Transnational Monsters: Reframing Monstrosity and Global Crisis
Monstrosity has long been explored in a number of ways that connect
gender, sexuality, class, race, nationality and other forms of otherness
with depictions of monsters or monstrosity (Wood, Williams, Halberstam,
Clover, Benshoff). While the collection explores cultural flow as it
relates to the construction of a transnational genre, by both producers
and by audiences, it also explores the ramifications of representations
of monstrosity in socio-political terms as they relate to a tumultuous
era of global crises. This era has of course been amplified and altered
by the Covid pandemic, which frames the content of this collection. This
ongoing crisis imbues the discourses of monstrosity, global catastrophe
and societal and human vulnerability with significant expression in
artistic terms.
The authors in this book engage with the most contemporary period of
Earth’s existence in which human activity has begun, markedly, to have
affected the climate and ecological status of the planet. We are now in
a novel period in time which is characterised by humankind’s dominance
of ecological systems and many of the texts addressed within this book
engage with the outcomes thereof, or as Keith Moser has characterised it
in The Metaphor of the Monster: Interdisciplinary approaches to
understanding the monstrous other in literature, the ‘disquieting
ecological anxiety related to the dawn of the Anthropocene’ (2020: 63).
The collection therefore explores the ways in which monsters
metaphorically represent forms of social and political otherness as they
relate to cross-cultural or transnational forms, either directly or
indirectly. The examination of the figure of the monster from a
transnational perspective offers the opportunity to better understand
issues of cultural production and influence, the relationship between
national cultures and transnational formations, hierarchies of cultural
production, the ethics of transnationalism, as well as the possibility
to explore how shifting cultural and political boundaries have been
represented through tropes of monstrosity.
We are seeking several chapters from any aspect of screen studies, to
complete our edited volume which is already under contract with
Cambridge Scholars Press.
We are looking, in addition to broader proposals, for work which addresses:
Covid/Viral Horrors
Ancient Monsters
Gyno-Horror
Cross-border appropriations of traditional monsters
Reflections of monstrosity that metaphorise contemporary global crises
(socio-economic, mental health, migration, climate, etc.)
Please include a 300-word abstract and a 100-word author bio and send it
to both [log in to unmask] and
[log in to unmask] The deadline for
proposals is 17th October 2022, with draft chapters due 1st June 2023.