Manifesto

I. We Begin from the Margins

Anusurja was founded on a simple, stubborn conviction: that rigorous intellectual and creative work produced in Bangladesh — and in the broader postcolonial world — deserves a publishing home of its own. Not a platform that translates our concerns into a language legible to foreign gatekeepers. A platform that takes those concerns on their own terms.

We do not measure our legitimacy by citation indices designed in the Global North. We do not chase impact factors that were never calibrated for our disciplines, our languages, or our epistemic traditions. We build our own record.

II. On the Unity of Knowledge and Imagination

We refuse the administrative separation between the academic and the literary, the scientific and the aesthetic, the archive and the poem. Anusurja publishes peer-reviewed scholarship alongside fiction, data humanities alongside film criticism — not as a compromise, but as a statement of epistemological principle.

A researcher studying the poetics of displacement and a novelist who has lived that displacement are in conversation with each other. Our platform is the room where that conversation happens.

III. Against Extraction, For Contribution

Too much of what passes for "global scholarship" on Bangladesh, South Asia, and the postcolonial world is produced by researchers who arrive, extract data or stories, and publish in journals that local scholars cannot access. Anusurja exists to interrupt this circuit.

We publish work about this part of the world, by scholars who are of it and in it. We make that work accessible — freely where we can, affordably where we must — to the very communities it describes.

IV. On Language

We publish in English and Bengali. We do not treat either language as more serious than the other. We acknowledge that language is a political choice — and we choose plurality.

V. Our Commitments

• To maintain editorial independence from state, corporate, and religious influence.
• To conduct peer review with integrity, transparency, and care for early-career scholars.
• To keep abstracts, summaries, and select full texts freely accessible to all readers.
• To pay contributors where we are financially able to do so — and to work toward that ability.
• To archive everything we publish, permanently and without condition.
• To be honest with our readers about our limitations, our funding, and our mistakes.

VI. An Invitation

This platform is not finished. It is, in the truest sense, a work in progress. We invite researchers, writers, filmmakers, translators, and readers to help us build what we are imagining. Send us your work. Tell us what we are missing. Hold us to the commitments above.

Inquiry at the edge. Always.