There is a line in David Peace’s Nineteen Eighty Three (2002) that is so resonant that its absence is all but unimaginable: ‘To us all and to the North – where we do what we want!’ (Peace 228). In a series of short articles for Alluvium I use the malevolence and pathos of this line – a toast drunk by corrupt police officers to a chimerical space which, as Christopher …
View More Original Modern or a New Kind of Ordinary?
Contemporary fiction about global conflict is often concerned with an imaginative collapsing of space. Putting emotional affect to instrumental use, it works to raise awareness about events that go untold by the world’s media, either challenging conventional understandings of…
View More Editorial – Global Conflict
The United Nations refugee agency – UNHCR – released a report in 2012 which argued that displacement, predominately caused by war, is ‘the new twenty-first century challenge’ (UNHCR Global Trends). Through the perspective of a vulnerable and …
View More Displaced Perspective
In January 2013 the novelist Teju Cole released a series of tweets introduced as “Seven Short Stories about Drones.” Each rewrites the opening of a classic novel, cutting off the narrative with a drone strike. For example, the third in the series rains “fire from heaven” …
View More Drones and Dissociation
Suicide bombing and drone strikes, both radically ultimate, occupy opposite ends of the spectrum of asymmetrical warfare: while the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle combines maximum destructiveness with zero physical danger for the pilot, a suicide attack is, following Baudrillard, the…
View More Pixels/Tissue – Drone Wars and Suicide Attacks
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) presents a dystopian vision of a near-future world in which most organic vegetation has died and human life is becoming increasingly rare. It is not unusual for dystopian fiction to …
View More Litter, Landscape and The Road
The academic and public interest in supernatural invasion narratives has increased exponentially in the 20th and 21st centuries. According to Terrence Rafferty of The New York Times, the fascination with the zombie apocalypse …
View More Reconsidering Quarantine in Invasion Narratives
The transition from the post-war welfare state to neoliberalism has been accompanied in Western countries by a series of events that Jan Breman, in an article in the New Left Review, summarizes as following: …
View More A Terrible Precariousness
The influences of cyberspace have been decried as the death of literature as we know it, the death of the book, and now also as the death of the critic. The changes introduced by the Internet in the production and reception of literature …
View More The Legitimacy of Literary Opinion
When the images of torture and abuse by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq became public in 2004, what was it that shocked so many people? It surely came as little surprise to…
View More Snapshots of the Executioners