The present moment has rightly been described in terms of crisis–economic, political, ecological, cultural. Marx saw crisis as built into the capitalist system; and a number of contemporary Left thinkers, like David Harvey, locate the roots of our current crisis in the boom-and-bust cycles of capitalism that triggered the Great Recession of 2008-09. Since the recession, economic inequality has grown significantly, as Thomas Piketty has shown. Rage at the system is now widespread, argues Pankaj Mishra, and political strongmen have responded by peddling rightwing ethno-nationalist solutions–all part of what Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor term “Endtimes fascism.” 

Yet, even amidst crisis and the ascendancy of the Right, promising forms of grassroots organizing have emerged on the international Left over the last couple of decades. Some of the most visible include the Arab Spring, Occupy, and climate justice mobilizations of the 2010s, and the Black Lives Matter and youth-led uprisings of recent years. Lesser known are the various workplace struggles (against Amazon, for instance), farmers’ protests (across India and the EU), and indigenous liberation movements, like Land Back, based on universal belonging to the land, that push back against identity-based and capitalist models of land ownership which remain central to nationalisms around the world. 

Alongside these mass mobilizations, a popular discourse of class consciousness has garnered currency. The Occupy movement has yielded a lingua franca (evidenced, for instance, by the 2016 Oxfam International report: An Economy for the 1 %). Indictments of inequality circulate increasingly across media (from print to audiovisual) and genre (from dystopian and declinist to apocalyptic and allegorical forms). And productions like Parasite and Squid Game have attained blockbuster status, their dramatic scenarios of exploitation and predation resonating with millions globally. 

This seminar invites papers that attend to the interaction between contemporary literary/cultural production and emerging social movements. Collectively, we will explore the many different genres and literary forms that are mobilized to represent and critique the present moment, while also asking what it means to practice close reading attuned to the contradictions of this moment as well as the opportunities it brings for political engagement and action. 

Topics include but are not limited to:

• Left theories and imaginations of crisis, past and present;
• Grassroots struggles and movements of liberation appearing on the international Left (within and across national boundaries) in recent years;
• Popular genres and modes of anti-capitalist critique that have surfaced amidst crisis (within national contexts or internationally), whether in imaginative literature, film/television, or online culture;
• The possibilities and limits of these emerging struggles and forms of representation.