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Emergence of New World Imagination in the 19th and 20th Century: Understanding of the Global Colonial Countries through the Lens of Auto-Biographical Narratives, Memoirs And Travelogues (ACLA 2025)

Beginning
29.05.2025
End
01.06.2025
Abstract submission deadline
14.10.2024

It is intriguing to examine how the documents from and about the global colonial countries written during the 19th and 20th century describe the extremely unstable social and political environments. With this an emergence of a new world order as well as a new world imagination can be seen. These narratives provide a vivid account of both the topographical details and the human and governmental enterprises that contributed to the national progress. The auto biographical narratives, the memoirs, and the travelogues document the transformative experiences of the narrators and their intentions to transfer such experiences as the colonised subjects from different stratum of the society and different communities. This transformative experiences and the potential of its people and the society that underwent numerous reform struggles and anti-imperialist movements. are documented in the aformentioned genres by acknowledging the civilizationally connected colonial nation-states which are divided by often newly designed borders. The ways in which the writers come to terms with their new cultural and linguistic experiences and use these newly acquired perspectives to understand the countries they are traveling and writing about often create a new discourse, providing the readers with a comparative perspective on the formation of new colonial nation-states who are involved in anti-imperialist movements at several unique levels. In the travel narratives, memoirs, auto-biographical documents human interactions go beyond the typical stereotypes, breaking the boundaries between political propaganda and elements of curiosity and hospitality. The narratives reveal how personal memory can be merged with the collective memory to conform to the political ideology. Emerging with the development of print culture and several other literary genres, such as novels and short stories, the autobiographical narratives and travelogues become a point of intersection of elements from various other genres. With the shifting geographical, political, and social orders, conceptualizations of both the self and the others changed as well. The colonial spaces with their anti-imperialist struggle and colonial trauma often produced a dynamic literary space for travelers, documenters and narrators from across different social and political spectrum to give life to their experiences. In the personal narratives the readers can find a deconstruction of the mythical stereotypes. The evaluation of the connections between the personal and the collective memories became an important means to substantiate the readers‘ knowledge about the pre-colonial past and their understanding of the present. An autobiographical narrative, memoir or travelogue, holding a space between fiction and history, document history as lived experience and with an understanding of new places, people, and milieus, where the narrators share their personal and empirical space with a larger group of readers, enabling them to

Source of description: Information from the provider

Fields of research

Postcolonial studies, autobiography, travel literature, Literature of the 19th century, Literature of the 20th century

Links

Institutions

American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA)

Relations

Institutions

American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA)
Date of publication: 13.09.2024
Last edited: 13.09.2024