Travelling Knowledge: Global Epistemologies and the Political Novel in Europe
If we ignore what other people are thinking, or have thought in the past, then rational discussion must come to an end, though each of us may go on happily talking to himself (Karl Popper, cited in Jonathan O. Chimakonam: African Philosophy and Global Epistemic Injustice)
Many scholars have noted what Chimakonam calls the “exclusions and lopsidedness in global epistemic discourses” that privilege Western European and white North American traditions of thought. Significant gaps in knowledge ensue. Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr describes how “dominantly situated knowers refuse to acknowledge epistemic tools developed from the experienced world of those situated marginally.” That refusal has a strategic function, permitting “dominantly situated knowers to misunderstand, misinterpret, and/or ignore whole parts of the world.” In a Eurocentric arena of knowledge, knowers are too often, in Pohlhaus’s words, “captivated by a distorted picture of the world.” Within Europe and globally, epistemic authority is further inflected by geography, class, gender, and many other factors.
The third CAPONEU consortium conference explores perspectives on how cultural and geopolitical knowledge travels in the political novel. Our approaches take in but also go beyond Western European and North American epistemologies; intersectional approaches; and/or explorations of novels as political in the sense that they have an epistemologically transformative impetus. If knowledge can travel across class barriers, time, space, and communities, how might political fiction be its vehicle? In the European context, how can we better apprehend travelling knowledge, and the political impetus and potential it brings with it?
Keynote speakers
- Day 1: Shambhavi Prakash
- Day 2: James Ogone
- Day 3: Divya Dwivedi
- Day 4: B. Venkat Mani
Programm
All times are given in GMT+1.
Monday, 15 Sep 2025
Alternative Epistemologies and the Political Novel
9.55
Welcome
10.00
Keynote
- Shambhavi Prakash (Jawaharlal Nehru University): “Schichten statt Geschichten” (Layers instead of Stories): Alternative Epistemologies in Hubert Fichte’s Petersilie (Parsley)
11.00
Alternative Epistemologies Panel 1: Resistant Knowledge
- Joanna Kellond (University of Brighton): Gender Politics and Subjugated Knowledge in Tlotlo Tsamaase’s Womb City
- Sarah Colvin (University of Cambridge): Animapoetics: Stories in the Face of Death
13.00
Alternative Epistemologies Panel 2: Ex-centric Knowledge on the Move
- Błażej Warkocki (Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań): Queer Discourse and Theory in Poland – Travelling Knowledge on the (Semi)Peripheries
- Charlotte Woodford (University of Cambridge): Ethnographic Fictions? Travelling Stories and Narrative Voice
Tuesday, 16 Sep 2025
Entangled Knowledges and the Political Novel
10.00
Keynote
- James Ogone (Jaramogi Oginga Odinga University): Epistemologies on Safari: Mobilities, Contestations, and Politics of Global North-South Knowledge Entanglements
11.00
Entangled Knowledges Panel 1: Translation Politics
- Tara Talwar Windsor (University of Cambridge): Between Recognition and Resistance: Literary Festivals and Prizes in Contemporary Germany
- Niki Sioki (University of Nicosia): Publishing the Political Novel: The Role of Material Form and Typographic Design in the Circulation of Translated Literature
13.00
Entangled Knowledges Panel 2: Knowledge across Borders
- Aurore Peyroles (ZfL): Imparting Knowledge: The Ambiguities of the Class Mobility Narrative
- Florentia Antoniou (University of Nicosia): Bildungsroman Novels from the European Periphery: Marangou’s From Famagusta to Vienna and Savičević’s Farewell, Cowboy
Wednesday, 17 Sep 2025
Decolonial Epistemologies and the Political Novel
10.00
Keynote
- Divya Dwivedi (Indian Institute of Technology): The Anti-decolonial Anti-caste Vision of O. V. Vijayan’s Dharmapuranam
11.00
Decolonial Epistemologies Panel 1: Other Voices
- Shuangzhi Li (Fudan University): From Daoism to Pseudo-Christianism: How German Novels Tell Stories of Chinese Rebellions
- Branimir Janković (University of Zagreb): One Knowledge, Different Uses: André Gide’s Travels in the Congo in the Two Yugoslavias
13.00
Decolonial Epistemologies Panel 2
- Chalo Waya (University of Cambridge): Negotiating Imbricated Positionalities: Critical Afropolitanism as Epistemic Self-assertion in Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s Esse Cabelo
- Mark Devenney (University of Brighton): Ghosts of the Political Novel: Decolonial Haunting in the Languages of Empire
Thursday, 18 Sep 2025
The Global Political Novel
10.00
Keynote
- B. Venkat Mani (University of Wisconsin-Madison): The Global Novel in an Age of Refugees
11.00
The Global Political Novel Panel 1: Reading for the Future
- Eric Bergman & Mirela Dakić (University of Zagreb): Departures of (Reading) the Political Novel in Post-Yugoslav Literature
- Tomasz Mizerkiewicz (Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań): Political Novels and Travelling Knowledge of Saving a Democratic Future in “Strange Times”
13.00
Book launch
- Ivana Perica (ZfL): Politics, Literature and Tertium Datur: Socialist Central Europe, 1928–1968 (Bloomsbury 2025)
- Aurore Peyroles (ZfL): Voyages au bout de la banlieue (De Gruyter 2025)
- others tba