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Alluvium is an online journal dedicated to twenty-first-century writing, affiliated with BACLS (British Association of Contemporary Literary Studies) as its Graduate-run journal. It publishes short (2-2500 word) academic articles on fiction as well as twenty-first-century approaches to the literary canon by researchers working at PG, ECR, Lecturer and Senior level. Alluvium encourages contributors to focus their articles around key issues and emerging trends within literature and literary criticism.
The first issue of the relaunched journal was published in February 2019, available at www.alluvium-journal.org . In June 2019 we are due to publish a special edition of the journal devoted to the Global Contemporary: Ecologies of Gender and Class within the Combined and Uneven Anthropocene.
As illustrated most prominently by the calls for a Green New Deal in the US, we live in an age when alternative political imaginaries are addressing the political and infrastructural necessities of combating symptoms and causes of cataclysmic climate change. Conversely, they are forced to confront: the epistemological difficulties, fragility of language and demobilizing anxiety associated with catastrophe; political recalcitrance; globalized mechanisms of disavowal and normalised precarity; and an underlying system of capital premised upon the exploitation of natural and social ecologies as well as the transnational flow of goods. Literature — through the allegorical, the speculative, the psychological and phenomenological — can provide an encounter with the ethical imperatives, hidden forces and effects which make up the Now as well as a way of signalling the future in its Utopian and terminal dimensions.
Submissions are invited on topics including (but not limited to):
- Intersections (of Gender/Race/Class/Q) within Contemporary Cli-fi
- Infrastructural Criticism in relation to ecologies, politics, literary form and the boundaries between speculative fiction-realism
- New Materialism and Enchanted Matter within dominant and peripheral literary spaces
- Post-structural geographies and the hauntological literary ethics of approaching the ecoeconomico-colonial South
- Phenomenologies of local and global environment anxiety within Twenty-first Century fiction
- Climate change, temporality and anxiety
- Literary participation in, deconstruction of, or resistance to neo-liberal de-politicization of discourses on climate change
- Formally realised or speculative takes on how current frameworks or researchers’ critical concerns might intersect with some dimension of the Eco-social (climate change, habitation, ecological mutations)
Abstracts should be submitted as soon as possible — and ideally by May 6th — whilst the deadline for submission of articles is May 24th.
Please see the attached generic Contributor Guidelines for more information about writing for Alluvium. If you have any questions about writing for the June ‘Global Contemporary’ issue please contact Martin Goodhead (Keele) at m.c.goodhead@keele.ac.uk or Katie Jones (Swansea) at kate_216@hotmail.co.uk
