Publication and issue: Journal of The Short Story in English (JSSE): “Defiance in 21st–century South African short stories”.
Deadline for proposal submission: 1 June 2026.
Issue theme / Volume presentation
The short story is the short fiction genre in which South African literature has most consistently excelled. It experienced a literary “renaissance” in transitioning from apartheid to a non-racial South Africa (MacKenzie 2010). However, while short stories of the early 1990s marked the hopeful vision of a ‘rainbow nation, ‘post-2000 short stories reflect increasing generic diversification and a range of aesthetic practices symptomatic of the thwarted promises of the country’s political transition (Sandwith 2022). This special issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE) will examine the 21st-century South African short story genre through the prism of defiance. How is defiance re-imagined in post-2000 South African writing? Is there a new poetics of defiance emerging in contemporary short stories? How do the shades of defiance, in form and substance, reflect and address the complexities of the country’s cultural, social and political realities?
Full CFP: https://journals.openedition.org/jsse/4636
Timeline
- Abstract submissions: 1 June 2026
- Notification of provisional acceptance : 1 July 2026
- Completed papers: 1 January 2027
- Publication in Autumn 2027
Website address
https://journals.openedition.org/jsse/4636
Contact details
DefianceJSSE2027@protonmail.com
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
Call for Papers JSSE_ “Defiance in 21st–century South African short stories”(Posted 28 May 2025)
Publication and issue: Lea – Quaderni di Lea. Transimperial Encounters: Networks of Cultural and Literary Exchange Between India and Europe, 1870-1947.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 8 June 2026.
Edited by Ujjwal Jana (University of Delhi) and Greta Perletti (University of Trento)
Publication presentation
This special issue of the journal LEA seeks to explore the transimperial intellectual, cultural, and political exchanges between India and Europe in the colonial period (1870-1947) by examining the complex, multidirectional flows of ideas, people, and cultural forms across imperial boundaries. While the notion of ‘transimperial encounters’ immediately evokes postcolonial theory and frameworks, the issue also intends to respond to the recent ‘global turn’ of Victorian studies, with scholars advocating for the need to “widen” (Banerjee, Fong and Michie 2021) or “undiscipline” the field (Chatterjee, Christoff and Wong 2020). The special issue Transimperial Encounters builds on such approaches by investigating how exchanges between the East and West – whether through travel, political activism, literary production, philosophical or religious discourse – reshaped anti-colonial thought, cultural movements, and intellectual traditions on both sides of the colonial divide.
The issue is especially interested to explore transimperial cultural movements like feminism, radicalism, vegetarianism etc. (Gandhi 2006; Selbin 2024), as well as transimperial literary genres like science fiction, spiritual autobiographies, realism etc. (Joshi 2002; Boehmer 2015; Gibson 2019). We welcome contributions from a range of disciplines, including literary studies, history, intellectual history, cultural studies, and transnational studies. In addition, we aim to bring together scholars working on different national and linguistic contexts to explore how anti-colonial and cultural networks functioned beyond the Anglo-Indian binary. We thus encourage also contributions that examine less-explored East/West connections (e.g., between India and Italy, France, Germany, etc.), as well as the role of multilingual and cross-cultural literary production.
We invite proposals that engage with, but are not limited to, the following themes: transimperial intellectual networks and literary genres; religious and philosophical exchanges; transimperial perspectives on feminism and the ‘New Woman’; Anti-colonialism and radical thought in India and the West; models of education and pedagogy across empires; theoretical perspectives on transimperialism.
Timeline
- Article ready for publication (no longer than 6,000-7,000 words in length) should be submitted by 8 June 2026
- Accepted articles (following double blind peer reviewing) will be published in February 2027.
Website addresses
Call for Papers – FUP Journals Transimperial Encounters – Call for Papers
Contact details
- Dr. Greta Perletti, greta.perletti@unitn.it
- Prof. Ujjwal Jana, ujana@english.du.ac.in
CFP
For further details, please check the publication original call inserted below.
(Posted )