On February 7–8, 2025, the International Research Network on Postcolonial Print Cultures (IRNPPC) held its annual international conference in Kolkata, titled “Anticolonial/Decolonial Text and Print in the Cold War Era: Lives and Afterlives.” Hosted by IRNPPC’s partner institutions—Jadavpur University and the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC)—the conference was supported by the CNRS (France), the University of Chicago Provost’s Global Faculty Award won by Professor Josephine McDonagh, and the Nicholson Center for British Studies at the University of Chicago.
The conference opened with a special event on February 6 at the Jadunath Bhavan Museum and Research Center (JBMRC), where Laetitia Zecchini moderated a thought-provoking conversation between acclaimed writers Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Amit Chaudhuri, titled “Living Through and After the Cold War.” Over two days, six panels featured 15 papers presented by scholars from India, the US, Canada, the UK, and France. Discussions explored the role of print in anti-colonial resistance, decolonization movements, Cold War alignments, feminist and student uprisings, and the production of activist literature. Topics ranged from socialist print cultures in 1960s India to Soviet picture books for children, and from Bengali little magazines to Cold War-era media in Latin America and the Middle East.
The conference served as a vibrant platform to interrogate the legacies of print, translation, and cultural production across global postcolonial and Cold War histories.
