[ecrea] CFP Interrupting Globalisation: Heterotopia in the Twenty-First Century

Call for Chapters:

Interrupting Globalisation: Heterotopia in the Twenty-First Century

Confirmed contributors:
Kevin Hetherington, author of Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and 
Social Ordering
Lieven De Cauter, editor of Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a 
Postcivil Society

Editors: Simon Ferdinand, Irina Souch and Daan Wesselman (the University 
of Amsterdam)

Keywords: heterotopia, globalisation, discourse, space, art, literature, 
film, popular culture

Can heterotopia help us make sense of globalisation? A heterotopia, in 
Michel Foucault’s initial formulations, describes the spatial 
articulation of a discursive order, manifesting its own distinct logics 
and categories in ways that refract or disturb prevailing paradigms. As 
part of the “reassertion of space” or “spatial turn” that has gathered 
pace in the humanities and social sciences from the 1980s onwards (Soja 
1989; Warf and Arias 2009), the concept of heterotopia has enjoyed broad 
critical appeal across literary studies, visual culture and cultural 
geography (Dehaene and De Cauter 2008). Allowing critics to grasp how 
discourse and space fold together in the construction of enclosed or 
discrepant domains, the term has been applied to an enormous variety of 
real and imagined cultural spaces, ranging from Hashima Island to 
Melville’s Pequod, Ramadan festival to Kowloon Walled City. And yet, 
despite its popularity, the concept of heterotopia stands in tension 
with other critical approaches and spatial terms in cultural theory. If 
heterotopias are marked off by virtue of the discursive difference they 
embody, current concepts of world systems, planetarity and above all 
globalisation emphasise “the widening, deepening and speeding up of 
worldwide interconnectedness” (Held, McGrew and Goldblatt 1999, 2). 
Twenty-first century globalisation is often characterised by a 
tumultuous undifferentiation of cultural spaces, in which formerly 
integral identities bleed into one another, diverse polities are 
commonly exposed to ecological risks, and sovereign territories fade 
amid shifting new configurations.

If globalising flows and planetary precarities might first seem to 
flatten heterotopian difference, they also constitute novel forms of 
heterotopia in that globalisation preconditions clashes among once 
distant discursive realms. This volume calls on scholars and critics 
across disciplines to explore the contrary dynamics through which 
heterotopian practices not only persist but proliferate amid 
twentieth-first century globalisation. What are the new forms assumed, 
and new spaces produced, by heterotopian imaginations today? How does 
heterotopian form interrupt or problematise dominant spaces, practices 
and policies, not least those of neoliberal globalisation and 
environmental governance? How have established heterotopias been 
reconfigured or remediated in the global present? What is at stake, for 
instance, in the transition from graveyard to mobile cryogenic storage 
units as a social mode of being-toward-death; from the fascist rally to 
the alt-right blog as the expression of political reaction? In the move 
from the elite boarding school to U.S. child migrant internment 
facilities as a passage to adulthood; from water-going vessels to 
interplanetary ships and stations as a means of traversing inhospitable 
spaces?

In addressing these and other questions pertaining to heterotopia and 
globalisation, contributors are invited to submit abstracts for chapters 
exploring heterotopian forms and expressions in film, literature, art, 
music, television and socio-political practice, relating to any genre, 
medium or geographical context. Possible topics might include (but are 
not limited to):

—applications of heterotopia to diverse new political, social, cultural 
and ecological realities;
—progressive and/or reactionary manifestations of heterotopia in global 
cultures;
—both representations of heterotopias and heterotopian social practices;
—either pre-eminently spatial or pre-eminently discursive heterotopian 
forms;
—digital manifestations of heterotopia;
—the presence of more-than-human agents in heterotopias;
—cosmopolitan, sub- or post-national forms of heterotopia.

Submission
Please submit abstracts (max. 300 words) for a full chapter, together 
with a short academic CV (max. 200 words), to (heterotopics /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(heterotopics /at/ gmail.com)> by 15 September 2018. Once contributors 
have been selected, we will send a book proposal to Palgrave Macmillan 
and Bloomsbury Academic. Provisionally, we envisage the following schedule:

15 Oct 2018 confirmation of selected authors
1 Mar 2019submission of draft chapters
1 Aug 2019submission of revised chapters
1 Sep 2019submission of full manuscript to Publisher

References
Dehaene, Michiel and Lieven de Cauter (eds.), Heterotopia and the City: 
Public Space in a Postcivil Society (London: Routledge, 2008)
Held, David,  Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt and Jonathan Perraton, 
Global Transformations, Politics, Economics and Culture (Stanford: 
Stanford University Press, 1999)
Warf, Barney and Santa Arias (eds.), The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary 
Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2009)
Soja, Edward, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in 
Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989)
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