Writing the Global Riot: Literature in a Time of Crisis

The history of the modern riot parallels the development of the modern novel and the modern lyric. Yet there has been no sustained attempt to trace or theorize the various ways writers over time and in different contexts have shaped cultural perceptions of the riot as a distinctive form of political and social expression. Through a focus on questions of voice, massing, and mediation, this collection is the first cross-cultural study of the interrelatedness of a prevalent mode of political and economic protest and the variable styles of writing that riots inspired. This volume will provide historical depth and cultural nuance, as well as examine more recent theoretical attempts to understand the resurgence of rioting in a time of unprecedented global uncertainty. One of the key contentions of this collection is that literature has done more than merely record riotous practices. Rather literature has, in variable ways, used them as raw material to stimulate and accelerate its own formal development and critical responsiveness. For some writers this has manifested in a move away from classical norms of propriety and accord, and toward a more openly contingent, chaotic, and unpredictable scenography and cast of dramatis personae, while others have moved towards narrative realism or, more recently, digital media platforms to manifest the crises that riots unleash. Keenly attuned to these formal variations, the essays in this collection analyse literature's fraught dialogue with the histories of violence that are bound up in the riot as an inherently volatile form of collective action.

Jumana Bayeh, Senior Lecturer, Macquarie University,Helen Groth, Professor, School of the Arts and Media, University of New South Wales,Julian Murphet, Jury Chair of English Language and Literature, University of Adelaide

Jumana Bayeh is Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. She is the author of The Literature of the Lebanese Diaspora (2015) and several articles on Arab diaspora fiction. She co-edited Democracy, Diaspora, Territory: Europe and Cross-Border Politics (2020), as well as a special issue on "Arabs in Australia" in Mashriq & Mahjar. She is working on two research projects, one that examines the representation of the nation-state in Arab diaspora literature from writers based in Australia, North America, and the United Kingdom, and another collaborative project looking at the global resurgence of riots.

Helen Groth is Professor of English in the School of Arts and Media, University of New South Wales. She is the author of Victorian Photography and Literary Nostalgia (OUP, 2004), Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices (2013), and co-author of Dreams and Modernity: A Cultural History (2013). She is the co-editor of a number of books and special journal issues, most recently Sounding Modernism: Rhythm and Sonic Mediation in Modern Literature and Film (2017), and The Edinburgh Companion to Literary Sound Studies (2023).

Julian Murphet is Jury Chair of English Language and Literature at the University of Adelaide. Prior to that he was Scientia Professor of English and Film Studies at UNSW, Sydney. He has published widely in the fields of modern and contemporary literature, literary theory, film studies, race, and other areas of critical inquiry. Forthcoming books include Modern Character: 1890-1905, Prison Writing in the Twentieth Century: A Literary History, and the Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Sound Studies, also edited with Helen Groth.