Crisis and Body Politics in Twenty-First Century Cultural Production: Territorial Bodies

The twenty-first century has been deemed the ＂Age of Crisis＂. We are witnessing the catastrophic unfolding of environmental crisis, financial crisis, pandemic and conflict. But are we to understand these crises as new phenomena? Is their seemingly simultaneous existence purely coincidental? Or rather do they instead form part of a singular, historically produced, unfolding crisis, which only today has reached a generalised consciousness? And perhaps most urgently, how far can we separate the crises of human experience from those exacted upon the land?

The chapters collected in Crisis and Body Politics in Twenty-First Century Cultural Production: Territorial Bodies deploy the framework of ＂Territorial Bodies＂ to address urgent social, ecological and political challenges. Examining themes such as (inter)national bodily governance, racialised bodies, eco-feminist movements, spatial justice and bodily displacement, this collection provides a deeper analysis of the interconnected forms of violence perpetrated against marginalised human and non-human bodies, taking this combined violence as the defining feature of contemporary crisis.

Charlotte Spear is a PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Her thesis is titled ＂Locating the Human: World Literature and the Concept of Rights＂ and explores the role of literature in rethinking dominant human rights frameworks. She has published on the notion of the ＂state of emergency＂ in Modern Language Review, on refugee-migrant fiction in Journal of Postcolonial Writing and postcolonial humanitarian intervention with De Gruyter and on sex workers’ rights in debt economies in The Journal of World-Systems Research.

Madeleine Sinclair is a Comparative Literature PhD candidate and an Early Career Teaching Fellow in the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning, at University of Warwick, UK. Entitled ＂World-Literature, Neoliberalism and the Politics of the Twenty-First Century Short Story-Cycle＂, her Wolfson-Foundation funded PhD thesis foregrounded the short story as a distinctive genre in world-literature by examining the interconnections between aesthetics and politics in contemporary short fictional forms. Her work is published, or forthcoming, in Literature Compass, Journal of World-Systems Research, Journal of Short Fiction in Theoryand Practice, and BRILL. She is editor of a special issue on ＂Short Fiction: Landscape and Temporality＂, forthcoming with the Journal of Short Fiction in Theoryand Practice.