WRITING FROM THE MARGINS: POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION

In a world which is continually getting pushed to the margins by the rise of the neo-liberal policies and the far right in politics, it is but timely to engage in a discussion on the issues of marginality. The Department of English, along with the Department of Bengali, Panchla Mahavidyalaya, in association with the IQAC of the college and the IQAC of Puras Kanpur Haridas Nandi Mahavidyalaya, organized an Online International Seminar on “Of Centres and Margins: Origin, Issues and Conflicts” 25^th to 27^th June, 2021. The seminar was conducted right in the middle of the second wave of the Covid pandemic, thereby situating itself in a context of unprecedented marginality of humanity that we have not encountered in the past century, or more. The question of marginality was discussed from various parameters – race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, language and the refugee crisis plaguing the 21^st century global scenario. The seminar had stalwart speakers from the across the globe, including Dr. Chandrani Biswas (Associate Professor in the Department of English, St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata), Dr. Kalyan Sekhar Chakraborty (Research Fellow at the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Research on Archaeological Ceramics, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada), Dr. Shinjini Bandyopadhyay (Associate Professor in the Department of English, University of Calcutta), Dr. Ritam Mukherjee (Assistant Professor in Bengali, Presidency University, Kolkata), Prof. Amechi Akwanya (Professor of English and Literary Studies, University of Nigeria), Prof. Ayila Orkusa (Professor in the Department of English and Modern Letters, University of Ngaoundere, Cameroon), Prof. Kevin Potter (University Assistant and Doctoral Candidate in the Department of English and American Studies, University of Vienna) and Prof. Ernest Emenyonu (Professor Emeritus of Africana Studies, University of Michigan). This book contains the selected papers presented during the seminar, and hopefully the readers will find the articles intellectually and academically useful. Hopefully, the book will start a critical engagement with various issues related to the politics of marginality.