Refiguring Global Challenges: Literary and Cinematic Explorations of War, Inequality, and Migration: 221 (Cross/Cultures)

An important task for scholars of cultural studies and the humanities, as well as for artistic creators, is to refigure the frames and concepts by which the world as we know it is kept in place. Without these acts of refiguration, the future could only ever be more of the (violent) same. In close dialogue with literary and cinematic works and practices, the essays of this volume help refigure and rethink such pressing contemporary issues as migration, inequality, racism, post-coloniality, political violence and human-animal relations. A range of fresh perspectives are introduced, amounting to a call for intellectuals to remain critically engaged with the social and planetary.

Amanda Minervini is the director of the Italian Program at Colorado College, USA, and the author of “Mussolini Speaks. History Reviewed” (The Massachusetts Review, 2019) and “Face to Face: Iconic Representations and Juxtapositions of St. Francis of Assisi and Mussolini during Italian Fascism” (M. Epstein, F. Orsitto, A. Righi, TOTalitarian Arts: the Visual Arts, Fascism(s) and Mass Society, 2017).
Amelie Björck is Associate Professor for Comparative Literature, Södertörn University, Sweden and author of Zooësis. Om kulturella gestaltningar av lantbruksdjurens tid och liv (2019), and editor and author of Squirreling. Human-Animal Studies in the Northern-European Region (2022).
Omri Grinberg is a postdoctoral fellow at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author of “Testimony as Event: Israeli NGOs, Palestinian Witnesses, and the Bureaucratic Logic of Human Rights” (Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 2021). With Yiftach Ashkenazy, he is also the author of “Who Let the Mad Dogs Out? Trauma and Colonialism in the Hebrew Canon” (Postcolonial Animality, edited by Suvadip Sinha & Amit Raul Baishya, 2019).
Amrita Ghosh is assistant professor of South Asian literature at University of Central Florida. She is the co-editor of Tagore and Yeats: A Postcolonial Reenvisioning (2022) and her monograph on Kashmir’s new literature is forthcoming.