The book considers how identities have become more fractured since COVID-19, by thinking of COVID-19 in relation to other crises (economic, social, digital, and ecological) and by drawing parallels to literature, cinema, and visual art. COVID-19 was a type of apocalypse, a catastrophic destructive event that produced dystopian measures in its wake and drew uncanny parallels to dystopic works of literature and speculative fiction. Yet the pandemic was apocalyptic in another sense too. The word apocalypse derives from apokalupsis, which means disclosure or uncovering. In this way, COVID-19 also revealed the dystopian processes already at work in the world, including digital forms of surveillance as well as the asymmetries within populations and divides in health outcomes between the Global North and Global South. Indeed, societies that have experienced the horrors of settler colonialism have already survived apocalypses. COVID-19 serves then as a premonition for our climate emergency as well as an echo of other apocalyptic situations, both real and imagined. This book consists of essays from acclaimed theorists and scholars writing amid the pandemic and exposes the asymmetries of our divided world. The volume will be indispensable for scholars and researchers of literature, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and comparative literature including post-apocalyptic and speculative fiction. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing and are accompanied by a new afterword.

The wide-ranging disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic altered the experiences of place, technology, time, and school for students. This book explores how students’ responses to these extraordinary times shaped their identities as learners and writers, as well as their perceptions of education. This book traces the voices of a diverse group of university students, from first-year to doctoral students, over the first two years of the pandemic. Students discussed the effects of having their homes forced to serve as classrooms, work, and living spaces, as they also navigated much of school and life through their digital screens. The affective and embodied experiences of this disruption and uncertainty, and the memories and narratives constructed from those experiences, challenged and remade students’ relationships with place, digital media, and school itself. Understanding students’ perceptions of these times has implications for imagining innovative and empathetic approaches to literacy and learning going forward. In a time when disruptions, including but not limited to the pandemic, continue to ripple and resonate through education and culture, this book provides important insights for researchers and teachers in literacy and writing studies, education, media studies, and any seeking a better understanding of students and learning in this precarious age. 2025 recipient of the Divergent Publication Award for Excellence in Literacy in a Digital Age Research from the Initiative for Literacy in a Digital Age

Detailing the resettlement narratives of five men who have committed different types of murder (confrontational/revenge, financial gain, random, intimate partner femicide, and family feud), this book counters narratives of neoliberal, ‘responsibilizing’ messages of individualism to investigate what informs their experiences of resettlement. Life Beyond Murder: Exploring the Identity Reconstruction of Mandatory Lifers After Release explores the impact of mandatory lifers’ institutionalisation, families, consumer culture, emotions, and supervision, considering how these factors hamper or assist with their transition from the stigmatising identity of being ‘dangerous murderers’. The book’s discussion is guided by the men’s narratives, employing a ‘tug of war’ metaphor to elucidate the ‘push-pull forces’ that influence the men’s efforts to reconstruct their lives in the years following their release. To be successful, the book argues, these men have to reconcile a paradoxical situation, and the most skilled mandatory lifers manage to relativise their involvement in murder whilst concomitantly showing remorse. This situation is achieved through a Splitting Narrative that ultimately defends against anxiety, contains internal stigma, and often showcases self-flagellant remorse, as they move towards positive social identities such as philanthropists, family men, wounded healers, and pious members of the church.

Identity in the Covid-19 Years explores the how the COVID-19 pandemic has been represented in media, communication and culture, and the role these changes have played in renewing how we understand identity, engage in social belonging and relate ethically to each other and the world. This book explores how the COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on how we perform our identities, engage in social belonging, and communicate with each other. Understanding the onset of the pandemic as a moment experienced as cultural rupture, Cover provides a framework for understanding how selfhood, belonging, relationships and perceptions of time and space have undergone a disruption that not only is damaging to continuity and stability but also provides positive value through renewal and the re-making of the self and ways of living ethically. Drawing on philosophic, media and cultural studies approaches, this book describes how networks of mutual care and global interdependency have been powerfully drawn out by the experience of the pandemic, yet also disavowed in some settings in favour of a problem individualism and sustained inequalities. The roles of disruption and interdependency are examined across an array of pandemic-related topics, including health communication, apocalyptic storytelling, lockdowns and immobilities, mask-wearing, social distancing and new practices touch, anti-vaccination discourses, and frameworks for mourning the lost past and the uncertain future. By focusing on the impact of the pandemic on identity, this work explains and revisits theories of belonging and ethics to help us understand how new ways of perceiving our vulnerability may lead to more positive, inclusive and ethical ways of living.

Focusing on works by Derek Walcott, Les Murray, Anne Carson, and Bernardine Evaristo, Katharine Burkitt investigates the relationship between literary form and textual politics in postcolonial narrative poems and verse-novels. Burkitt argues that these works disrupt and undermine the traditions of particular forms and genres, and most notably the expectations attached to the prose novel, poetry, and epic. This subversion of form, Burkitt argues, is an important aspect of the texts' postcoloniality as they locate themselves critically in relation to literary convention, and they are all concerned with matters of social, racial, and national identities in a world where these categories are inherently complicated. In addition, the awareness of epic tradition in these texts unites them as 'post-epics', in that as they reuse the myths and motifs of a variety of epics, they question the status of the form, demonstrate it to be inherently malleable, and regenerate its stories for the contemporary world. As she examines the ways in which postcolonial texts rewrite the traditions of classical epics for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Burkitt ties close textual analysis to a critical intervention in the politics of form.

A fascinating look at national symbols worldwide and the important role they play in creating and maintaining individual and collective identity.

Fostering a dialog between Critical Disability Studies, American Studies, InterAmerican Studies, and Global Health Studies, the edited compilation conceptualizes disability and (mental) illnesses as a cultural narrative enabling a deeper social critique. By looking at contemporary cultural productions primarily from the USA, Canada, and the Caribbean, the books’ objective is to explore how literary texts and other cultural productions from the Americas conceptualize, construct, and represent disability as a narrative and to investigate the deep structures underlying the literary and cultural discourses on and representations of disability including parameters such as disease, racism, and sexism among others. Disability is read as a shifting phenomenon rooted in the cultures and histories of the Americas.

This book explores how meaning-making during the COVID-19 pandemic, and specifically during the period of the April 2020 lockdowns, may be derived from shared lived experience among participants, residing in diverse geographical regions. This study conducted 46 in-depth interviews with Greek participants residing in 13 district countries and 23 cities around the globe and argues that meaning making of the pandemic derives from shared lived experiences of radical change and everyday transformations, fearful as well as well as hopeful perceptions of crisis and trauma emerging through loss of life before the pandemic.

Can society be healthy, and how? Is Britain a ‘healthy society’ in the 21st century? When people ponder health, they usually consider the health of the individual, but individuals co-exist in a social environment so attention should be placed on the health of communities and populations. Re-examining health, healthcare and societal health using the latest data and research, this book provides a clear, accessible account of the current state of play. Addressing definitions of health in individuals, communities and populations, definitions of society itself, changes in health over time and the contribution of healthcare to health and longevity, it also suggests ways of effectively tackling obstacles to improving health and healthcare in 21st century Britain.

The colonialist West has spoken for New Mexico since 1540 when Francisco Vasquez de Coronado traveled to Acoma Pueblo in his search for the legendary cities of gold. With the Spanish incursion, followed fifty-six years later by the first English-speaking colonists in New Mexico, began the representation of New Mexico from an outsider's perspective. The colonial West imagined itself to hold central claims to knowledge, so it knew its peripheries only as it encountered and articulated their presence to itself. This Western narrative, based on an imagined Western privilege to foundational or platonic knowledge, has become the dominant Euro-American discourse through which New Mexico has come to be known. The comparative study of this collection of travel and contact narratives traces the enforcement of--and resistance to--the Western myth of the Euro-American and European as normative, as well as the Hispanic and the native as Other. The author ably introduces the platonic quest as a new unifying thread that links each of these travel narratives to his argument that identity and claims to knowledge may be tested, recovered, or created in movement within New Mexico. The platonic journey has mostly been understood as an intellectual journey toward truth. This study expands upon the platonic journey to show that it may also, like the quest, be played out in geographical space. Travel Narratives from New Mexico will be a very valuable resource for students and scholars of literature, especially of the American Southwest and travel theory.