The Age of Brutalism: Sacrificial Modernity and the Contemporary Novel
                                          (The edited volume has received an expression of interest from Springer)

Volume Editors:

● Om Prakash Dwivedi, Professor, School of Liberal Arts and Behavioral Sciences, Chandigarh University Uttar Pradesh.

● Madhurima Nayak, Assistant Professor, School of Liberal Arts and Behavioral Sciences, Chandigarh University Uttar Pradesh.

● Arunima Moitra, Assistant Professor, School of Liberal Arts and Behavioral Sciences, Chandigarh University Uttar Pradesh.

This edited volume emerges from the idea that the defining aesthetic of our historical present is not resilience, not sustainability, not even crisis—but brutality. Not brutality as spectacle or episodic violence, but brutality as structure: a condition in which the infrastructures that organize life operate through exposure, extraction, abandonment, and managed disposability. This volume proposes that we inhabit an age of brutalism—a formation in which neoliberal governance, technological abstraction, ecological collapse, and permanent geopolitical emergency converge to produce a world increasingly stripped of any redemptive horizon. While violence, trauma, crisis, and catastrophe have been extensively theorized, what remains under-theorized is the condition in which violence ceases to be episodic and becomes ambient—structuring everyday life, temporal experience, and the very possibility of being human. It is this condition that we theorize as brutalism. Contemporary fiction—from climate novels and migration narratives to techno-dystopian and postcolonial reconfigurations—registers this shift from emancipatory modernist world-building to a literature of constrained horizons. These novels do not simply depict catastrophe; they formalize the thinning of possibility.

Much existing scholarship on the contemporary novel has been productively organized around discrete critical paradigms—anthropocene thought, biopolitics, neoliberalism, posthumanism, and global modernity. Foundational interventions such as Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016) and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2021) have foregrounded the limits of realist fiction in apprehending ecological catastrophe. In parallel, Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011) and Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley’s edited volume Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (2011) have illuminated the uneven distribution of environmental harm within postcolonial contexts. Meanwhile, neoliberalism and its cultural logics have been incisively theorized by Wendy Brown in Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (2015), David Harvey in A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), and Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009), each of whom, in different ways, has shaped literary-critical engagements with the contemporary novel’s embedding within financialized capitalism. Similarly, accounts of global modernity and world-literary circulation—such as Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading (2013) and Pheng Cheah’s What Is a World? On Postcolonial
Literature as World Literature (2016)—have expanded the scale at which novels are read, situating them within transnational networks of capital, translation, and circulation. While these approaches remain indispensable, they tend to operate through analytic segmentation: ecological crisis is read through the Anthropocene, subject formation through biopolitics, precarity through neoliberalism, and circulation through global modernity. More recent interventions, including Achille Mbembe's Necropolitics (2011), Tabish Khair's The New Xenophobia (2016), Living Cargo: How Black Britain Performs Its Past by Steven Blevins (2016), Neferti X. M. Tadiar's Remaindered Life (2022), Bruce Robbins’ Atrocity: A Literary History (2025) further extend these conversations by foregrounding questions of violence, disposability, borders, migration, and planetary inequality. What remains under-theorized is the convergence of these domains as a single, coordinated condition of contemporary life. This book attempts to intervene precisely at that juncture by proposing ‘brutalism’ as a unifying critical framework. Brutalism, in this formulation, is neither a metaphor nor a mere transposition of architectural discourse into literary studies but a critical framework capable of reading the intensification of violence, precarity, and exhaustion that structures contemporary life across planetary, digital, decolonial, and geopolitical registers. What is novel about our approach is that brutalism is theorized here not as an aesthetic choice alone, but as a condition of the present, one that literature uniquely registers through narrative form, temporal distortion, affective depletion, and ethical impasse. This shift is crucial to the literary imagination of the twenty-first century. Brutalist literature does not necessarily shock; it wears down. It documents what Rob Nixon has called slow violence, but extends this idea beyond ecology to encompass bodies, labor, affect, and political life

What distinguishes neoliberal brutalism, is not the persistence of sacrifice but its increasing rationalization, abstraction, and its invisibility. Carbon markets replace overt extraction, debt restructuring replaces colonial plunder, and humanitarian management replaces direct dominance. Sacrifice is no longer dramatized as a tragic necessity but is instead rendered technical and administrative. As a result of this change, sacrifice is both ubiquitous and disavowed, ingrained in technocratic, neutral, and inevitable systems. Franco “Bifo” Berardi observes in After the Future (2011) that late modernity is marked by a “slow cancellation of the future,” not as chronological cessation but as the erosion of the cultural and psychological horizon that once sustained modernity’s promissory structure (18-19). The teleologies of progress—whether socialist, liberal, or technocratic—no longer organize collective expectation, yet the demand for sacrifice persists.

We have divided the book into four parts: Planetary Brutalism, Digital Brutalism, Decolonial Brutalism and Geopolitical Brutalism.

(I) Planetary Brutalism

The first section of this volume theorizes planetary brutalism, foregrounding how literature confronts ecological devastation as a form of lived violence. Climate change, extinction, poisoned landscapes, and displacement are but a constitutive feature of contemporary brutality, one that literature captures through fractured temporalities, ruined landscapes, and
diminished futures.We are particularly interested in literary representations of environmental exhaustion, displacement, and climate vulnerability. We are interested in: how do contemporary novels narrativize the normalization of ecological loss? How do they register the entanglement of planetary crisis with neoliberal development?

(II) Digital Brutalism

This section engages with digital brutalism and examines how the contemporary novel responds to the violence of technological abstraction, surveillance, and “platform capitalism” (Srnicek). Digital violence is abstract, incremental, and depersonalized. For this section we invite research papers that analyze: how do novels register the transformation of life into data, and of subjectivity into measurable productivity? In what ways do they narrate the violence embedded in seemingly immaterial infrastructures? This portion of the book attempts to map the literary imagination of digital life as a space of intensified control, precarity, and endurance.

(III) Decolonial Brutalism

The third section articulates decolonial brutalism, placing the contemporary novel within the longue durée of colonial violence. It attempts to investigate how coloniality is increasingly generalized throughout the world, making decolonial critique central to understanding contemporary literature everywhere. We are interested in papers that engage with novels that deal with the persistence of colonial logics through debt regimes, humanitarian interventions, and epistemic control. We aim to answer: how do contemporary fiction represent sovereignty as material impossibility? How do modern fictions narrate the continuity between colonial violence and neoliberal governance? This section seeks to foreground the novel as a decolonial archive in this brutal age.

(IV) Geopolitical Brutalism

This ultimate segment of the book addresses geopolitical brutalism, focusing on literature that emerges from zones of conflict, occupation, and permanent crisis. We concentrate on texts that depict worlds where democracy and autocracy blur, humanitarianism masks violence, and survival depends on navigating shifting regimes of power. Brutalism,in the geopolitical context, therefore, refers to the normalization of insecurity, wherein war inserts itself into our everyday governance, borders, and bodies. For this section, we are specifically interested in papers that engage with the themes such as migration, border regimes, proxy wars, and global supply chains. How do novels represent the diffusion of imperial power in a multipolar world? In what ways do they narrate the entanglement of violence, finance, and governance across national boundaries?

The edited volume invites contributions that engage with one or more of its thematic stands: Planetary Brutalism, Digital Brutalism, Decolonial Brutalism and Geopolitical Brutalism.

Submission Guidelines

Abstract (minimum 500 words): Authors are invited to submit an abstract of not less than 500 words, clearly outlining the chapter's central argument, theoretical framework, methodology, and its relevance to the theme of the volume.

Abstract Submission Deadline: September 30, 2026

Full Chapter: Selected contributors will be invited to submit a full chapter of 6,000–7,000 words, prepared in accordance with the MLA (9th edition) style guidelines.

Full Chapter Submission Deadline: March 31, 2027

Submission Email: theageofbrutalism@gmail.com