Crisis and Body Politics in Twenty-First Century Cultural Production : Territorial Bodies

Abstract

The twenty-first century has been deemed the “Age of Crisis”. We are witnessing the catastrophic unfolding of environmental crisis, financial crisis, pandemic and conflict. But are we to understand these crises as new phenomena? Is their seemingly simultaneous existence purely coincidental? Or rather do they instead form part of a singular, historically produced, unfolding crisis, which only today has reached a generalised consciousness? And perhaps most urgently, how far can we separate the crises of human experience from those exacted upon the land?

The chapters collected in Crisis and Body Politics in Twenty-First Century Cultural Production: Territorial Bodies deploy the framework of “Territorial Bodies” to address urgent social, ecological and political challenges. Examining themes such as (inter)national bodily governance, racialised bodies, eco-feminist movements, spatial justice and bodily displacement, this collection provides a deeper analysis of the interconnected forms of violence perpetrated against marginalised human and non-human bodies, taking this combined violence as the defining feature of contemporary crisis.