Brutalism, Remaindered Life and World-making in the Precarious Global South: Representations in Fiction and Film
Special Issue Call for Papers Bandung: Journal of the Global South Brutalism, Remaindered Life and World-making in the Precarious Global South: Representations in Fiction and Film
Objective
This special issue focuses on the critical practices that give rise to the notion of ‘brutalism’ and ‘remaindered life’ in the global South. Tied centrally to the militarized nature of neoliberalism, the concept of brutalism and remaindered life will be analyzed to understand how the divisive nature of neoliberalism is not only exploitative but aims to retain, even heighten the cultural supremacy, economic superstructure, and political power of the global North.
Nonetheless these ‘zones of war’ are also ‘times of living’, what the Filipino scholar Neferti Tadiar conceptualizes as “remaindered life”.1 The notion of remaindered life teems with optimism, promoting ideas and acts of collective solidarities in the region at the time of the ongoing death drives. It also enables our social and political institutions to reimagine alternative frameworks for constructing, maintaining, and reproducing life from anti- imperialist perspectives. Dismissing the binary of “productive” and “disposable” life, remaindered life seeks to reconstitute the possibility of becoming human of the global South, an exercise that has been mostly directed towards the global North. Seen this way, the notion of remaindered life may provide possible intervention to move beyond the dynamics of surplus and abandonment in the region, central to neoliberal ideology. The ‘remainder’ needs to be located outside the vectors of value and waste. As a concept, remaindered life may sound weak, but when tested against the backdrop of the resilience evident in the region, one might derive the energy and determination to discover cognitive tools to reconfigure the already collapsed global South, thus underlining the urgency to remake the world that we live in.
The imperativeness of worldmaking as a site “that is open to the emergence of peoples that globalization deprives of world” will be the analytical gaze of this special issue that it seeks to examine from literary and cinematic perspectives.2 This special issue is planned to provide critical intervention in the age of brutalism that is exclusionary and violent in nature.
Context
Pitted against this ongoing war are the pressing issues of survival and futurism. In light of the marginalization and cancellation of life, Judith Butler underlines that beings are mostly devoid of a “right to life” by virtue of their aliveness since life and its forms are seen as resources by extractive forces.3 This embodiment of pervasive cruelty and everyday Precarity defines the core of Brutalism, which functions “without external limits”.4 No wonder, the iterations of the apocalypse are already a living reality in the global South and self-determinism is not just precarious but also a mirage. Brutalism is linked to the ideation and rendition of ‘collapsology’, evidently found in abundance in the global South. The discourse of collapsology ensures that the global South's future is pulverized and pushed to the margins of a circle that keeps moving without reaching its destination. Or to put it differently, the future and life in the global South are ontologically denied protection, since both are conditioned and shaped by extractive regimes of brutalism that systematically obliterate the exit door for many of us. No wonder that one witnesses in the region is an acute degree of emergency that is routinely normalized and becomes symptomatic of the brutal life conditions.
Colonial injustices, incremental violence, the accelerated financialization of everyday life, plundering of resources, and extraction of life and life forms have reached astronomical levels in the global South, giving rise to what Pramod K. Nayar terms “cultures of extreme” in this region.5. Although the global South is a heterogeneous category, what unties these nations is how they are rendered into a geography of violence. Consequently, the regime of “slow violence”6 has become a quotidian reality and its institutional consolidation and normalization under the garb of neoliberalism have only ensured deeply rooted structures of inequality, legitimizing “the gradual deaths, destructions, and layered deposits of uneven social brutalities within the geographic here – and – now.”7 This exponential rise in necropolitics and the simultaneous erasure of a future for the global South exposes globalization’s immanent sovereign exceptionality that breeds and thrives on predation and disenfranchisement, driven as it is through its impunity from legal consequences. This supposedly progressive aspect of globalization propels a perpetual state of brutality known as ‘the South’. As Achille Mbembe puts it, the violent geography of ‘Southification’ is also seen as “the becoming black of the world.”8
With a focus on fiction and film in the English language representing the global South, some of the major questions that this special issue aims to investigate are:
• What forms, genres, literary, and cinematic techniques can be used to represent brutalism in the age of neoliberal capitalism in the global South?
• How can historical approaches and interventions inspire worldmaking that can offer us tools to rethink the relationship beyond the global infrastructures, imperialism, and ideology?
• What insights can literature and cinema provide to understand the ongoing developments in racial capitalism in the global South?
• What can be the relationship between storytelling, worldmaking, and social movements in the global South?
• In what ways has the composition of the capitalist class changed since the 1990s?
• How do we overcome the representational problems of environmental catastrophe and racialized environmentalism in the age of brutalism?
By emphasizing the narratives from the global South, the special issue aims to provide a nuanced account to understand the nature and contours of brutalism, remaindered life, and worldmaking in our precarious time. It is aimed to provide a springboard for scholars for future discussions of worldmaking in the global South.
Submission Guidelines and Work Schedule
Interested authors are invited to email a proposal of 300 words along with a biographical note (100 words) to the special issue editors, Om Prakash Dwivedi (om_dwivedi2003@yahoo.com) and Pak Nung Wong (pnw21@bath.ac.uk; bandung.editorial@gmail.com) by January 21 , 2025.
The themes for this special issue include, but are not limited to:
• Brutalism and racial capital
• Technocolonization, Precarity, and Vulnerability
• Global South futurism
• Storytelling as Worldmaking
• Remaindered life and Conviviality
• Epistemological Violence of globalization
• Global South as a ‘burnout society’
• Regimes of slow violence in the Global South
• Collapsology and Coloniality of the Global South
• Hermeneutics of decolonization
• Ecoprecarity of the global South
• Toxic ecologies
• Politics of silence and bodily violence
• Deathworlds in the global South
• Aesthetics of global realism
Based on the topicality and theoretical intervention reflected in the abstract, the editors will communicate the decision by February 20, 2025.
Full manuscripts submitted to this special issue’s editors should be between 7,500 – 8,000 words in length (including an abstract and list of works cited). Please follow the journal’s author submission guidelines for further details. Submissions of the full manuscript should be made by December 20, 2025. Manuscripts should be prepared with consideration for the aims and objectives of the special issue. The manuscripts must be original and not be under consideration for publication by another journal or publisher. Manuscripts will undergo evaluation by the guest editors based on their quality and relevance, and will also undergo the double-blinded peer review
process. The entire review and scientific publication procedure must comply with Brill’s publication ethics:
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Authors will be informed of the publication schedule once an article is accepted for publication after revisions. For detailed instructions for authors, please refer to the link below: https://brill.com/fileasset/downloads_products/Author_Instructions/BJGS.pdf
Planned publication date: 2027
1 Tadiar, X.M. Neferti. 2022. Remaindered Life. Durham: Duke University Press.
2 Cheah. Pheng. 2016. What is a World: On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 19.
3 Butler, Judith. 2020. The Force of Non-Violence. London: Verso, 47.
4 Mbembe, Achille. 2024. Brutalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 3.
5 Nayar, Pramod K. 2017. The Extreme in Contemporary Culture: States of Vulnerability. Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield.
6 Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence: Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, Harvard University Press.
7 Davies, Thom. 2019. “Slow Violence and Toxic Geographies: ‘Out of Sight’ to Whom?” In Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space. 40(2), 410.
8 Mbembe, Achille. 2017. Critique of Black Reason. Durham: Duke University Press, 6.
Editors' details:
Om Prakash Dwivedi (lead guest editor)
Associate Professor, School of Liberal Arts,
Bennett University,
Greater Noida, India.
om_dwivedi2003@yahoo.com
Pak Nung Wong
Editor-in-Chief, Bandung: Journal of the Global South,
Department of Politics, Languages & International Studies,
University of Bath, Bath, UK
p.wong@bath.ac.uk ; bandung.editorial@gmail.com