Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies

Brutalism in the Global Novel  (https://journals.upress.ufl.edu/jgps/cfp) 

• Guest Editors: Om Prakash Dwivedi, Chandigarh University, India

                                 Madhurima Nayak, Chandigarh University, India

This special issue focuses on the critical practices that define the concept of ‘brutalism,’ influential in shaping neoliberal ideology, and their manifestation in narrative forms of fiction. As a term, ‘brutalism’ was linked to post-World War second architecture (Clement 2018), and only recently it came to define the socio-political decline of our times and the volcanic eruption of violence and digital technology. (Mbembe 2024). Brutalism can be seen as the dovetailing of capital and violence in unprecedented ways, culminating in a pervasive crisis of dehumanization. Brutalism marks a shift from the idea of violence understood in its conventional sense as outright conflict, given that, since the 1980s, the world has witnessed different manifestations of insidious forms of violence, which acts on bodies, ecologies, and organizations in invisible ways. How else do we define the emergence of surveillance culture, precarious work conditions, economic wars, global organs trade, food crisis, the exceptionality of the deep state, the ‘spheres of deathworlds’ (Ganguly 2016), and the rise of the ‘burnout society’ (Han 2010). We are witnessing the humanization of technology and its intrusion into our privacy, the establishment of necropolitical order (Mbembe 2019), and the rampant privatization of public life. It would not be wrong to claim that brutalism has naturalized the project of dehumanization and in the pervasive ‘war to be human’ (Tadiar 2022), aided and abetted by the deep state, has ensured that capital and the state share the profits while the vulnerable sectors of society experience loss and suffering. Brutalism as a practice of the political economy, therefore, requires an endless supply of bodies as resources and these are invariably located in the Global South. In this way, brutalism retains and heightens the notion of cannibalistic capitalism (Fraser 2022) by tightening its grip on the expansion of racial differences. Difference becomes both an object of consumption and exclusion, a permanent raw material zone for brutalism to function. Under brutalism, life and liveability are no longer contingent on a democratic setup but decided by the exceptional nature of the state-capital nexus, thus dividing the world into liveable and non-liveable zones, underpinned as it is by the deep state’s exclusive predatory rights. These brutal living conditions occurring in peripheral zones are symptomatic of their quotidian reality reinforcing the notion of ‘slow violence’ (Nixon 2011). Brutalism, therefore, divorces normativity from its worldmaking processes.

          The special issue aims to examine the fractured social lives and subsequent epistemological abandonment of humanitarianism since the 1980s. To register the contemporary dynamics of brutalism in terms of cultural production, and the peripheralization of those lacking economic stability, financial resources, and access to social assets, even home if we see the rampant problem of migration and refugees, the special issue will analyze the novel genre as global form. Writing about the polymorphous ambit of the novel, Mikhail Bakhtin suggests that it has “a living contact with the unfinished, still evolving contemporary reality” (1981). No wonder Debjani Ganguly in her groundbreaking work, This Thing Called the World sees the genre as “a distinct product of informational capitalism” (2016), advancing as it does “the politics of witnessing in our era.” As a literary archive, the global novel can help us locate the brutal collusion of state-capital duo exacerbating socialist infrastructures in different parts of the world. In so doing, the global novel becomes a tool to imagine and anticipate the logic of a collectivity which has yet to come into being” (Jameson 1981). Thus the literary archive of the global novel also becomes a futuristic platform since it enables us to cognitively and normatively map our place within the dynamics of relationships in this world. The capacity to produce such affective frameworks is integral to the novel genre. In so doing, this special issue argues that the analytical gaze rendered by the global novel is vital to enhance our sociality-realized readings (Tadiar 2020) of the world at this critical juncture where life and freedom have been monetized and exceptionalized.

          Some of the relevant questions that this special issue of Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies will address are: How does the novel as a global form lead to affective witnessing? As a literary archive, what role does the novel genre play in the humanitarian project of worldmaking? How do we envisage evidence of brutalism in literary texts? What should we make of the becoming human of the technology that characterizes our age? In the backdrop of brutalism, what then remains of our socialist project of a collective future? Can brutalism be applied to environmental issues and ethics?

Authors are encouraged to submit proposals that seek to engage with the above-mentioned issues, asking questions that include but are not limited to:

• Neoliberalism and precarity
• Brutalism and colonization
• Planetary future
• Literature of the Global South and pedagogical tools for worldmaking
• Literature and human rights
• Ethics of bearing witness
• Planetary Subjectivity vs. Capitalist Globalism
• Testimonial literature
• Decolonial thought and the war to become Human
• Refugees and Border-Bodies
• Technological mutation of Species and Human Bodies

Please submit an abstract of 300 words by March 10, 2026, at:
om_dwivedi2003@yahoo.com and madhurimanayak@gmail.com

The final submission should consist of a 5000-6000-word article, including a 300-word abstract, 5-7 keywords, a list of references (only cited works), and a 150-word author’s bio by September 01, 2026. Follow the MLA stylesheet and adhere to the journal’s guidelines
at https://journals.upress.ufl.edu/jgps

Publication Due: 2027 (Oct./Nov.)