In recent decades, scholarship has increasingly foregrounded the intersection between literary studies and social justice. From Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s reflections on the ethical responsibility of the critic (An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, 2012) to Martha Nussbaum’s defence of literature as a resource for democratic imagination (Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, 1995), critics have shown how narrative and form can reshape political thought and civic engagement. Literature has long served as a site where inequality, resistance, and collective agency are represented, contested, and reimagined.

This special issue of Matraga invites contributions that explore literature as a catalyst for social justice, broadly conceived. We welcome papers that combine close reading with critical and theoretical approaches, as well as interdisciplinary work connecting literary studies to law, history, philosophy, sociology, and cultural studies.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Literature and human rights (Joseph R. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., 2007)
• Narratives of migration, displacement, and asylum (Ato Quayson, Calibrations: Reading for the Social, 2003; Yumna Siddiqi, Anxieties of Empire and the Fiction of Intrigue, 2008)
• Gender, sexuality, and intersectionality in literary texts (Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins,” 1991; Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, 2004)
• Ecocriticism, postcolonial studies, and environmental justice (Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, 2011)
• Literature, carcerality, protest, and abolitionist thought (Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, 2003; Dylan Rodríguez, Forced Passages, 2006)
• Pedagogical approaches to teaching literature and social justice (Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1968; bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 1994)

Editors: Marcela Santos Brigida (UERJ) and Akanksha Mehta (Goldsmiths, University of London)

Submissions: https://www.e-publicacoes.uerj.br/matraga/index