CALL FOR PAPERS:
Literatures of the Global South: Space, Place, Environment
University of Toronto
2nd – 4 th June 2027
Keynote: Ato Quayson (Stanford University)
The Centre for Comparative Literature invites submissions for a scholarly conference and
edited collection that will explore the material and imaginative alignments across literary
cultures of the Global South.
We welcome projects that capture how the Global South manifests across space and time.
How does literature figure cross-regional collectivity and toward what ends? We ask that
scholars consider how authors and texts entangle distant places, scales, and
environments in crisis. We are especially interested in papers that expand our notion of the
Global South, such as by centring the pre-modern or prioritizing South-South dialogues
across unexpected geographies.
We offer three complementary concepts for reading the Global South. Following Doreen
Massey, we wish to stress how space—even at its most intimate scales—looks “outward.”
One may thus consider how minor spaces such as the home, field, or street index
complicated material ties across regions. By place, we gesture to definite geographies and
their relations with each other. How does a shared experience of neocolonialism shape
literary productions across the Middle East and Latin America? What does it mean to see a
metropolitan city such as London or Toronto as “southern” by stressing the constitutive role
played by working-class, immigrant labor? Our gesture to environment situates affiliation
with the Global South as a response to the commodification and consequent destruction
of nature. How do characters perceive environmental collapse, and how might the latter
inspire new forms of thinking the self and its belonging to a greater collectivity?
We welcome papers that thread multiple regions while speaking to one or more of the
following themes:
- New imaginations of place and collectivity
- Translation, circulation, and exchange
- Mobility of objects, ideas, and individuals
- Anti-/post-/neo-/colonialism
- Global capitalist modernities
- Ecocriticism and global environmental collapse
To apply, please submit a 250-word abstract to globalsouthtoronto@gmail.com by 31st
August 2026. Ensure your abstract includes your name, email, position, and institutional
affiliation.
The conference will be held in person at the University of Toronto.
We regret that travel funding is not available.
