Names of Proposed Editor(s) and academic affiliation:

Prof. Om Prakash Dwivedi, Director, Faculty of Humanities & Liberal Arts Chandigarh University Uttar Pradesh, India 

Dr. Madhurima Nayak, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Chandigarh University Uttar Pradesh, India

Prof. Debajyoti Biswas, Department of English, Bodoland University, India

Aim & Intellectual Scope of Issue

Collapsology, as articulated by Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens, in How Everything Can Collapse (2020), emerges from dissatisfaction with a debate mired in what they call the “absence of factual arguments.” The discourse remains trapped in “imaginary and philosophical speculation without any real factual grounding,” still “lack[ing] an overview of what a collapse might look like, how it might be triggered, what it would imply in psychological, sociological and political terms for the present generations.” However, if, in archaeology and history, ‘collapse’ signifies the relatively rapid fall or gradual decline of polities, in general, collapsology can be defined as a condition in which “the Earth System [transforms] into a much less hospitable state,  damaging efforts to reduce poverty and leading to a deterioration of  human wellbeing in many parts of the world, including wealthy countries” (Steffen et al. 2015).

          Chrostowska observes that collapsology “does overlap with survivalism, for which the highest good [can only be] survival” (Utopia in the Age of Survival 172). However, collapsology’s dominant narratives often universalise crisis while effacing its geopolitical asymmetries. The temporality of collapse, therefore, “will not be linear and will not be homogeneous” or, as Evan Calder Williams in Combined and Uneven Apocalypse (2010) observes, “[t]he world is already apocalyptic. Just not all at the same time.” For many in the Global South, the “end of the world has already happened” (Danowski and Viveiros de Castro 2016) 

          It is for this reason that from a postcolonial perspective, this framing demands a critical inquiry. To situate collapsology within postcolonial writing, then, is to shift the analytic from anticipatory apocalypse to stratified histories of ruin. In the Global North, if collapsology may be seen as ‘mourning in advance,’ it may appear differently from the Global South: not as unprecedented discontinuity but as the exposure of longstanding asymmetries. This special issue proposes to reframe collapsology through postcolonial literary and cultural analysis. It seeks to provincialize the universalising language of planetary ruin, foreground colonial genealogies of ecological devastation, interrogate the financialisation of vulnerability, and examine how cultural production in the Global South reimagines survival within conditions of prolonged instability. Collapse, in this reframing, is stratified, situated and historically produced and reified. This issue attempts to understand how novels and cultural texts from the Global South register ecological exhaustion, financial enclosure, or civilizational disillusionment with or without adopting metropolitan apocalypticism. The question is: Is Global South approached as a passive site of vulnerability? Or, do they suggest alternative ideas of endurance that unsettle the binary between stability and ruin. Engaging with collapsology from postcolonial perspective or from the vantage point of the Global South brings us to certain other crucial questions: Who narrates collapse? What temporal assumptions structure collapsology? Does collapse discourse reproduce civilizational anxiety? Does it obscure ongoing colonial extraction?

We invite papers that engage literary and cultural texts that address, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Coloniality and the capitalocene, extractive modernity, racial capitalism.

• Postcolonial ecologies, urban Fragility and infrastructural breakdown, agrarian crisis, land dispossession, and struggles for ecological justice in the Global South.

• Afterlives of Empire and ruin, imperial debris, toxic legacies, and the longue durée of colonial violence as ongoing collapse.

• Indigenous cosmologies and ontologies of Remembrance, and more-than-human ethics as alternatives to Western survivalism.

• Affective Economies of Catastrophe beyond technocratic rationality toward embodied and communal modes of knowing.

• Migration, Displacement, and Climate Refugees.

• Feminist, queer, and critical race readings of collapse.

• Experimental, speculative, and non-realist modes (cli-fi, dystopia, speculative realism, magical realism) as formal responses to planetary crisis.

• Literary imaginaries of collective survival, insurgent futurities, and decolonial world-making beyond apocalyptic fatalism.

• Critiques of technocratic collapsology; engagements with subaltern knowledges, vernacular science, and epistemologies marginalized by Western modernity.

Key Themes

• Social Cohesion vs. Fragmentation

• Brutalism and Neoliberalism

• Planetary precarity

• Vulnerability and the Burnout Society

• Decoloniality 

• Solidarities, Antagonisms, and the Cultures of Collapse in the Global South

• Biosphere vs. Technosphere

Abstract submission guidelines:

• Date of abstract submission: 10 June, 2026.

• Email address for submission:   collapsology26@gmail.com 

• Word limit: 200- 250 words

• Kindly ensure that the contributor’s name, affiliation, and email ID are included within the Word document containing the abstract, and not only mentioned in the body of the email.