APOCALYPSE AS UTOPIA: Hopeful Visions of Apocalypses in Literature, Media and Culture
CALL FOR PAPERS
Anglica: An International Journal of English Studies
Thematic Issue 2027
Apocalypse as Utopia:
Hopeful Visions of Apocalypses in Literature, Media and Culture
Guest Editors:
Magdalena Cieślak, University of Lodz
Paola Spinozzi, University of Ferrara
Katarzyna Więckowska, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun
As Rosi Braidotti repeatedly reminds us, we live in the age of the fourth industrial revolution and the sixth extinction, both happening simultaneously and shaping our daily lives. The looming apocalypse, or rather apocalypse in progress, intertwines with scientific and economic development on a monumental scale. For many people, such a vision of reality exists only in the realm of denial or fiction, but culture relishes in the potential offered by apocalyptic prospects of what the world might turn into. In a time of military conflicts that have become global and of ecological and ideological crises that are turning dystopian and apocalyptic fiction into reality, we wish to propose a critically hopeful approach to the present and the future.
In The Promise of Happiness (2010), Sara Ahmed constructs the notion of “happiness dystopias” (163), embracing dystopia as “a starting point” to think about the loss of a future, to consider the concept of happiness depending on “there being a future”, and to address the anxiety related to the sense of loss (163). In that way, Ahmed invites us not only to dismiss the unsustainability of hopeful utopias but also to imagine impossible possibilities in the revolutionary dreaming of “what does not yet exist” (191). Similarly, José Esteban Muñoz in Cruising Utopia (2009) proposes imagining the impossible by embracing the power of potentiality understood as “a certain mode of nonbeing that is eminent, a thing that is present but not actually existing in the present tense” (9). Inviting us to “dream and enact [...] other ways of being in the world,” Muñoz sees the rejection of “a here and now” as a way of opening up a “possibility for another world” (1). Writing about the spectre of climate change, post-political populism and the post-democratic condition, Erik Swyngedouw argues for the need to move away from “an apocalypse without the promise of redemption” (2010: 218) and to create different, more nurturing fictions of the future. Drawing from those perspectives, our goal is to document the recent changes in dystopian and utopian discourse and provide critical tools to approach and analyze the new hopeful apocalypses. By focusing on the utopian/dystopian potential of apocalyptic texts, we wish to develop a new critical perspective for intersectional discussions that may navigate us through this unique stage of human and planetary history.
In this special issue, we invite papers that seek to integrate the concepts of apocalypse and utopia and offer a synthetic approach to the divide between the threat and the promise that apocalypse entails. We want to revisit the now widely accepted distinction between apocalypses that anticipate pessimistic futures and those more hopeful and optimistic in order to show why they work better when they coexist. Moving away from an antithetical approach, we wish to encourage critical perspectives that explore the intersectionalities of apocalyptic and utopian discourses in order to investigate the potential of apocalyptic narratives in which the threat and the promise are intertwined. Apocalypse can thus be viewed constructively, as a rupture that opens up alternative ways of envisioning our (post)human future(s) and creates the space for what Lyman Tower Sargent (2010) refers to as “social dreaming.”
We invite contributions exploring those perspectives in works of fiction, with a special focus on literature, theatre, the visual arts, cinema, and media. We encourage looking at the metaphorical and symbolic levels of the apocalypse to bring out its utopian potential. Sensational anticipations of a world that is ending, satirical and/or self-reflective representations of collapse, or disasters as innovative ruptures leading to reinventions of the world are but some of the possible ways in which the utopian potential of terminal visions can be expressed.
Thus, the special thematic issue of Anglica will address such issues as ethics, class, gender, ethnicity, ecology, or consumerism, exploring repeated and inevitable end-of-the-world scenarios, focusing on how to live through the apocalypse, interrogating modernity through decolonial, feminist and queer critique, investigating images of global capital, labour, precarity, justice and climate change, and bringing out social resilience and sustainability. In that way, we hope to connect the utopian potential to the revolutionary and liberating power of apocalypse.
Proposals of no more than 300 words should be submitted by 31 March 2026. Please include your name, affiliation, ORCID, and your contact information. Full articles should be submitted by 31 October 2026, and closely follow the ANGLICAstylesheet.
Timeline:
Proposals: 31 March 2026
Notifications of acceptance: 15 April 2026
Deadline for complete papers: 31 October 2026
CONTACT:
ANGLICA: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIESis an open-access, annual, peer-reviewed journal in literary, cultural, and linguistic studies published by Warsaw University Press and indexed in SCOPUS, DOAJ, CEEOL, MLA, BazHum, EBSCO, MIAR, Index Copernicus, ERIHPLUS.