Call for Papers: Surveillance and Literature

Special Issue of Surveillance & Society

Edited by Steph Brown, University of Arizona

Submission deadline: January 1, 2025 for publication September 2025

This special issue asks: what does literature, and the study of literature, offer our shared understanding of surveillance? And what can literature tell us about surveillance and its entanglement with the arts?

Creative literature offers a number of resources for representing surveillance and experiences of surveillant environments and systems that other media, including other forms of surveillance art, lack. This makes literature that depicts surveillance an essential complement to other genres of surveillance-focused media. This proposed issue asks what literature, across a range of genres including fiction, creative non-fiction, memoir, and poetry, contributes to our understanding of historical and contemporary surveillance practices. Does literature help us historicize the trajectories that brought us to our surveillance-saturated present? And, more broadly, what might the many methodologies developed in and adjacent to literary studies afford surveillance studies in terms of analytic tools?

The notion of “surveillance art” emerged from the now-well-documented “cultural turn” in surveillance studies in the early 2010s.[1] The cultural turn led to an efflorescence of work on the cultural impacts of surveillance practices and the modes of response to surveillance generated by cultural practitioners. This work has interpolated theoretical frameworks that are also the traditional ground of literary studies into the field: post-structuralism, hermeneutics, queer theory, sexuality studies, Black studies and theories of race, feminism, Marxist reading, performance studies, affect theory, and aesthetics have all, for example, been preoccupations for literary theory since before the advent of surveillance studies as a field. In its turn, newer literary scholarship on networks, data-driven and digital-narratives, surveillance aesthetics, and ecotheory have evolved in parallel to work on these topics in surveillance studies, as has new formalist work of the type exemplified by Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network  (2015). Similarly, works like David Rosen and Aaron Santesso’s The Watchman in Pieces, Peter Marks’ Imagining Surveillance, and Willliam J. Maxwell’s F.B.Eyes have explicitly taken up the work of surveillance scholars to explain surveillance’s purchase on the literary imagination.

Yet despite the shared preoccupations of literary and surveillance scholars, when surveillance studies looks to the arts, it has tended to focus on the visual arts, most notably film and television, installation and performance art, and art that works through the visual registers of various surveillance technologies. This is unsurprising: the language of “watchers” and “watched,” like the term surveillance itself, grounds itself in the discursive register of the visual. This rhetorical choice permeates surveillance studies work, reflecting how the field conceptualizes the activities it studies. Surveillance, it is understood, paradigmatically turns on negotiations of the visible, as does resistance to it. The field’s historical exploration of its concerns through the visual metaphor of the panopticon and other specific technologies of watching, language of privacy, and, more recently, gazing and the performative, has generated path-breaking scholarship (see reference list); it has also, as the field has long recognized, perhaps allowed these terms to be overrepresented in our understanding of the multiplicity of surveillance practices and experiences.

Literature’s ability to represent the sensorium as a whole as well as its aggregate parts allows this proposed issue to shift emphasis from the visual to other registers (the auditory, the affective, the tangible/corporeal, the psychological), augmenting the well-developed language through which we theorize the visual with new ways of thinking surveillant encounters. The issue aims to balance the study of contemporary and historical literature across a range of genres, including (but not limited to) fiction, poetry, and life-writing, to consider the following ambitious inventory of questions:

• How does literature narrate surveillance experiences?
• How does literature help us parse the social, political, and ideological contexts in which surveillance emerges?
• How does literature stage encounters between the watchers and the watched?
• How does literature afford different registers or frameworks for interrogating surveillance than other, perhaps more visual or less narrative, media? What strategies does it share registers with these media?
• Which concepts or methodologies from surveillance studies are particularly productive for the analysis of literature?
• How does literature figure resistant to surveillance? Do terms like sousveillance (as developed in Mann), dark sousveillance (Browne, Ross), insurgent aesthetics (Kapadia), or stealth (Beauchamp) clarify the aesthetics of resistance?
• Are some literary forms (e.g. the novel, the third-person omniscient narrator) inherently surveillant?
• How does literature handle climate crisis as it is playing out in an era of increasingly totalizing surveillance?
• What questions does literature ask about the link between pervasive surveillance and our shared definitions of the human?
• How do works of literature from earlier periods depict the emergence or origins of surveillance, or modes of surveillance that no longer exist in their original forms?
• How does literature depict the relationship between community and surveillance?
• How does literature function within (or against) what Kirstie Ball has described as the confines of the “surveillance imaginary”?
• If most of our access to historical experiences of surveillance must be through the interpretation of written accounts, how do literary and surveillance scholars offer an historically situated understanding of what we read when we read about surveillance?
• How do anti-colonial/postcolonial/decolonial/indigenous literatures depict the role of surveillance in imperial rule? Do works within surveillance studies that take up coloniality/the postcolonial provide resources for approaching this literary work?
• How does surveillance literature’s narratives of the visual aspects of surveillance supplement or diverge from work in the visual arts? How does it negotiate the gaze?
• How does creative literature narrate racialization through surveillance, including as process that does not rely exclusively on visual markers of race? What roles do double consciousness, discrepancies between epidermalization and other modes of understanding racial “status” or identity, and theories of the biology of race play in these accounts? Does surveillance produce race in these texts?
• Surveillant institutions (e.g. law enforcement agencies) generally obstruct attempts to investigate their activities, and as a result, scholars lack unobstructed accounts of the work of doing surveillance. How might literature help us theorize experiences of surveillance agents?
• How do literary texts that narrated early forms of workplace, corporate, transnational, or military surveillance inform our understanding of the origins of surveillance capitalism?
• What roles have utopian and dystopian literature played in shaping surveillance in the broader cultural imagination?
• How do emergent contemporary genres such as autofiction and autotheory engage with surveillance?
• How do surveillance and surveillance dynamics play out in the literature classroom?

Submission Information:

The issue will welcome full academic papers, opinion pieces, and review pieces. We do not anticipate including creative work. We especially encourage early career researchers and scholars from outside North American and Europe to submit. The language of contributions must be English, but we welcome pieces on literature originally published in any language.

Submissions will undergo a peer-review and revision process prior to publication. Submissions should be original work, neither previously published nor under consideration for publication elsewhere. All references to previous work by contributors should be masked in the text (e.g., “Author, 2024”).

We anticipate publishing this issue in September 2025. All papers must be submitted for consideration through the online submission system no later than January 1, 2025.

Please submit the papers in a MS Word-compatible format. For further formatting information, please consult see the Surveillance & Society submission guidelines.

For all inquiries regarding the issue, please contact the guest editor: Steph Brown (stephbrown@arizona.edu).