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Call for Papers

Calls for Papers: Upcoming Special Issues

(Post-)Migration and the Poetics of Affect in Fiction

Guest Editor: Birgit Neumann (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf)

The special issue is committed to exploring how works of fiction register and configure affects in response to different forms of migration and (post-)migration. As both intimate and impersonal sensations, affects inscribe bodies into the social world of encounter (Seigworth and Gregg). While encounters with the social world are always unpredictable and messy, in the context of (post-)migration they typically unfold under conditions of dependency, precarity, and hierarchical relations. Experiences of displacement, the ambivalences of belonging and nonbelonging, the vulnerabilities arising from racist experiences, and the anxieties linked to both assimilationist demands and repatriation policies exert affective pressures that migrants must navigate and process (Piocos). In fact, many affective patterns that emerge from experiences of migration and (post-)migration are highly ambiguous, raising substantial ethical questions about the forceful undercurrents, obstinacies, and even refusals shaping contemporary societies. Affects sustain relationality but also interrupt it. Approaching migration and (post-)migration from the perspective of affect—the embodied and somatic—therefore provides an opportunity to bring into view the affective demands and tensions that enable and constrain possibilities of social collectivity today.

The special issue foregrounds the productive role of narrative fiction in modeling and generating affects that are capable of intervening critically in dominant affective economies and opening up new modes of expressivity and forms of sociality. Texts by writers such as Abdulrazak Gurnah, Zadie Smith, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Teju Cole, Dinaw Mengestu, Ocean Vuong, Boubacar Boris Diop, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Valeria Luiselli, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Namwali Serpell, Bernardine Evaristo, and many more use the space of fiction to explore the affective labor that experiences of (post-)migration involve.

By examining the poetics of affect in relation to (post-)migration, the special issue seeks to initiate a conversation about the literary language, forms, grammars, and styles that both register and transform the forces binding some bodies together while keeping others apart. Which affects and affective patterns arise out of migration and (post-)migration and how are they turned into something literary? How is the intersection between affect and race modeled in fiction and how does the articulation of affects navigate sociopolitical pressures and ideologies? What are the political stakes of detachment from hegemonic structures of feeling—and does detachment open up pathways toward liberation and transformation (Yao)? And which affective promises operate as technologies of cultural integration, binding migrants to hegemonic norms (Ahmed)? Finally, how is the engagement with affect and (post-)migration in fiction shaped by the demands and expectations of the contemporary, hyper-commercialized, and Anglocentric book market? While the distinction between affect and emotion has been widely debated in recent scholarship, the issue adopts a broad understanding of affects as physical forces that underpin, accompany, and complicate codified emotions, opening subjects to the pressures of the social.

We invite contributions that focus on the forms and affordances of fiction to foreground the unexpected, inconvenient, and seemingly minor affects that both emerge from and shape experiences of migration and (post-)migration.

Please submit an abstract of 250 words by December 2026 to Birgit.Neumann@hhu.de; full essays of 6000–9000 words are due by June 2027. Essays should be formatted according to the latest MLA style manual.

References
Ahmed, Sara. “Happy Objects.” Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, Duke UP, 2010, pp. 29–51.
Piocos, Carlos M., III. Affect, Narratives and Politics of Southeast Asian Migration. Routledge, 2021.
Seigworth, Gregory J., and Melissa Gregg. “An Inventory of Shimmers.” Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, Duke UP, 2010, pp. 1–25.
Yao, Xine. Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America. Duke UP, 2021.

 

Ecowar Literature

Guest Editors: Michael Boyden (University of Fribourg) and Katharina Gerund (University of Zurich)

While it has not officially declared war since the Second World War, the United States is often conceived as a nation continuously at war and thus fundamentally shaped by it. This self-image of a nation perpetually at war finds expression in a rich archive of literary texts about combat, which has received ample attention in the scholarship (salient examples include Jeffrey Walsh; Jennifer Haytock; and Kate McLoughlin). In recent years, the somewhat narrow corpus of soldier’s stories with strong authenticity claims and a focus on the battlefield has been considerably expanded to include homefront narratives as well as literature engaging issues of race and social exclusion within the military (David Eisler; Haytock; and Susan Farrell). In addition, an emergent body of scholarship has started to approach American war literature through an environmental lens (for example, Sarah Daw; Sylvain Belluc, Isabelle Brasme, and Guillaume Tanguy). Our special issue takes this broadened understanding of war writing as its starting point to explore different forms of what we term post-1945 ecowar literature, that is, US-American literary texts which engage the nexus of militarization, technology, and the environment in both form and content.

War and the environment have, of course, always been connected. Access to natural resources has long been a major driver of armed conflict, while environmental conditions have consistently shaped military strategy and planning. During the post-1945 era, however, the entanglements between environments, military technologies, and industry reached unprecedented levels. This period witnessed not only an extraordinary military build-up—particularly in the United States, which emerged as the world’s leading military power—but also the exponential increase in fossil fuel consumption alongside accelerating environmental degradation and biodiversity loss. Ironically, the rise of the environmental movement was closely intertwined with the militarization and nuclearization of the environment. Environmental historian Donald Worster claimed that the “age of ecology” began with the atomic bomb and the use of nuclear energy in war, while biologist Joel Hagen saw a “symbiosis developing between atomic energy and ecosystem ecology” (An Entangled Bank 101) in the aftermath of World War II (see also Richard P. Tucker et al., Nature at War). Moreover, Military institutions have played a major role in advancing climate change research, creating the persistent risk that environmental science may be shaped by military priorities or coopted for strategic purposes (Naomi Oreskes; Libby Robin, Sverker Sörlin, and Paul Warde; and Robert Marzec). Today, artificial intelligence is fundamentally transforming the conduct of warfare, whose ecological costs remain difficult to predict.

Our special issue asks how post-1945 American war literature negotiates the ethical and social challenges attendant on the above developments. We invite contributions on both canonical/popular war literature genres (narratives that revolve around the combat experience of the soldier, real and imagined) and fictional or poetic texts that are not normally labeled as war literature but still reflect on the connections between war, the military, and the environment (for example, nature writing, or narratives featuring ecoterrorism, mountaineering, the home front, the arms industry, among others).

Possible angles might include:

  • Military-Industrial-Ecological Complex: How does ecowar literature mediate environmental consciousness through the epistemic frameworks of the military-industrial complex (for example, surveillance, logistics, systems thinking, nuclear modeling, AI, GPS, sonar)? How is the military represented as an ecological actor?
  • Aesthetics/Form: What kind of aesthetic strategies does ecowar literature develop to represent forms of ecological damage that manifest on a global scale, often exceeding direct perception? How are such scalar disjunctions represented? To what extent does the environment figure as an agent in war fictions?
  • Temporalities: How does ecowar literature represent aftermaths, intergenerational issues related to toxicity, distended temporalities, and similar themes? How does this literature complicate the distinction between war and peacetime, or all-out war and attritional environmental damage or slow violence?
  • Identities: What kind of formal strategies do ecowar narratives use to either underwrite or challenge white bias, heteronormativity, gendered assumptions, transphobia, and similar biases? How and when does racism intersect with, for example, insect phobia in the context of chemical warfare? How does war literature use specific figures such as the war veteran, the military spouse, the medic, or the journalist to negotiate the various (environmental) impacts of war and military service?

We invite proposals (250-word abstracts) by December 15, 2026. Please send your proposal to both Michael Boyden (michael.boyden@unifr.ch) and Katharina Gerund (katharina.gerund@es.uzh.ch). Notifications of acceptance will follow over the course of January, and full articles are due by June 15, 2027. The special issue will be published in Fall or Winter 2028.