Poverty and precarity are among the most pressing social issues of today and have become a significant thematic focus and analytical tool in the humanities in the last two decades. This volume brings together an international group of scholars who investigate conceptualisations of poverty and precarity from the perspective of literary and cultural studies as well as linguistics. Analysing literature, visual arts and news media from across the postcolonial world, they aim at exploring the frameworks of representation that impact affective and ethical responses to disenfranchised groups and precarious subjects. Case studies focus on intersections between precarity and race, class, and gender, institutional frameworks of publishing, environmental precarity, and the framing of refugees and migrants as precarious subjects. Contributors: Clelia Clini, Geoffrey V. Davis, Dorothee Klein, Sue Kossew, Maryam Mirza, Anna Lienen, Julia Hoydis, Susan Nalugwa Kiguli, Sule Emmanuel Egya, Malcolm Sen, Jan Rupp, J.U. Jacobs, Julian Wacker, Andreas Musolff, Janet M. Wilson

"Poverty and precarity are among the most pressing social issues of today and have become a significant thematic focus and analytical tool in the humanities in the last two decades. This volume brings together an international group of scholars who investigate conceptualisations of poverty and precarity from the perspective of literary and cultural studies as well as linguistics. Analysing literature, visual arts and news media from across the postcolonial world, they aim at exploring the frameworks of representation that impact affective and ethical responses to disenfranchised groups and precarious subjects. Case studies focus on intersections between precarity and race, class, and gender, institutional frameworks of publishing, environmental precarity, and the framing of refugees and migrants as precarious subjects. Contributors: Clelia Clini, Geoffrey V. Davis, Dorothee Klein, Sue Kossew, Maryam Mirza, Anna Lienen, Julia Hoydis, Susan Nalugwa Kiguli, Sule Emmanuel Egya, Malcolm Sen, Jan Rupp, J.U. Jacobs, Julian Wacker, Andreas Musolff, Janet M. Wilson"--

Originally a concern primarily of social studies and economics, poverty has emerged as a significant thematic focus and analytical tool in literary and cultural studies in the last two decades. The "new poverty studies" are dedicated to analyzing representations of poverty and the poor in literature and the visual arts, in the news media and in social practices. They aim at exploring the frameworks of representation that impact the affective and ethical responses of audiences to disenfranchised groups such as the poor. The contributions to this volume focus on representations of poverty in the Anglophone postcolonial world, exploring, for example, contemporary discourses on poverty in the UK, filmic representations of Nairobi slums or the agency of the poor in literature from India.

This book analyzes precarious conditions and their manifestations in recent South Asian literature in English. Themes of disability, rural-urban division, caste, terrorism, poverty, gender, necropolitics, and uneven globalization are discussed in this book by established and emerging international scholars. Drawing their arguments from literary works rooted in the neoliberal period, the chapters show how the extractive ideology of neoliberalism invades the cultural, political, economic, and social spheres of postcolonial South Asia. The book explores different forms of “precarity” to investigate the vulnerable and insecure life conditions embodied in the everyday life of South Asia, enabling the reader to see through the rhetoric of “rising Asia”.

Ecocritical Explorations of the Climate Crisis expands postcolonial precarity studies by addressing the current climate crisis and threats to the habitability of the planet from a range of ecocritical and environmental perspectives. The collection uses planetary thought-action praxis that acknowledges the interconnectedness of all forms of life in addressing the socioecological issues facing humanity: accelerating climate change, over-exploitation of natural resources, and the Global North–South divide. With reference to contemporary cultural productions, such praxis seeks to examine the ideas, images, and narratives that either represent or impede potential disasters like the so-called sixth extinction of the planet, that inspire the dismantling of carbon democracies arising in the wake of neoliberalism, and that address rising inequality with precarious conditions in the transition to renewable energy. The different chapters explore literary and visual representations of planetary precarity, identifying crisis-responsive genres and cultural formats, and assessing approaches to environment-re/making that call for repair, recovery and sustainability. In imagining future habitability, they deploy diverse critical frameworks such as queer utopias, zero-waste lifestyles, alternative ecologies, and adaptations to the uninhabitable. The collection tackles problems of global vulnerability and examines precarity as a condition of resilience and resistance through collective actions and solidarities and innovative constructions of the planet’s survival as a shared home. It engages with current postcolonial debates, uses intersectional methodologies, and introduces contemporary literary, visual concepts, and narrative types.

There are numerous different democratic systems in Africa, from the Igbo institutions that date back to the 15th century to Western-style democracy introduced by colonial powers. But what does democracy really mean for African nations? And what effect does it have on the lives of their people? This is the first comprehensive examination of the social and political consequences of democracy in Africa. Written from an African philosophical perspective, leading and emerging scholars explore the impact of democracy in a continent dealing not only with the perennial issues of leadership failure, poverty and corruption but also with contemporary global concerns such as immigration, digital media and COVID-19. With a focus first and foremost on the African people, this pioneering volume investigates how the challenges of democracy as a system affect their lived experience. Looking in particular at the sub-Sahara, it reveals the influence that the failures of democracy have on fundamental needs, including allocation of primary resources, autonomy, welfare, free speech and women's rights. African Democracy: Impediments, Promises, and Prospects gives an unflinching insight into the struggles caused by democratic governance in Africa, whilst also, crucially, pointing to its accomplishments and the future possibilities for African nations.

The Routledge Handbook for Global South Studies on Subjectivities provides a series of exemplary studies conjoining perspectives from Asian, African, and Latin American Studies on subjectivity in the Global South as a central category of social and cultural analysis. The contestation of the Northern myth of the autonomous subject—the dispositive that contests subject formation in the South by describing it as fragmented, incomplete, delayed or simply deviant, has been a cornerstone of theory production from the South over the years. This volume’s contributions offer an interdisciplinary and transarea dialogue, reframing issues of selfhood and alterity, of personhood, of the human, of the commons and contesting the North’s presumption in determining what kind of subjectivities abide by its norms, whose voices are heard, who is recognised as a subject, and, by extension, whose lives matter. In the context of the shifting dynamics of today’s manifold crises, they raise questions regarding how subjectivities act on or resist such forms of contestation, contingency, and indeterminacy. A major contribution to the growing body of scholarship on the Global South, this handbook will be an essential resource for students, scholars, researchers and instructors in literature, media and culture studies, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, law, politics, visual arts and art history.

The present state of research in precarity demands meta-questions and hence we need to probe both philosophy and practice in light of precarity’s different manifestations. The plural perspectives by which this phenomenon can be addressed also suggest potential for further theorization alongside that of Butler and her critics. By inviting scholars and experts from different fields and disciplines, and by applying multiple frameworks, methodological approaches, and critical lenses, this volume seeks to explore the different facets of our precarious world, while providing insights into the challenges of our possible futures.

Contemporary Indian English Literature focuses on the recent history of Indian literature in English since the publication of Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children (1981), a watershed moment for Indian writing in English in the global literary landscape. The chapters in this volume consider a wide range of poets, novelists, short fiction writers and dramatists who have notably contributed to the proliferation of Indian literature in English from the late 20th century to the present. The volume provides an introduction to current developments in Indian English literature and explains general ideas, as well as the specific features and styles of selected writers from this wide spectrum. It addresses students working in this field at university level, and includes thorough reading lists and study questions to encourage students to read, reflect on and write about Indian English literature critically.

This collection of essays aims to widen the current critique on borders by examining their entanglements with constructions of identity and disciplinary categories. In particular, it calls into question established models of gender, notions of narrative genres and typological genera of borders in today’s literary, artistic, philosophical, and socio-political discourse. The chapters interrogate boundaries and boundary-crossing not only in terms of geographical frontiers and the physical acts of trespassing, but also as discursive constructs that police crossing subjects as gendered subjects, on the one hand, and identify artistic genres and academic disciplines as fixed, sealed-in ways of understanding the world, on the other. Taking inspiration from the multiple meanings of the Italian word genere (which stands for “gender”, “genre”, and “typology”/“genus” simultaneously), the volume reflects on the gendered, narrative, and typological nature of borders and border imagery, and on the significance and potentialities of crossover phenomena taking place in borderlands, in the fields of arts, literature, anthropology, sociology and philosophy.