[CFP] “Shit Matters: The Politics and Poetics of Faecality in Anglophone Postcolonial and Decolonial Literatures and Arts”, Université de Lille, 29 et 30 avril 2027

International Conference

Organized by Cédric Courtois and Natacha Lasorak 

Confirmed Keynote Speaker: Pr. Stephanie Newell (Yale University)

Call for Papers

Anglophone postcolonial and decolonial literatures and arts are full of shit. This blunt statement extends John Eustace’s observation that “Rohinton Mistry’s fiction is full of shit” (2003, 26) beyond the Indian-born Canadian writer’s work, to consider the pervasive presence of excrement, in all kinds of textures and shapes in postcolonial and decolonial literatures and arts. Its critically overlooked presence has been referred to as “fecal blindness” by Annabel L. Kim (2022, 2) in her study of French literature. Sociologist David Inglis, likewise, speaks of “faecal invisibility” and “faecal censure” (2002, 215). Such blindness is striking given the ubiquity of shit in these cultural productions: in Kwei Quartey’s novel Children of the Street (2011), where the Accran protagonist encounters “the kind of human waste [he] definitely did not want his shoes to touch” (4); in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), where a Keralan river “smell[s] of shit and pesticide” (13); or in Mridula Koshy’s Bicycle Dreaming (2016), where a Delhiite Dalit latrine cleaner explains that the lowest members of the Dalits “were those who picked rubbish up from the shit-covered streets, from the shit-filled garbage piles around the city” (152).

In these literary works, shit emerges as abject matter, political metaphor, social stigma, and infrastructural problem, opening onto questions of embodiment, inequality, labour, and the politics of in/visibility. If colonial modernity sought to regulate bodies, spaces, and populations through regimes of hygiene, sanitation, and purity, faecality offers a privileged lens through which to examine the unstable boundaries upon which (post-)colonial power has depended. Inglis’s concept of “toiletry habitus” draws attention to the historically and culturally organised practices, technologies, dispositions, and social distinctions through which societies manage shit. As he puts it, “faecal matters are always inherently political in character” (2002, 207). The central paradox is that all bodies produce shit, yet not all of them are equally associated with it. Studying faecality therefore brings questions of race, caste, class, gender, sexuality, disability, labour, citizenship, and ecology – see Fabien Esculier’s call for an ecological reconsideration of excrement in Une autre histoire des excréments (2026), which echoes Dominique Laporte’s own History of Shit (1978/2002) – in conversation. It asks whose bodies are associated with shit, whose labour is required to manage this human waste, and whose exposure to it is rendered acceptable – see, for example, Stephanie Newell’s discussion of the shameful colonial Lagosian figure of the agbépóò, or night-soil man, popularised by the Nigerian singer Fela Kuti (Newell 2020, 125–127). 

These questions are particularly acute where sanitation is shaped by poverty, inadequate infrastructure, environmental injustice, and social inequality. In Tamil writer Salma’s short story “Toilets” (2005), for instance, the absence of safe sanitation turns the basic act of defecation into a site of vulnerability, surveillance, and sexual violence for women. In queer and disabled writer Abhishek Anicca’s memoir The Grammar of My Body (2023), his irreverent “An Ode to a Diaper” (27), as well as his reflections on “Diapers, Dating and Disappointment” (21), treat diapers not merely as signs of dependence or bodily failure but also brings the materiality of their content into view. Faecality thus becomes a way of challenging the ideal of the autonomous, self-sufficient body and of foregrounding forms of dependence that dominant regimes of dignity tend to make abject or invisible. In Rohinton Mistry’s short story “Squatter” (1987), the (in)ability to defecate becomes entangled with a migrant character’s sense of homelessness and (un)belonging. For caste-oppressed communities, meanwhile, sanitation labour exposes the enduring violence of purity/pollution regimes, while for queer subjects, faecality can expose the ways in which sexual and/or gender nonconformity is itself made abject: bodies and practices that disturb dominant norms may be figured as dirty, contaminating, excessive, or otherwise improper. 

Faecality also draws attention to the politics of naming and representation. From colonial descriptions of “dirty” territories to contemporary geopolitical rhetoric such as “shithole countries” (see Donald J. Trump about Haiti and African nations), faecal metaphors have helped naturalise hierarchies between populations and places. V. S. Naipaul’s depiction of India in An Area of Darkness (1964) offers a particularly stark example of the incomprehension and shock that practices of defecation can create for the onlooker: “Indians defecate everywhere. They defecate, mostly, beside the railway tracks. But they also defecate on the beaches; they defecate on the hills; they defecate on the river banks; they defecate on the streets; they never look for cover” (76). The quote, if taken out of its context (Naipaul’s own realisation that his initial perceptions as an outsider are insufficient to appreciate and understand India), might open the door to a racialising discourse, in which a historically and materially situated problem of sanitation is understood to be the inherent characteristic of an entire population. As Warwick Anderson (1995) argues in relation to the US and the Philippines at the beginning of the 20th century, shit can become a discursive weapon through which bodies and territories are marked as inferior, contaminated, or disposable. 

Shit, like dirt, is thus used as a marker through which the Occidental gaze creates and maintains power structures. According to Newell, dirt, that is, “matter that is no longer regarded as having economic, social, or productive value” (3), has long been a potent category in Eurocentric representations of Africa. The same can be said of the term “trash”, which Kenneth W. Harrow explains is “what one averts one’s gaze from, what repels and stinks, what is the last resort for people who have nothing” (2013, 170). We argue that excrements, “the waste produced by bodies” (Kim 2), have been used in a comparable way. To make dirt, trash – or shit in our case – a central object of study therefore risks reproducing the very oppositions – clean/dirty, civilised/backward – that colonial discourse established. Postcolonial and decolonial literatures and arts can instead expose the historical, political, and infrastructural conditions that produce experiences of human waste, while foregrounding the complexity and agency of the communities associated with it. 

Yet, shit is not only represented or politicised; it is also made into literature and art. If Haris Qadeer’s idea of “politicizing shit” (2025) brings to the fore the political work performed by faecal matter, Susan Signe Morrison’s concept of “fecopoetics” (2008) draws attention to its aesthetic and formal possibilities. Faecality can shape narrative form, imagery, voice, genre, tone, and modes of representation. Postcolonial and decolonial literatures and arts often transform shit from a sign of degradation into a language of critique and resistance. From Wole Soyinka’s excremental satire in The Interpreters (1965) – see Joshua D. Esty (1999) – to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s “shit-eaters” in Paradise (1994, 247), Lola Shoneyin’s mobilisation of constipation, diarrhoea, and bodily excess in The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives (2010), and representations of sanitation labour and untouchability in South Asian writing, shit becomes formally productive: generating disgust, humour, irony, satire, obscenity, and grotesque excess. This is maybe best exemplified in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), which “translates all the forms of corruption in [Kwame] Nkrumah’s Ghana into an unforgettable shit-stained handrail” (Harrow 2013, 24). Faecality is thus simultaneously material, symbolic, political and aesthetic. 

Bringing together scholarship on African, South Asian, Caribbean, Pacific, Indigenous, Irish, and diasporic literatures and arts, the conference seeks to investigate how shit functions simultaneously as material reality, political metaphor, and aesthetic form in fictional and non-fictional texts, poetry, drama, performance, music and songs, films and visual arts more generally. We are interested not only in representations of shit but also in the social relations, affects, infrastructures, labour regimes, embodied experiences, and epistemologies that cluster around it. 

We therefore invite papers that explore the political, aesthetic, philosophical, ecological, affective, and embodied dimensions of faecality in Anglophone postcolonial and decolonial literatures and arts. 

Possible topics include, but are not limited to: 

• Faecality as postcolonial and decolonial critique;
• Decolonial readings of colonial texts dealing with shit;
• Wole Soyinka’s “philosophy of shit” and excremental satire;
• Shit and the legacies of colonial hygiene;
• Caste, pollution, untouchability, and sanitation labour;
• Toilets, latrines, and architectures of exclusion;
• Gender, sanitation, and bodily vulnerability;
• Disability, dignity, and bodily waste;
• The grotesque body, the carnivalesque, abjection, and disgust;
• Constipation, diarrhoea, excess, and bodily unruliness;
• Sewage infrastructures and the politics of urban space;
• Waste economies, informal labour, and disposability;
• Environmental humanities and excrement;
• Toxic landscapes, contamination, pollution, and ecological degradation;
• Human/nonhuman boundaries and bodily waste;
• Excrement in migrant, refugee, prison, and border narratives;
• Representations and meanings of shit in postcolonial and decolonial cinema, visual arts, and songs/music;
• Faecality and decolonial aesthetics/aestheSis;
• Comparative approaches to faecality and excremental imaginaries across the Global South;
• …

Works Cited: 

Anicca, Abhishek. The Grammar of My Body. Penguin, 2023. 
Anderson, Warwick. “Excremental Colonialism: Public Health and the Poetics of Pollution.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 21, no. 3 (Spring 1995), 640–669. 
Armah, Ayi Kwei. 1968. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Heinemann African Writers Series, 1969. 
Esculier, Fabien. Une autre histoire des excréments. Actes Sud, 2026. 
Esty, Joshua D. “Excremental Postcolonialism.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 40, no. 1 (Spring 1999), 22–59. 
Eustace, John. “Deregulating the Evacuated Body: Rohinton Mistry’s ‘Squatter’.” Studies in Canadian Literature, vol. 28, no. 1 (Spring 2003), 26–42. 
Gurnah, Abdulrazak. 1994. Paradise. Bloomsbury, 2004. 
Harrow, Kenneth W. Trash: African Cinema from Below. Indiana University Press, 2013. 
Inglis, David. “Dirt and Denigration: The Faecal Imagery and Rhetorics of Abuse.” Postcolonial Studies, vol. 5, no. 2 (2002), 207–221. 
Kim, Annabel L. Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature. University of Minnesota Press, 2022. 
Koshy, Mridula. Bicycle Dreaming. Zubaan, 2016. 
Laporte, Dominique. History of Shit. Trans. Nadia Benabid and Rodolphe El-Khoury. MIT Press, 2002. Originally published as Histoire de la merde : prologue (Paris : C. Bourgois, 1978). 
Mistry, Rohinton. “Squatter.” Tales from Firozsha Baag. Faber and Faber, 1987. 
Morrison, Susan Signe. Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 
Naipaul, V. S . 1964. An Area of Darkness. Penguin, 1968. 
Newell, Stephanie. Histories of Dirt: Media and Urban Life in Colonial and Postcolonial Lagos. Duke University Press, 2020. 
Qadeer, Haris. “Politicizing Shit: Everyday Spaces, Abject Bodies, and Disgust in Salma’s ‘Toilets’.” South Asian Review (2025), 1–17. 
Quartey, Kwei. Children of the Street. Random House, 2011. 
Roy, Arundhati. 1997. The God of Small Things. Fourth Estate, 2009. 
Salma. “Toilets.” The Curse: Stories. Trans. N Kalyan Raman. Speaking Tiger, 2020. 
Shoneyin, Lola. The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives. Serpent’s Tail, 2010. 
Soyinka, Wole. 1965. The Interpreters. Heinemann, 1985. 

Please send abstracts (Word document) of 250–300 words, together with a short biographical note (150 words maximum), to Cédric Courtois (Université de Lille, CECILLE) – cedric.courtois@univ-lille.fr – and Natacha Lasorak (Nantes Université, CRINI/HCTI) – natacha.lasorak@univ-nantes.fr by 30 November, 2026.

The conference will take place at the University of Lille, 29–30 April 2027 (in-person only); 
Conference fee: PhD students and non-tenured scholars (20€); tenured scholars (30€); 
Catering will be provided for both lunches and one dinner; participants will be responsible for their own travel and accommodation costs. 

Scientific Committee: 

• Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding (Université Paris-Cité); 
• Vanessa Guignery (ENS de Lyon); 
• Mélanie Joseph-Vilain (Université Bourgogne-Europe); 
• Florence Labaune-Demeule (Université Jean-Moulin, Lyon 3); 
• Christine Lorre (Université de Caen Normandie); 
• Fiona McCann (Sorbonne Université); 
• Judith Misrahi-Barak (Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry); 
• Laura Singeot (Université de Tours); 
• Kerry-Jane Wallart (Université d’Orléans). 

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