Metropolis and margins: shifting perspectives in literary and language studies.

On-line Annual International Conference 2023 of IACLALS, the Indian Chapter of ACLALS. April 27-29, 2023.

The Conference is open only to members of IACLALS – visit the website here to learn how to become a member. Register for the Conference by March 25.

About: ‘Metropolis’ and ‘margins’, ‘centre’ and ‘peripheries’ are concepts that enable us to imagine multiple configurations of power-relationships of enablement and disablement. They are deployed to signify positions of dominance and subjugation. The metropolis is taken to be the centre, the repertoire of knowledge systems and world views that command attention and deference while the margins, by their very definition, inhabit the periphery and often have a complex relationship with the metropolis, ranging from seeking sanction/ approval from it to questioning the very legitimacy of this unequal relationship. Metropolis is also an empowered urban space providing hubs for writers, publishers, literary journals, thus producing debates, introducing newness, and generating innovative trends that the margins witness with alternating attitudes of reverence and resistance and try to replicate or replace. With the forces of decolonisation moving apace the shifting axes of metropolis and margins created new configurations in which earlier paradigms and tools of canonization are challenged/revisited and new paradigms imagined and accommodated. This, by its very nature, remains a work in progress and attempts must be made periodically to assess the paradigms and examine their validity. The IACLALS annual conference 2023 will be an attempt to further the discourse in this direction.