Key Essays Mapping the Contemporary in Literature and Culture

Any level of study within literature and culture requires an engagement with a wider scope of themes, issues and discourses, and these debates are often centred around key ‘essays’. This book examines a wide range of these essays on topics such as posthumanism, racism, feminism, necropolitics, the Anthropocene, gender, Global North/South, neo- and de-colonialism, universals, borders and limits, interspecies relations, blackness, cosmopolitics, epistemology, addiction. The essays selected represent scholars from a range of disciplines, ethnicities, nationalities and genders, and offer readings relevant across the arts and humanities. Each chapter explains why the essay is of vital importance in our contemporary era, introduces and explains the key themes and theories with which it engages, demystifies any complex content and positions it within wider current debates. Covering all of the essential debates that students and academics must engage with, alongside a close analysis and critique of contemporary seminal essays in the debate, this book will be an essential read for students of literature and culture across the arts and humanities.

Introduction 1. Junkspace – Rem Koolhaas 2. Blackness Matters – Denise Ferreira da Silva 3. The Superpositioning of Cuteness – Sianne Ngai 4. How Matter matters – Karen Barad 5. Posthumanism – Rosi Braidotti 6. Companion Species – Anna Tsing 7. Feminism and Happiness – Sara Ahmed 8. A Pharmacopornographic Pandemic – Paul B Preciado 9. Epistemologies of the Global South – Boaventura de Sousa Santos 10. Counter Forensics – Eyal Weizmann 11. Necropolitics – Achille Mbembe 12. The Undercommons – Moten and Harney 13. Cosmopolitics – Emily Apter 14. Comrades in Time – Boris Groys 15. The Mentality of the Anthropocene – Cathérine Malabou Afterword

Johnny Rodger is Professor of Urban Literature at the Glasgow School of Art, Scotland. He publishes both fiction and criticism. He is the author of Hero Building: An Architecture of Scottish National Identity (Routledge, 2015).