After the Catastrophe. Contemporary postapocalyptic narratives
Revue Between
University of Cagliarii
Date d’échéance : 1er mai 2025
Texte de l’appel :
Editors: Elisabetta Abignente (University of Naples Federico II), Claudia Cao (University of Cagliari), and Claudia Cerulo (University of Naples Federico II)
Submission Deadline: May 1st, 2025.
Publication Date: November 30th, 2025
Since ancient times, narratives about the end of the world have given voice to the anxieties and crises of the societies that have produced them. The forms of the apocalypse are thematically and diachronically broad and diverse (Pharr, Clark and Firestone 2016; De Cristofaro 2020). Already at the dawn of the nineteenth century, in her The Last Man (1826), Mary Shelley, the brilliant inventor of this genre, reflected on the condition of the single survivor of a lethal virus. While, for obvious chronological reasons, the anguish for a wasted environment is still absent in Shelley, many twentieth-century narratives reflect on the annihilating potential of humans’ actions on ecosystems. Continuer la lecture de Appel à contributions : After the Catastrophe. Contemporary postapocalyptic narratives (revue Between)
In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and the blockbuster cinematic world of Wakanda, Black futures proliferate—hypervisible in sci-fi casting, in reading lists for liberal audiences, in political discourses of anti-racism and their backlash. But imagining Black futures is not, in fact, a new (pre)occupation in Black literature and expressive culture. World-building, utopic and prophetic aesthetic strategies, investments in speculative genres, and fantastic formulations of Black being abound in the history and present of African American literature. This guest-edited issue seeks to engage and trouble the contemporary boom in Black futures while also renarrating the archive of African American literary and cultural expression through its lens.