GAPS conference 2026

Conference Programme

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Conference Warming

Registration

Conference Opening & Keynote: "Postcolonial Futures?"*

Conference Opening & Keynote: "Postcolonial Futures?"*

From its inception, the field of postcolonial studies has raised a series of doubts. Can the subaltern speak? Is postcolonialism a derivative discourse? Are mimicry and hybridity always already ambivalent? Such questions are so characteristic of the discipline that at times it has seemed too mired in paralytic self-reflection to effect meaningful change in the real world. Critics routinely denounce postcolonialism as apolitical, inactive, or confined to the realm of theory. On the other end of the spectrum, postcolonial studies is at the forefront of social movements that, especially in the United States, have become the target of the political right. From this perspective, postcolonialism is seen as too radical an agent of change, upending institutions and even seeking to dismantle Western civilization. At this moment of transition and transformation, as evolving forms of colonialism continue to proliferate, the questions that postcolonial studies raises, and the answers it seeks to generate, are as timely as ever. This talk will examine the possibilities and limitations of postcolonial studies within our current global environment. *Content note*

Coffee Break

The Voice from the Crate: Revenants and Return in Mati Diop’s Dahomey (2024)

Maria Menzel (LMU Munich, Germany)

Material Echoes: Loss, Inheritance, and More-than-human Memory in Irenosen Okojie’s Butterfly Fish (2015)

Isabel Jacobs (LMU Munich, Germany)

Storied Objects: Museums, Poetics, and Affect in Contemporary African and Asian British Poetry

Sarah Fekadu-Uthoff (LMU Munich, Germany)

Contested Transfers: Anglophone Middle Eastern Literature between Postcolonial Discourse and World Literature

Nuha Askar (Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany)

Nikkei Transformations: Notes on a Transpacific Figure

Alexander Rüter (University of Cologne, Germany)

Polycoloniality: Envisioning Plurality for a Second-Wave Postcolonialism

Gavin Herbertson (SWPS University, Poland, University of London, King’s College London, UK)

Narrating Womanhood: Life Writing, Violence, and National Identity in South Asia

Nidhi (Indian Institute of Technology Bhilai, India)

Translating Postcolonial Pasts into Postmigrant Presents: Identity Formation in Hafsa Zayyan’s We Are All Birds of Uganda (2019)

Ceydanur Temurok (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium)

Caste, Gender and the Dalit Diaspora: Reading The Past is Never Dead by Ujjal Dosanjh

Arunima Ray (Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi, India)

Migrating while African and Muslim in The Last Gift

Buhle Hlatshwayo (University of the Free State, South Africa)

Coloniality, Citizenship, and Islamophobia after 9/11: A Decolonial Reading of Aisha Abdel Gawad’s Between Two Moons

Robert Moyo (University of Pretoria, South Africa)

Transculturality as a Translational Process in Contemporary Postcolonial Novels

Nadia Butt (Goethe Universität Frankfurt, Germany)

Postcolonial Moroccan Literature as Counter-Narrative: Writing Back to Colonial Representations of the Moroccan Goumiers in Mohamed El Maâzouz’s Harb Al-goum

Sara Boulhaoua (Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdellah University, Morocco)

Affective Care in Vuong and Anzaldúa: From Borderlands to Gaps in Knowledge

Anna Busse (Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany)

The Corpse Still Burns: Cultural Memory in Vietnamese American Diaspora Narratives

Matthias Himstedt (Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany)

Lunch (catered)

Informal lunch with GAPS Didactics Representative Dr. Subin Nijhwan in Room 115

Disruptive Didactics: Reconfiguring Translation Theory through Experiential Translation Studies Teaching

Angela Kölling (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany)

“Colonialism 101 for Kids”: Postcolonial Knowledge Transfer and Decolonial Pedagogy in Selina Tusitala Marsh’s Mophead and Mophead Tu

Paloma Fresno-Calleja (University of the Balearic Islands, Spain)

Knowledge Transfers and Epistemic Resistance: Postcolonial Constraints on Indigenous Women’s Knowledge

Neha Tiwari (University of Delhi, India)

Postcolonial Transfers and Artificial Intelligence in Nnedi Okorafor’s “Mother of Invention” and Remote Control

Judith Simon (University of Pretoria, South Africa)

Postcolonial Transfers Beyond the Human: Subalternity and Multispecies Living in Cereus Blooms at Night

Shu-ching Chen (National Chung Hsing University Taichung, Taiwan)

Transforming ‘River’ into Bily and Bila: Indigenous Waterways as Agentive, Embodied Beings

Geoff Rodoreda (University of Stuttgart, Germany)

Filipina Diasporic Novels and the Dangers of White Saviorism

Marikit Tara Alto Uychoco (University of the Philippines, Philippines)

Apartheid as Exception-Template: Literary Form and Postcolonial Transfers*

Yulin Li (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)

     *Content note

Ethical Transfer: Nicholas Jose’s The Idealist, Australia and Timor-Leste

David Callahan (University of Aveiro, Portugal)

Stories Under Watch: Necropolitical Spectacle and the Alegropolitical Transfer of Memory in Kashmir

Sankha Maji (Raghunathpur College, India)

“Fifty-Fifty Species”: Linguistic Hybridity and Critical Irrealism in Postcolonial Anglo-Indian Literature

Krutika Patri (University of Bremen, Germany)

Subversive Multilingual Writing as a Form of Resistance in Assia Djebar’s Quartet

Hassan Ouhssata (Ibn Tofail University Kenitra, Morocco)

Between Honor and Jealousy: Affective and Social Transformations in Ibero-American Colonial Theatre*

Jenny Augustin (Osnabrück University, Germany)

     *Content note

‘Affective Witnessing’ and its Rhetorical Dimension in Francisco Núñez de Pineda‘s Cautiverio Feliz

Stephan Jan Siebert (Osnabrück University, Germany)

“Muse-born Orpheus bore Fair Arts and Virtues”: translatio imperii et studii and British Imperialism in Late Eighteenth-Century Poetry

Laura Schmitz-Justen (University of Münster, Germany)

Coffee Break

Parallel Panels 3 | Extended Panels

Four papers per panel

Postcolonial Transfer, Epistemic Disjuncture and (Mis)translation in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide

Antara Chatterjee (Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Bhopal, India)

Guruprasād Kāginele’s Hijab (2020): Disjunctures in Healthcare, Medical Coloniality, and Epistemic Violence

Manali Karmakar (VIT Chennai, India)

Biomedical Discourse, Embodied Experience, and Disruptive Language: A Critical Analysis of Jerry Pinto’s Em and the Big Hoom

Shobha Elizabeth John (IISER Bhopal, India)

Epistemic Transfers, Medico-Legal Coloniality, and Disjunctive Bodies: A Critical Enquiry into the Women’s Reproductive Rights in Postcolonial India

Swathi Mohan (VIT Chennai, India)

Oriental Tales and Early Genre Fiction: Fleeting Constructions of Türkiye in Penelope Aubin’s Novellas*

Roslyn Joy Irving (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany)

*Content note

Narrative Transference and Transformation in Bernadine Evaristo’s White Roots

Rachael Sumner (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany)

After Empire, Before Apocalypse: Arabic Dystopia as Postcolonial Genre Fiction

Ayman Almomani (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany)

Methods That Don’t Travel: Crime Fiction, Colonial Calcutta, and the Failure of Resolution

Suman Jha (University of Passau, Germany)

Gaps, Silences, and Discontinuities in the Narrative of the South African Transition: A Reading of Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story

Marek Pawlicki (University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland)

Forced Transfer of Children from Ukraine: Colonial Logics, Cultural Genocide, International Solidarity

Kerry Bystrom (Bard College Berlin, Germany)

From Reckoning to Restitution: Transforming History in Elif Shafak’s There Are Rivers in the Sky (2024) and Violet Kupersmith’s Build Your House Around My Body (2021)

Sofia Guimarães (University of Freiburg, Germany)

Maternal Memory and Postcolonial Reconciliation in Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand

Sushree Routray (Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India)

Passing Up Pushkin – Claude McKay and the Soviet Promise*

Fanny Wehner (EXC 2020 Temporal Communities, Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research Berlin, Germany)

*Content note

Friction in Relay Translation: Indo-Soviet Literary Transfers in Post-colonial Era (1950s-1960s)

Sampayan Chakraborty (Indian Institute of Technology Mandi, India)

The Literary Scholar as Thick Translator? On the (Un)Translatability of Culture-Specific Illness Models and their Negotiation in Literature*

Christina Slopek-Hauff (TU Dortmund University, Germany)

*Content note

Decolonizing the Swordfish: Postcolonial Transfer of Singaporean Folklore in Ng Yi-Sheng’s Lion City and Twisted Temasek

Eriko Ogihara-Schuck (TU Dortmund, Germany)

  • 18:00-18:30

Break

Evening Reading with Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

Evening Reading with Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

If you’d like to follow along as Jennifer reads, you can download the excerpts to your device by either scanning the QR codes situated at the Aula entrance and break area tables, or using the link on the website home page. There will also a few printed copies of the excerpts available at the venue.

    Download Reading Excerpts Here

    Reception

      Geoffrey Davis Memorial Lecture: “Non-Rational Factors in the Postcolonial (Post-Conflict) Quest for Flourishing”

      Geoffrey Davis Memorial Lecture: “Non-Rational Factors in the Postcolonial (Post-Conflict) Quest for Flourishing”

      Nelson Mandela inaugurated a new era of postcolonial social and political world-making whose theoretical significance we are only beginning to grasp. His government established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, making forgiveness a central instrument in the reconstruction of civic life after violence. Rather than treating reconciliation as merely a juridical or procedural matter, the Commission foregrounded moral gestures — confession, forgiveness, and acknowledgment — as indispensable to rebuilding a fractured political community. This paper examines the social significance of such gestures for the broader project of flourishing in postcolonial and post-conflict societies. Against the longstanding Western privileging of rational deliberation (logos) in the constitution of civil society, I argue that non-rational forces such as forgiveness, symbolic acts, and moral imagination are irreplaceable in repairing political relationships. These practices cultivate the affective and ethical conditions that make coexistence possible where law and procedural reason alone prove insufficient. By bringing postcolonial experience into dialogue with democratic theory, this paper demonstrates how moral-political gestures deepen our understanding of conflict resolution, shared civic life, and the pursuit of dignity and rights in multiracial democracies.

      Coffee Break

      The Invention of the Tea Frontier

      Priyam Goswami Choudhury (University of Potsdam, Germany)

      Epistemic Violence and Disjointed Environmental Knowledge in Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were (2021)

      Kata Gyuris (Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary)

      Reparative Ecologies: Environmental Justice and the Afterlives of Empire between Africa and Britain

      Linda Muloh Munki (University of Yaoundé I, Cameroon)

      Architectures of the Everyday: Postcolonial Palimpsestic Space, Autofiction, and Urban Solidarity in Amit Chaudhuri’s Friend of My Youth

      Cecile Sandten (Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany)

      Queering the Home: Intimate Spatial Solidarities in Babyji

      Rudrani D. Chaudhuri (Indian Institute of Technology Bhilai, India)

      Towards a Literary Cartography of Hope

      Anubhav Pradhan & Nidhi (Indian Institute of Technology Bhilai, India)

      The Death of Indigenous Languages: A Comparative Analysis of Ernesto Contreras’ I Dream in Another Language (2017) and Ángeles Cruz’s Nudo Mixteco (2021)

      Corina Wieser-Cox (University of Bremen, Germany)

      The Power and Politics of Language in Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries

      Andreia Sarabando (University of Aveiro, Portugal)

      Of Fractures and Faultlines: Nat Raha’s Dissolution of Language

      Jennifer Leetsch (University of Trier, Germany)

      The Question of Universality in Decolonial Theory and Hegel’s Philosophy

      Stanisław Bogdanowicz (University of Warsaw, Poland)

      Is It Possible to Avoid the Right-wing Appropriation of Postcolonial Critique?

      Claudia Snochowska-Gonzalez (Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland)

      Decoloniality in Central Eastern Europe after 2022

      Katarzyna Bielińska (University of Warsaw, Poland)

      Creolised Hauntings: Hybridity, Transformation and Caribbean Gothic Writing*

      Ronja D. Quast (University of Koblenz, Germany)

           *Content note

      Haunted by the Empire: Epistemological Rupture in His House (2020)

      Özge Kepenek (Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany)

      Transformations of Historical Memory in Chosen Short Stories of Salman Rushdie

      Wojciech Gruszkiewicz (University of Gdańsk, Poland)

      • 12:15 - 13:15

      Lunch (self-organized)

      Dis/Continuities of Transition in Postcolonial West African Petrofiction

      Sophie U. Kriegel (Free University of Berlin, Germany)

      *Content note

      Hope, Solidarity, and “Staying with the Trouble”: Negotiating Ecological Transformations through Translation in Writings from the Sundarbans

      Barsha Santra (Indian Institute of Technology Bhilai, India)

      Translating Disaster, Transforming Politics: Gandhi, Untouchability, and Hindutva in the Aftermath of an Earthquake

      Tirthankar Ghosh (Kazi Nazrul University, India)

      From Displacement to Inhabitation: Partition, Memory, and Urban Space in Victory Colony, 1950

      Chandrani Sanyal (Indian Institute of Technology Bhilai, India)

      Rekindling Fraternity through Heritage and History: Yom-e-Quli and Hyderabad

      C. Yamini Krishna (FLAME University, India)

      Railway Towns as Anglo-Indians’ Memoryscape of Belonging

      Sruthi Vinayan (Indian Institute of Technology Bhilai, India)

      Indian-Ocean Storytelling as Strategy of Postcolonial Cartography

      Katrin Althans (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany)

      From Colonial Occupation to Postcolonial Translation: Indian Ocean Transfers in the Work of Mirandi Riwoe

      Marijke Denger (University of Bern, Switzerland)

      Affective Crossings: Maternal Identity and Postcolonial Feminism in Morning Sea

      Yasaman Taheri (Durham University, UK)

      Transition(ing) in the Academy: Decolonising Trans/Gender Studies

      yashka Chavan (University of Münster, Germany)

      Impossible Transfers: Intimacy, Documentation, and Trans Precarity in Lingua Franca (2019)

      Yaren Demirdoğan (Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany)

      Transforming the Human: Ogbanje Ontology, Epistemic Ruptures and Pluriversality of Being in Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater (2018)

      Karolina Kmita (University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland)

      Transmissions That Falter: Intergenerational Cultural Transfer in 1990s Black British Domestic Fiction

      Esther Katharina Zitterl (University of St Andrews, UK)

      Exilic Families and Absent-Present Fathers: The Return as a Postcolonial Remediation of the Odyssey

      Merve Akçay (LMU Munich, Germany)

      The Frictions of Authenticity: De-essentialising and Re-affirming Authenticity in Transcendent Kingdom, The Island of Missing Trees, and Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens

      Tamara Dima Imboden (University of Basel, Switzerland)

      Coffee Break

      Members' Meeting

      Conference Dinner

      *If you would like to join the dinner, please ensure you have registered and paid the additional fee of €33,50.

      Diasporicising the Bildungsroman through British Chinese Takeaway Memoirs

      Judith Neder (TU Dresden, Germany)

      Food in Café Culture Speaks: Gastronomic Journey as Cultural Translation to Navigate Transition of the New Middle Class in Contemporary India

      Pritha Sarkar (School of Liberal Arts, XIM University, India)

      New Bales: Postcolonial Re-tailoring of “Mitumba” Second-hand Clothes in Eastern Africa

      Oduor Obura (Technical University of Kenya, Kenya)

      Indigenous Discursive Activism against Epistemic Erasure: Transmedia Storytelling as Theory-Practice Framework for Decolonial Transformation

      Martina Muci (University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy)

      Transatlantic Translations: Multilingual Provocations to the Cultural Memory of German Colonialism

      Rita Maricocchi (University of Münster, Germany)

      Between Languages and Memories: Multilingual Aesthetics and the Politics of Memory in Contemporary Black German Literature

      Satyam Kumar (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India)

      “Bless Our Blue Bodies”: Haunting as Transformation in Warsan Shire’s Poetry

      Charlie Geitlinger (University of Trier, Germany)

      Chronotopes of Madness and Trauma in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

      Deepanwita Dey (Indian Institute of Technology Bhilai, India)

      Testifying to the Magdalene Trauma of Tuam*

      Marine Berthiot (University of Galway, Ireland)

      *Content note

      Story, Memory, and Resistance: Cultural Narratives of the Indian Subaltern

      Akshay Kumar (Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), India)

      Bodies in Flux: Leprosy and Social Transformation in Samaresh Basu’s Shamba

      Srijanee Roy Chowdhury (University of Leeds, UK)

      Beyond Erasure: Storytelling as Postcolonial Transfer Across Death in Refaat Alareer’s Late Style Poem “If I Must Die”

      Asma Hussein (University of Jordan, Jordan)

      • 10:30 - 10:45
      • Schloss Osnabrück, Building 11, Neuer Graben 29, 49074 Osnabrück

      Short Coffee Break

      Poetry Performance: Trans Gaze (or) Prism Geometries
      • 10:45 - 11:15
      • Aadhi Avrina
      • Schloss Osnabrück, Building 11, Aula (Room E08), Neuer Graben 29, 49074 Osnabrück

      Poetry Performance: Trans Gaze (or) Prism Geometries

      At the edge of a dying forest, the traveller sees a face in the bark of a tree. / At the edge of a dying forest where time fractures, the traveller seeks a name. / At the edge of a dying forest where eyes are stars of midnight, the traveller is a lonely seed. / At the edge of a dying forest is a shattered glass beam, the traveller gathers light. / At the edge of a dying forest is a body without bones, the traveller slips on.  

        Keynote: "Beyond Anglophone Postcolonial Studies: Italian Theory, Third-Worldism and Postwar Decolonization"

        Keynote: "Beyond Anglophone Postcolonial Studies: Italian Theory, Third-Worldism and Postwar Decolonization"

        In this lecture, I discuss how a postcolonial approach to Italy, a nation marked both by a diasporic past and an instantly recognizable territorial shape, can open up discourses around its national identity to dialogues with the wider world. At the same time, I also ask whether there are certain strands of Italian thought that can make a specific contribution to make to a contemporary theory of global resistance. Can it act, in other words, as a postcolonial theory, if we understand such thinking as interested in making a radical political intervention on issues of global social justice through a historical awareness of colonialism’s enduring effects in the present? Or does Italian postcolonial theory suffer from the irremediable blind spot of its amnesia towards Italy’s colonial past? I argue it is important to move away from assuming that critiques of British imperialism are “applicable” to the Italian context, so as to avoid re-enacting forms of “cultural colonialism” within postcolonial scholarship itself, where a hierarchy of empires continues to subsist, dominated by research on Anglophone and Francophone writing. I look back to Italy’s own cultural past in order to uncover the anti-colonial genealogy of Italian radical thought, which goes back to Antonio Gramsci, and that finds its culmination in a specific moment of militancy: the 1960s. This period saw the emergence of new political movements on the left, which were in dialogue with Third-World movements of decolonization. This is an important moment of intellectual dialogue; and understanding how Italian intellectuals and writers responded to, and were influenced by, Third-Worldism can help us to identify a form of radical anti-colonial politics, and more historically informed methods of analysis grounded in the Italian experience. It can also serve to decolonize postcolonial studies and articulate its Anglophone bias more explicitly.

        • 12:30 - 13:00
        • Schloss Osnabrück, Building 11, Neuer Graben 29, 49074 Osnabrück

        Break

        • 13:00 - 14:00
        • Schloss Osnabrück, Building 11, Aula (Room E08), Neuer Graben 29, 49074 Osnabrück

        Award Ceremony

        Closing Remarks