Fractured Narratives and Pandemic Identities
COVID-19, the (Post)Apocalyptic, the Dystopic, and the Postcolonial
- 138 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Fractured Narratives and Pandemic Identities
COVID-19, the (Post)Apocalyptic, the Dystopic, and the Postcolonial
About this book
The book considers how identities have become more fractured since COVID-19, by thinking of COVID-19 in relation to other crises (economic, social, digital, and ecological) and by drawing parallels to literature, cinema, and visual art.
COVID-19 was a type of apocalypse, a catastrophic destructive event that produced dystopian measures in its wake and drew uncanny parallels to dystopic works of literature and speculative fiction. Yet the pandemic was apocalyptic in another sense too. The word apocalypse derives from apokalupsis, which means disclosure or uncovering. In this way, COVID-19 also revealed the dystopian processes already at work in the world, including digital forms of surveillance as well as the asymmetries within populations and divides in health outcomes between the Global North and Global South. Indeed, societies that have experienced the horrors of settler colonialism have already survived apocalypses. COVID-19 serves then as a premonition for our climate emergency as well as an echo of other apocalyptic situations, both real and imagined. This book consists of essays from acclaimed theorists and scholars writing amid the pandemic and exposes the asymmetries of our divided world. The volume will be indispensable for scholars and researchers of literature, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and comparative literature including post-apocalyptic and speculative fiction.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing and are accompanied by a new afterword.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half Title
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- Citation Information
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction – Living in dystopia: Fractured identities and COVID-19
- 1 Pandemic: Invisibility and silence
- 2 Thinking the delirious pandemic governance by numbers with Samit Basu’s Chosen Spirits and Prayaag Akbar’s Leila
- 3 Infection rebellion in Bina Shah’s Before She Sleeps
- 4 The Adivasi and the undead: From (post)colonial carnage to Necrocene apocalypse in Betaal (2020)
- 5 Septopia and the wastialized Other: Allegorizing neo-liberalism in the age of COVID-19
- 6 Fragmentations, phantom limbs, re-memberings: Negotiating bodies, representation, and subjectivity in Caribbean British writing
- 7 Flattening the curse: Cooling down with Zadie Smith’s Intimations
- 8 The art of COVID-19
- Afterword – COVID-19 and the other virus
- Index