The International Society for Folk Narrative Research is conducting the online lecture series entitled Voices from Around the Globe, which are open not only to our global network of international folk narrative scholars, but also to the general public. Initiated by the former President of the ISFNR professor Sadhana Naithani, the series was launched on April 15, 2022 and since then, the lectures take place online at 5 pm CET, on the third Wednesday of every alternate month. The series is coordinated by a member of the Executive Committee of the Society. For each lecture, the respective Vice Presidents of the ISFNR in turn invite speakers from Europe, North and South Americas, Asia, and Africa to present their research. The lectures are given in English. After the event, the prerecorded lectures are made available on the ISFNR website.
The ISFNR members and other researchers are cordially invited to join us in this exploration of various cultural phenomena – local and global, old and contemporary, stable and changeable. Folk narrative scholars continue to record, map and communicate how people are navigating their cultural practices and values through turbulent and peaceful times and through the palimpsestic layers of history, which have witnessed the rhizomatic growth of narratives. Indeed, in our own time, it is relevant to ask whether folk narrative still has the means to grasp the truth of a post-truth world.
Detailed information and links to the forthcoming lectures are announced on the ISFNR website and Facebook, and emailed to all members of the ISFNR. For more information, please contact Lina Būgienė (bugiene.lina@gmail.com).
Next lecture
Malay Bera
Queering Rupkatha: Tracing Queerness in Fairy Tales from 19-20th Century Bengal to Contemporary India
February 19, 2025. at 5 p.m. CET
Speaker’s Biography:
Malay Bera is a Doctoral Candidate in English at Ashoka University, India where he is writing his dissertation on gender and nationalism in Bengali fairy tales. He holds a BA (Honours) in English, and an MA in Linguistics. He also studied Comparative Folkloristics as a Dora Plus Visiting Doctoral Fellow at the University of Tartu, Estonia. His research centres on fairy tales and belief narratives. His articles have appeared in Cultural Analysis and The Literary Encyclopedia, and his forthcoming works will be featured in Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore, Indigenous Religious Traditions, and several scholarly edited volumes. Beyond academia, he has also collaborated with TED-Ed as an educator to create animated contents based on Bengali fairy tales, which are set to be released soon as part of TED-Ed’s ongoing folklore and mythology series.
Abstract:
Is there a place for queerness in Indian fairy tales? This lecture will explore the tropes of queerness in late 19th and early 20th century Bengali rupkatha (fairy tales) alongside contemporary Indian queer fairy tales to trace how depictions of queerness in Indian fairy tales have evolved over time. While 19-20th century Bengali rupkathas do not offer explicitly queer resolutions, they contain queer possibilities in transgressive elements (e.g., non-normative relationships, gender fluidity, and queer desire) that challenge heteronormative social structures. Although the majority of these tales portray queerness as deviance from the norm which warrants punishment, some also employ queerness as an enabling tool for subverting heteronormative expectations with complex, liminal, queer characters. In contrast to 19-20th century rupkathas which require interpretative queering of the tales to uncover their latent elements of queerness, contemporary Indian queer fairy tales, however, explicitly feature queer characters and resolutions. Furthermore, with their subversion of the fairy-tale formula with magical realist tropes, and the queer treatment of the concept of “reproductive future” in traditional fairy tales, these modern tales queer the genre of fairy tale itself, indicating a shift in how fairy tale as a narrative category is understood and reimagined by the queer folk in contemporary India.