Aleks Wansbrough – författare

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.

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.

Global Literature and the Digital analyses the continued impact of the digital revolution upon contemporary literature. From the vantage of the 2020s, global literature possesses a digital sensibility where reality and perceptions are shaped by digital saturation and global networks. Time becomes on-demand and space seems to contract as we engage beyond national borders.

The book explores the influence of the digital: from the emergence of digital culture in the 1990s amid mediatization and interactivity, to the predominance of social media platforms in the 2000s and the rise of screen surveillance, to the more inclusive internet of the 2010s where digitally shared literatures promote ‘influencer’ writers from the Global South, shrinking the digital divide, to the 2020s, where post-digital norms render users complaisant to digital exploitation and the new crisis of AI. It discusses literature from over 30 countries across diverse literary forms including novels, poetry, nonfiction, blog fiction, AI-generated texts, videogames, and more.

As society struggles to process the rapid changes borne of our digital realities, Global Literature and the Digital asks whether nostalgia and distain for globalization hinders our potential to imagine a positive digitally enabled globalism, that calls for regulation, global justice, and solidarity. This comprehensive resource is an essential read for students and researchers of globalization, global literature, and digital humanities.