Anglistica AION. An Interdisciplinary Journal
Call for Papers
Living in the Age of Anger: Representing ‘negative solidarities’ in Contemporary Global Culture
Editors Rossella Ciocca and Sabita Manian
When in 2017 Pankaj Mishra published The Age of Anger: A History of the Present, he verbalized an iconic title for a shared condition of our global contemporaneity. All over the world, forms of ‘negative solidarity’ (Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 1968) - a concept also evoked by sociologist, Emile Durkheim - manifests itself with local adaptations. It has traveled transnationally, and paradoxically prospered due to the weakening of national sovereignties in which the severe limits of the impoverished welfare state, unable to dispel the generalized perception of insecurity and sense of disposability, produces systemic mistrust in personal agency and a correlated thirst for ‘problem-solving’ authoritarianism. The challenges posed by refugees and immigrants to the bulwarks of citizenship, national culture and identity tends to make some individuals more prone to inventing scapegoats (e.g., intellectuals, elites, minorities such as Muslims, women, Blacks, Jews, and even mainstream politicians) for their real or imagined problems. Even the threat of global climate change, instead of inspiring cooperative action, tends to generate blind forms of social anxiety, pessimism and anti-scientific conspiracy theories.
The very beginning of 2021 saw one of the most striking episodes of this universal crisis of social consensus: on January 6, a mob of Trump’s supporters attacked the US Congress attempting to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election. Such illiberal trends and negative solidarity have appeared globally - from Brazil to Myanmar, or from Turkey to India.
This issue of Anglistica, will focus on the aforementioned historical conjunction and contemporary social features leading to the current global variant of ‘negative solidarity,’ and examine the role and manifestations of sociopolitical culture in highlighting, understanding, denouncing, contrasting, mourning the Age of Anger, as represented in literature, film, tv, the performing and visual arts, as well as through other media communication including journalism and historical and political discourse.
Papers must be original work that is not previously published elsewhere. We invite contributions on topics including, but not limited to:
- Religion and anger
- Gender and anger
- Ethnicity, marginalization and anger
- Communalism Vs Community
- Isolation and competition
- Entrepreneurialism, social greed
- Geo-political fields of tension
- Post-imperial melancholies, global fears
- Hate-speech and communication
- Visualizing terror, representing angst
- Storytelling and trauma
- Narration as antidote against poisonous socialization
- Literary/artistic forms of activism
Deadline for abstracts: 15 November 2021 [250-300 words]
Notification of acceptance: 10 December 2021
Deadline for completed articles: 10 February 2022
Please contact: Manian@lynchburg.edu OR Rciocca@unior.it
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