Global Crime Fiction and the Problem of (In)justice
Description
Crime fiction is intimately bound up with the claims of justice, even if the genre is typically critical of the state’s official justice system, to the point that ‘it affirms an alternative sense of justice, an alternative vision of the law represented by a figure outside the state-established channels’ (Collins). ‘Justice is what I bother about – not rank,’ the nameless detective in Derek Raymond’s ‘Factory’ novels says, alluding to this distinction and the difficulties of realising justice through institutional and procedural mechanisms. So justice, typically understood as part of a state’s democratic mandate, remains a slippery term both as a political category and as an end of crime fiction. What kind of justice is sought by the genre – social, economic, criminal, environmental, personal – and what happens to our understanding of crime fiction as genre when any kind of justice is unrealised and unrealisable? These challenges intensify when the genre is understood as a global one where jurisdictional complications often stymy efforts to contain crime. What do we mean by justice in the context of global crime fiction where no single authority exists to police it and where the concerns and priorities of particular places (e.g. the US, the West) are consistently privileged over others (e.g. the Global South)? Whose justice is upheld and whose is denied? In the context of police violence, the climate emergency, and other institutional failures, and on a wider set of social exclusions based on race, class, gender, and sexuality, should we focus instead on how examples of crime fiction examine the problems of injustice?
We are looking for contributions to our seminar that tackle the problem of justice and/or injustice in crime fiction, either in specific places/ jurisdictions or as a global phenomenon. We are keen to explore how individual examples of crime fiction thematise and interrogate the complications that accrue when justice is both highly prized and unachievable. We are especially keen to encourage contributions that pay attention to what happens to the genre when injustice, understood in terms of race, gender, class, sexuality, geopolitics or environment, rather than justice predominates, i.e. whether crime fiction is still able to function as crime fiction. This seminar series, in various forms, has run at ACLA almost every year since 2015 and we are keen both to welcome back longstanding contributors and to bring in new voices.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Erin A. Smith is professor of American Studies and Literature and Program Head for Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is the author of Hard-Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines and What Would Jesus Read?: Popular Religious Books and Everyday Life in Twentieth-Century America. This paper is part of a book-in-progress about American women's cold-war crime fiction and its readers.
Speaker Bio
Caroline Reitz is Associate Professor of English at John Jay College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is author of Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture (OSU 2004) and Female Anger in Crime Fiction (CUP 2024), as well as numerous essays on detective fiction from the 19th - 21st century. She is the executive editor of Clues: A Journal of Detection, and a co-editor, with Stewart King and Andrew Pepper, of Bloomsbury Studies in Global Crime Narratives.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Michael Harris-Peyton is an Adjunct Professor of English at the University of Delaware and at the Community College of Philadelphia. His work concentrates on crime fiction and its development as a global genre through the lenses of adaptation and colonialism. His most recent work orbits the idea of crime fiction within transcultural traditions of storytelling as a social game, and how those storytelling methods inform our understanding of real-world crimes and social crises.
Speaker Bio
Sahil Kumar is a PhD candidate in Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. At the intersections of literature, philosophy, and politics, his current research reads Marxism and psychoanalysis through detective fiction—both broadly and in 20th-century Argentina—bringing literature’s own thinking to bear on global theoretical and philosophical traditions.
Speaker Bio
Carlos Varón González is an Associate Professor at the Hispanic Studies Department of the University of California, Riverside. He has published a monograph on ideologies of poetry in XXth Century Spain (La retirada del poema, 2020) and is currently working on his second book on the political mobilization of affect.
Speaker Bio
K. Gachevska is a Principal Lecturer in Criminology at Leeds Beckett University. Her research spans critical security studies, European (in)security, democratisation, and criminal justice. She is currently exploring intersections of crime and culture, with particular attention to crime fiction, visual culture, and the forensic turn in contemporary art. She currently researches installation art dealing with violence and justice, and questions of ‘truth’ in art and 'true crime' genre.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Ms. Swarnima Banerjee is a PhD Scholar in the School of Liberal Arts at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Jodhpur, India. Her research interests lie at the intersection of feminist geography, crime fiction and pre-Indian independence Bengali literary narratives. She has presented papers in several national and international conferences such as NeMLA, ACLA, CRASSH (organised by University of Cambridge) and International Crime Fiction Association, among others.
Speaker Bio
Louise Wigglesworth is a Comparative Literature doctoral candidate at the University of Kent funded by the Susan Cohen Scholarship and her working PhD title is 'Crime Fiction in the Context of Ecological Crises'. Before this, she worked for two years as a lectrice at Sorbonne Université for first-year undergraduate students. Her research interests include: Ecocriticism, Crime Fiction, Genre, Speculative Fiction, Transgression, Justice, Affect.
Speaker Bio
Dr Angus Nurse is Professor of Law and Environmental Justice and Director of the Centre for Access to Justice and Inclusion at Anglia Ruskin University, UK. He is co-convenor of the SLSA's Graphic Justice Stream and has published in the Comics Grid, Journal of Comics Scholarship and on Law and Comics within Anthem Press's Law and Humanities collection (2024). He also researches wildlife and environmental crime and human rights. Angus' books include Cleaning Up Greenwash (Lexington, 2022).
Papers
Speaker Bio
Dr. Nicole Kenley is an Associate Teaching Professor at the University of California, San Diego. Her scholarship focuses on the relationship between contemporary world detective fiction and globalization. Her work appears in edited collections such as The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction and The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction as well as journals including Crime Fiction Studies, Clues, and The Journal of Popular Culture.
Speaker Bio
Brian Martin is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Williams College. He is the author of the book Napoleonic Friendship: Military Fraternity, Intimacy, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century France (2011), a history of queer soldiers in the French military, from Napoleon to the First World War, which won the Laurence Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies. Martin’s work focuses broadly on gender and sexuality in France, and on Nordic masculinities from Scandinavia to Québec.
Speaker Bio
Andrew Pepper is Professor of English at Queen's University. He is author of Unwilling Executioner: Crime Fiction and the State (2016) and co-editor of Contemporary European Crime Fiction (2023), The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction (2020) and Globalization and the State in Contemporary Crime Fiction (2016).