Current Conference

In postcolonial discourse, the past is frequently resurrected archaeologically, politically, and poetically. Reappropriating or rediscovering cultural practices, recovering texts and histories previously ignored, repressed or erased by hegemonic powers is crucial to how futures are imagined and contested. The origins of such unearthing may be literal as physical archives and artifacts are accessed or reassessed, but it is also symbolic, aesthetic and epistemic, taking place through narratives and in the cultural memory. Literary unearthings may also prompt more engagement with the past, challenging the epistemic rules of an archive through the archaeology of the dominant discourse (Foucault, 1982). Dormancy or failures of and obstacles to such an endeavour may manifest in images and embodiments of incomplete resurrection.

This conference will explore the entanglements of corporeal and mnemonic return of bodies and histories that refuse to remain buried. Figures of the undead, such as zombies, vampires, ghosts, revenants, and other liminal beings, often register colonial violence, dispossession, disrupted temporalities of death and survival, and the afterlives of imperial rule. They can showcase agency, systemic exploitation or social death understood not merely as metaphor, but as a lived condition. Likewise, memories reemerge in forms that are resistant to closure: as decolonial practices, testimonies, spectral inheritances or unresolved demands for justice. The social and institutional organization of memory, as well as its affective economies, shape what can be reimagined and sustained about imperial rule. Testimony can be barred from cultural space and rendered inaudible by epistemic and affective injustice (Fricker, 2007; Srinivasan, 2018), diminishing the perceived significance of colonial subjugation long after it has officially ended. Narratives of decolonization may then turn to the images of unearthing, revenants and spectrality to showcase mnemonic resurrection and transformation.

We are especially interested in how colonial and imperial powers have systematically appropriated, erased and silenced colonized subjects through practices of othering, images of monstrosity, and epistemic violence, how such impositions may have been internalized, and how resistance manifests in cultural narratives. Moving beyond material theft, the conference asks how struggles over restitution, memory and historical authority may still shape postcolonial societies and cultural production today.

We welcome contributions across fields and disciplines, and especially encourage applications from literary, cultural, film and memory studies. Although the conference foregrounds Anglophone contexts, we strongly encourage papers that broaden the geographical frame and the application of postcolonial terminology.

We welcome papers on (but not limited to) the following topics:

1. Practices and manifestations of exclusion: monstrosity, liminal bodies, social death and silence. How are necropolitical existences negotiating with survival and resurrection? What is “social death” in colonial and postcolonial contexts? How does alienation persist beyond formal colonialism? How do silences function as historical evidence? How does narrative authority structure it?
2. Languages of resurrection: the afterlife of memory (distortion). How do postcolonial narratives approach colonial memory and its lingering presence? In more literal terms, how do they subversively employ (step-)mother tongues and develop decolonial practices? What is reclamation and reappropriation with regard to heritage if it necessitates transformation? How do memories left unacknowledged ferment over time and what does their resurrection look like?
3. Non-Western ontologies of death and epistemic violence. How do other non-Western, non-binary understandings of death negotiate with narratives of power? What is the political cost of misrecognizing these ontologies? How do colonial practices contribute to forms of death of knowledge? How is knowledge killed or resurrected? How does colonialism disrupt death rituals?
4. Disrupted temporalities. How does belatedness, recurrence, return, and non-linear histories interact with the post-life of post-colonial subjects? How do narratives configure unresolved loss and reparative memory? How does memory and time interact to configure decolonial futurisms and the politics of imagining? What does it mean to “work through” the past when the past is not past?
5. Draining emotions and affective economy. What terms are available to think about mnemonic archives and affective injustice? Has the right to mourn been upheld? How can we think about “cold-blooded” colonial subjects, loss of vitality, resources, and emotions as opposed to affective reclamation.

The conference is organized by members of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and will take place on September 16-17 2026 at LMU Munich, Schellingstrasse 3.

Submission guidelines and details:

Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words and bios of no more than 100 words to postcolonialnarrations@g-a-p-s.net by the end of the day on June 1^st 2026.

Submissions from early-career researchers are especially encouraged.

List of sources:

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

Charlier, Philippe. Zombies an Anthropological Investigation of the Living Dead. University Press of Florida, 2017.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, editor. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Erll, Astrid, and Ann Rigney, editors. Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009.

Foucault, Michel. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France; 1974–1975. Picador, 2003.

Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Vintage Books, 1982.

Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press, 2007.

Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser. University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Mbembe, Achille. “Life, Sovereignty, and Terror in the Fiction of Amos Tutuola.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 34, no. 4, 2003, pp. 1–26. Translated by R. H. Mitsch.

McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death. Harvard University Press, 1982.

Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage Books, 1994.

Srinivasan, Amia. “The Aptness of Anger,” Journal of Political Philosophy, vol. 26, no. 2, 2018, pp. 123–144.