Special Issue on Brutalism in the Global Novel

Guest Editors: Om Prakash Dwivedi, om_dwivedi2003@yahoo.com and Madhurima Nayak, madhurimanayak@gmail.com, both of Chandigarh University, India

This special issue focuses on the critical practices that define the concept of "brutalism," influential in shaping neoliberal ideology, and their manifestation in narrative forms of fiction. As a term, "brutalism" was linked to post–World War second architecture (Clement 2018), and only recently it came to define the sociopolitical decline of our times and the volcanic eruption of violence and digital technology (Mbembe 2024). Brutalism can be seen as the dovetailing of capital and violence in unprecedented ways, culminating in a pervasive crisis of dehumanization. Brutalism marks a shift from the idea of violence understood in its conventional sense as outright conflict, given that, since the 1980s, the world has witnessed different manifestations of insidious forms of violence, which acts on bodies, ecologies, and organizations in invisible ways. How else do we define the emergence of surveillance culture, precarious work conditions, economic wars, global organs trade, food crisis, the exceptionality of the deep state, the "spheres of deathworlds" (Ganguly 2016), and the rise of the "burnout society" (Han 2010). We are witnessing the humanization of technology and its intrusion into our privacy, the establishment of necropolitical order (Mbembe 2019).

Some of the relevant questions that this special issue of the Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies will address are:

• How does the novel as a global form lead to affective witnessing?
• As a literary archive, what role does the novel genre play in the humanitarian project of worldmaking?
• How do we envisage evidence of brutalism in literary texts?
• What should we make of the becoming human of the technology that characterizes our age?
• In the backdrop of brutalism, what then remains of our socialist project of a collective future?
• Can brutalism be applied to environmental issues and ethics?

Authors are encouraged to submit proposals that seek to engage with the above-mentioned issues, asking questions that include but are not limited to:

• Neoliberalism and precarity
• Brutalism and colonization
• Planetary future
• Literature of the Global South and pedagogical tools for worldmaking
• Literature and human rights
• Ethics of bearing witness
• Planetary Subjectivity vs. Capitalist Globalism
• Testimonial literature
• Decolonial thought and the war to become Human
• Refugees and Border-Bodies

 

Submission Instructions

Manuscripts following the journal guidelines and formatted in MLA style should be submitted by September 1, 2026 at https://journals.upress.ufl.edu/jgps/submit

 

(2028 Special Issue on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, detailed CFP coming soon!)