Discursive Resistance in Contemporary Anglophone Literature and Public Discourse
The last decade has witnessed an accelerated transformation of the conditions under which a shared sense of reality is manufactured. The political moment of 2016 was, in fact, only a turning point in a longer process that could be attributed to late modernity, late capitalism, and the information age. The signs of this acceleration are felt globally, not only in the political sphere, with the rise of extremism, authoritarianism, and “techno-feudalism” (Varoufakis, 2023), but also in social behavior, artistic production, and, most crucially, the generation and circulation of information.
A remarkable succession of events has made this transformation increasingly visible: the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit vote in 2016, the COVID-19 pandemic, the killing of George Floyd in 2020, the public emergence of generative AI in 2022, the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the attacks of 7 October 2023 and their aftermath. Shared reality has, once again, become unstable. Political speech has become increasingly fabricated; the authority of legacy media has been eroded; Western publics appear more distracted than ever, their collective attention manipulated by algorithms; and liberal democracy itself has been placed in jeopardy.
We use the term discursive resistance broadly to name the many ways in which literature and other narrative practices push back against hegemonic discourses and dominant cultural narratives that exploit these instabilities, establishing systems of constraint and justifying social inequalities. Works that manifest this quality may offer retellings of official histories that have systematically silenced dissenting and marginal voices. In the context of what has been called the “postsecular” condition, they may reactivate spiritual dimensions of society through ritual and neo-religious practices. They may challenge prevailing norms or cultural misrepresentation by foregrounding non-normativity and alterity, however these concepts are understood, especially in opposition to mainstream culture, homogeneity, and conformism. They may contest climate-sceptic discourses that cast doubt around environmental crisis. Finally, they may expose the constructedness of discourses that present themselves as transparent reports of fact, thereby destabilizing relations between speaker, text, and reader.
Several theoretical traditions have laid the groundwork for this kind of exploration: Cultural Studies and the legacy of Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School; Critical Theory, from the Frankfurt School to Habermas’s work on the “public sphere”; feminist, postcolonial, and other poststructuralism-informed approaches; and more recent studies of the fiction/fact divide in narrative theory.
We are especially interested in works that engage the contemporary moment. While many of the questions raised here have a long history, the twenty-first century has reshaped them in ways that deserve specific attention. This is particularly important given our aim to investigate possible links between discursive resistance and the aforementioned recent developments. We invite submissions that critically engage with contemporary Anglophone writing across a wide range of genres and media: the novel, life writing, autofiction, poetry, drama, the essay, comics, narrative nonfiction, and hybrid forms. We also welcome work that proposes new theoretical frameworks for thinking about discursive resistance in the present.
This issue is organized around three thematic axes. Contributors are invited to address one or more of them, or to submit work that cuts across them.
Axis 1. Counter-hegemonic narrative and literary form
This axis examines how contemporary Anglophone literary writing articulates positions of discursive resistance through formal, structural, and rhetorical means. We are particularly interested in contributions that examine how literary form itself—polyphony, narrative fragmentation, the deliberate mixing of authentic and fabricated archival material, the ritual reactivation of cultural and spiritual resources, the imagining of alternative subjectivities—operates as a critical response to contemporary discursive conditions. Topics may include but are not limited to:
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Postsecular literary fiction and the reactivation of religious, ritual, or spiritual resources (in the lineage of John A. McClure’s Partial Faiths and Emily McAvan’s The Material Sacred)
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The relationship between literary fictionality and post-truth political discourse
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Counter-historical fiction and the contested use of the historical archive
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Polyphony and multi-perspectivism as narrative techniques
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Slowness and sustained attention as resistance
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The return to analog and material form in contemporary writing
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The novel’s renewed engagement with collective and communal experience in the context of modern atomization
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Diasporic and racialized literary form as discursive resistance
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Contemporary forms of gendered and embodied writing
Axis 2. Life writing and autotheory as sites of discursive resistance
This axis examines how contemporary autobiographical, autofictional, and autotheoretical practices articulate resistance to dominant frameworks of subjectivity, identity, and self-representation. We are interested in how contemporary life narrative, including autofiction, contests dominant notions of truth, the self, and normalcy. We are also interested in exploring the recent surge in autotheory, a form that merges lived experience—often with a focus on the body—with theories of subjectivity and social critique, situating the self within historically specific conditions and culturally imposed meanings. Topics may include but are not limited to:
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Illness, disability, and bodily difference in narrative
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Queer and trans life writing as discursive intervention
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Racialized and migrant life narratives
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Narrating motherhood and non-motherhood in resistance to normative frameworks
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Hybrid forms at the intersection of memoir, theory, poetry, and essay
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Interrogating the subject–object divide through autotheoretical practices
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Autofiction and the question of “truth” in the twenty-first century
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Performing the self in twenty-first-century life writing
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Self-narration and self-invention in the post-digital age
Axis 3. Literary engagements with media and contemporary public discourse
This axis examines how contemporary Anglophone literature engages with the media environments, journalistic practices, and digital public discourses of the twenty-first century, and the modes of discursive resistance generated by this encounter. We are especially concerned with works that operate at the boundary between the literary and the journalistic—between fiction, reportage, the essay, and digital writing—and that reimagine the principles of contemporary public communication. Topics may include but are not limited to:
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Literary nonfiction and the contested boundary between fact and fiction
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Documentary fiction, reportage-novels, and the contemporary novel’s engagement with the news
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Essayistic writing and the renewal of literature as public argument
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Literary writers working in digital and online environments
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Literary podcasts, audio essays, and emergent hybrid forms
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Literary responses to post-truth political discourse and the crisis of journalistic authority
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Literary responses to climate-sceptic discourse
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The literary mediation of contemporary political events and crises
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Literature, attention, and the algorithmically saturated public sphere
We invite authors to submit a 400-word abstract along with a short biographical note (150 words) by September 1, 2026. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by October 1, 2026.
Book reviews of recent or understudied works that engage with topics relevant to this call for papers are also welcome.
Abstract submissions should follow the submission guidelines available at https://alizes.univ-reunion.fr/ and be emailed to the editors:
The full draft papers for all accepted proposals must be submitted by February 15, 2027, and will undergo a double-blind peer review process.