editors of Learned Journals) in 2010. Her community-oriented teaching includes the
digital humanities initiative Gardening in the Tropics, and her current research centres on the
multi-tiered Black Canada and the Great War project.
Geraldine Skeete (U West Indies) Dr Geraldine Skeete teaches Literatures in English in the
Faculty of Humanities and Education at The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. Among her
publications are those in journals such as the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, Caribbean
Teaching Scholar, Caribbean Journal of Education, Interviewing the Caribbean, The Year's Work in
English Studies and Short Fiction in Theory & Practice. She is co-editor of The Child and the Caribbean
Imagination and Tout Moun: Caribbean Journal of Cultural Studies. Her areas of interest are
Caribbean literature, the short story form, literary linguistics, and the scholarship of teaching and
learning.
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Ruta Šlapkauskaité (Vilnius U) I am an Associate Professor of English literature at Vilnius
University, Lithuania, where I teach several courses on literary theory, postcolonial, and (neo)Victorian literature. My research interests include Canadian and Australian literature, memory and
material visuality, animal studies, and material ecocriticism. My recent publications include
“Precariousness, kinship and care: Becoming human in Clare Cameron’s The Last Neanderthal”
in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature and “An Arc of Itinerant Tropes: Beyond Kin and Kind in
André Alexis’ Fifteen Dogs” in The Anglo-Canadian Novel in the Twenty-first Century edited by Maria
and Martin Loschnigg.
Susan Spearey (Brock U) Sue Spearey teaches in the Department of English, and is affiliated with
the interdisciplinary MA in Social Justice and Equity Studies, and the PhD in Interdisciplinary
Humanities, at Brock University in St Catharines, ON, Canada. Her teaching and research focus on
South African literature and culture, the role of the arts in “post-conflict” settings, transitional
justice, pedagogies of witnessing, trauma studies, trauma-informed collective healing, and
decolonial pedagogies and approaches to (inter)disciplinary practices and institutional
transformations.
Michelle Stork (Goethe U) Michelle Stork studied English Studies, Moving Cultures, Comparative
Literary Studies and History of Art at Goethe University Frankfurt and Universiteit Utrecht. She
holds an M.A. in Moving Cultures – Transcultural Encounters and an M.A. in History of Art, both
from Goethe University Frankfurt. Her PhD project aims at reading road narratives in fiction and
film across the Anglophone world from a transcultural perspective. Since November 2020, Michelle
holds a scholarship with the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung des
Deutschen Volkes).
Helene Strauss (U Free State) Helene Strauss teaches in the Department of English at the
University of the Free State, South Africa. Her research and teaching interests span topics such as
Southern African, African and African diasporic literature and (audio-visual) culture; feminist and
queer aesthetic activisms; protest cultures; mining; documentary film; and Yoga Studies. Recent
major publications include the books Wayward Feeling: Audio-visual Culture and Aesthetic Activism
in Post-Rainbow South Africa (University of Toronto Press, 2022) and Contemporary African
Mediations of Affect and Access (Routledge, 2017, co-edited with Jessie Forsyth and Sarah Olutola).
She is the Vice-Chair of the Association for Cultural Studies.
Sylvia Terzian (St. Jerome’s University) Sylvia Terzian is a Lecturer in the English Department at
St. Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo. Dr. Terzian’s research interests include
Migration and Diaspora Studies, Literatures of the Arab diaspora, and Transnational Feminisms.
Her current research explores contemporary Arab diasporic women writers through the axis of
transnational feminism and migration, as well as the conceptual links between migration, literature,
and hospitality.
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Terri Tomsky (U Alberta) Terri Tomsky is an Associate Professor in the Department of English
and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Her research examines memory politics and memory
economies in postcolonial and post-socialist literatures. She is the co-editor (with Eddy Kent)
of Negative Cosmopolitanism: Culture and Politics of World Citizenship After Globalization(McGillQueen’s UP, 2017). She has published in the areas of human rights literary studies, life writing,
cultural memory and trauma, cosmopolitanism, as well as the Global War on Terror. She is
currently completing a book manuscript on Guantánamo and the many forms of cultural activism
inspired by the prison’s injustices.
Ryan Topper (Western Oregon U) Ryan Topper is Assistant Professor of English at Western
Oregon University. He is completing a book on trauma and animism in Anglophone African
literature. His articles appear in Research in African Literatures, English Language Notes, Moving
Worlds, and The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma.
Sam Erevbenagie Usadolo (Durban U Technology) Dr. Sam Erevbenagie Usadolo is a Senior
Lecturer in the Department of Media, Language and Communication, Durban University of
Technology, Durban, South Africa. He majors in Communication skills, Language, and intercultural
communication among others. He has to his credits several journal articles both local and
international.
Harismita Vaideswaran (U Delhi) Harismita Vaideswaran is an MPhil research scholar and Junior
Research Fellow at the Department of English, Delhi University. Her research interests include
processes of recollecting and writing wartime trauma, and personal and political resistance in
Nigerian civil war fiction; the city-space and affective attachment to place in the literary
imagination; and representations of food in fiction.
Paola Della Valle (U Turin) Paola Della Valle is Associate Professor at the University of Turin
(Italy). She specializes in New Zealand and Pacific literature, postcolonial and gender studies. Her
articles appeared in, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Textus, NZSA Bulletin of New Zealand
Studies, Le Simplegadi, RiCognizioni, English Studies, Semicerchio and Loxias. She has published the
monographs From Silence to Voice: The Rise of Maori Literature (2010), Stevenson nel Pacifico: una
lettura postcoloniale (2013) and Priestley e il tempo, il tempo di Priestley (2016). She has recently
contributed to the collections Uncommon Wealths in Postcolonial Fiction (2018), Antroposcenari:
Storie, paesaggi, ecologie, (2018), and Trees in Literatures and the Arts: HumanArboreal Perspectives
in the Anthropocene (2021).
Ruth Vanita (U Montana) Ruth Vanita is a professor of English and World Cultures at
the University of Montana, where she directs the program in South & South-East Asian Studies. An
academic and activist with a focus on gender and sexuality studies, she also teaches and writes
on Hindu philosophy. She is the author, editor or translator of more than a dozen academic books.
While living in Delhi in 1978, Vanita co-founded Manushi: A Journal about Women and Society, a
journal that combined academic research and grassroots activism. She served as the journal's coeditor from 1979 to 1991. Her first novel, Memory of Light, appeared in 2020 from Penguin.
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Asha Varadharajan (Queens U) Asha Varadharajan is Associate Professor of English at Queen's
University in Canada. Her current research focuses on forced migration and involuntary
displacement. Her most recent publications comment on the crisis of the humanities, the subaltern
in contemporaneity, sexual violence and human rights, decolonizing pedagogies, and the legacy of
the Frankfurt School. The most fun she has had lately was while composing her entry on Eric Idle
for the Dictionary of Literary Biography. The most chuffed she has been lately was when she
received the Queen's University 2021 Principal's Promoting Student Inquiry Teaching Award.
Karina Vernon (U Toronto) Karina Vernon is Associate Professor of English at the University of
Toronto Scarborough where she researches and teaches in the areas of Canadian and Black
Canadian literature, Black aesthetics, archives, critical pedagogy, and Black-Indigenous solidarities.
She is editor of The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology, published by Wilfrid Laurier University
Press in 2020 and a companion volume, Critical Readings in the Black Prairie Archives, which is
forthcoming. With Winfried Siemerling (UWaterloo) she is working on a book project on the politics
and aesthetics of relation of Black Canadian cultural achievement, including writing, music, film,
and visual art.
Jacqueline Walker (Kwantlen Polytechnical U) Jacqueline Walker is completing her dual major
in English and political science at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Canada. She is interested in
social justice, animal rights, gender studies and the intersections between these areas of research.
Alex Wanjala (U Nairobi) Dr. Alex Nelungo Wanjala is a Senior Lecturer at the University of
Nairobi. He is the regional editor, East Africa of Tydskrif vir Letterkunde and the Chairman, East
African Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (EAACLALS).
Maloba Wekesa (U Nairobi) Dr. Maloba Wekesa is a lecturer at the University of Nairobi based in
the Department of Linguistics and Languages with over 15 years teaching experience. His research
interests are in the fields of Discourse Analysis and Applied Communication.
Agnes Woolley (Birbeck U) Dr Agnes Woolley is Lecturer in Transnational Literature and
Migration Cultures at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research interests are in contemporary
and postcolonial literature, theatre and film, with a focus on concepts of migration and diaspora.
She is the author of Contemporary Asylum Narratives: Representing Refugees in the Twenty-First
Century(Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and has published extensively on asylum, refugee arts, climate
change and contemporary literature. Her forthcoming book, Moving Images: Refugees in
Contemporary Screen Culture (Bloomsbury, 2022) examines the interrelationship between
contemporary screen cultures and geopolitical refugee discourses. She is a regular contributor to
openDemocracy, reporting on migration issues and works with grassroots refugee organisations in
London.
Shuyin Yu (Calgary U) Shuyin Yu is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University
of Calgary. Her research interests are East Asian diaspora studies, asexuality studies, children's and
young adult literature and media, food studies, and pedagogy. She received her H.B.A. from the
University of Toronto and her M.A. from the University of Calgary.
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Map of TMU Campus
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Map of Toronto
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Title
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19th Triennial Conference Program
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Conference Program
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July 2022