Monstrous Ontologies Politics Ethics Materiality

While the presence of monsters in popular culture is ever-increasing, their use as an explicit or implicit category to frame, stigmatise, and demonise the other is seemingly on the rise. At the same time, academic interest for monsters is ever-growing. Usually, monstrosity is understood as a category that emerges to signal a transgression to a given order; this approach has led to the demystification of the insidious characterisations of the (racial, sexual, physical) other as monstrous. While this effort has been necessary, its collateral effects have reduced the monstrous to a mere (socio-cultural) construction of the other: a dialectical framing that de facto deprives monstrosity from any reality. 'Monstrous Ontologies: Politics, Ethics, Materiality' proffers the necessity of challenging these monstrous otherings and their perverse socio-political effects, whilst also asserting that the monstrous is not simply an epistemological construct, but that it has an ontological reality. There is a profound difference between monsters and monstrosity. While the former is an often sterile political and social simplification, the end-product of rhetorical and biopolitical apparatuses; the latter may be understood as a dimension that nurtures the un-definable, that is, that shows the limits of these apparatuses by embodying their material excess: not a 'cultural frame', but the limit to the very mechanism of 'framing'. The monstrous expresses the combining, hybridising, becoming, and creative potential of socio-natural life, albeit colouring this powerful vitalism with the dark hue of a fearful, disgusting, and ultimately indigestible reality that cannot simply be embraced with multicultural naivety. As such, it forces us towards radically changing not the categories, but the very mechanisms of categorisation through which reality is framed and acted upon. Here lies the profound ethical dimension that monstrosity forces us to acknowledge; here lies its profoundly political potential, one that cannot be unfolded by merely deconstructing monstrosity, and rather requires to engage with its uncomfortable, appalling, and revealing materiality. This book will appeal to postgraduate students, PostDocs, and academics alike in the fields of philosophy, critical theory, humanities, sociology and social theory, criminology, human geography, and critical legal theory.

Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism is a major reference work on the paradigm emerging from the challenges to humanism, humanity, and the human posed by the erosion of the traditional demarcations between the human and nonhuman. This handbook surveys and speculates on the ways in which the posthumanist paradigm emerged, transformed, and might further develop across the humanities. With its focus on the posthuman as a figure, on posthumanism as a social discourse, and on posthumanisation as an on-going historical and ontological process, the volume highlights the relationship between the humanities and sciences. The essays engage with posthumanism in connection with subfields like the environmental humanities, health humanities, animal studies, and disability studies. The book also traces the historical representations and understanding of posthumanism across time. Additionally, the contributions address genre and forms such as autobiography, games, art, film, museums, and topics such as climate change, speciesism, anthropocentrism, and biopolitics to name a few. This handbook considers posthumanism’s impact across disciplines and areas of study.

Feminist Reconfigurings of Alien Encounters reclaims the notion of alien encounters together with strange but queerly loved companions: Vulgar slugs, diatoms (micro-algae), and familiars (spirit guides of witches). The book’s three human co-authors ask: what would it take to establish more-than-human, bio- and geo-egalitarian co-existence on a planet in trouble? This playfully crafted mixed-genre book is informed by feminist posthumanisms and co-created with a spectral community of more-than-humans who are respectfully summoned to contribute with their perspectives. In focus of the entangled artistic-philosophical-poetic investigations are questions of ethics, aesthetics, and methodologies to co-exist response-ably rather than based on modern human beliefs in exceptionalism and entitlement to sovereignty, control, and conquest of more-than-human worlds. Feminist Reconfi gurings of Alien Encounters is intended for broad global audiences of researchers, teachers, professionals, NGOs, politicians, students from undergraduate to postgraduate levels, artists, writers, activists, and artivists who are interested in entangled artistic-poetic-philosophical modes of understanding the world as well as in ecology, new feminist materialism, critical posthumanism, and questions about radically rethinking and reimagining human/more-than-human relations on Earth.

This book investigates the hostile environment and politics of visceral and racial denigration which have characterised responses to refugees and migrants within the UK and Europe in recent years. The European ‘migrant crisis’ from 2015 onwards has been characterised by an extremely intimidating atmosphere which denies the basic humanity of refugees and migrants. Deep rooted in Western Enlightenment trajectory, this racially-driven politics is linked to the Western theories of scientific superiority which went on to become the basis of eugenics and coloniality as part of modernity. Focusing on the ‘migrant crisis’, Brexit, and the impacts of the global pandemic, this book unpicks the waves of crises and neuroses about the ‘Other’ in Europe and the UK. The chapters analyse the rhetoric of camps, refrigerated death lorries, the notion of channel crossings and ‘accidental’ drownings, the formation of relationship with border architecture such as the razor wire, and corporeal resistance in detention centres through hunger strike. In examining such specific sites of rhetorical articulation, policy formation, social imagination, and its incumbent visuality, the chapters deconstruct the intersection of dominant ideologies, power, knowledge paradigms (including the media) as part of the public sphere and their combined re-mediation of the dispossessed humans in the shores and borders of Europe. This important interdisciplinary volume will be of interest to researchers of migration, humanitarianism, geography, global development, sociology and communication studies.

"This book brings together political economy and vital materialism to set out an original conceptualization and genealogy of urban violence"--

Have Your Yellowcake and Eat It is a story of men, monsters and uranium in Swakopmund, a small coastal city in the west of Namibia. Founded by German settlers in the late nineteenth century, Swakopmund remains a popular holiday destination for Namibians and international visitors alike. How do young African men make their home in this peculiar town of pretty beaches and luxury hotels, a brutal colonial history and a large uranium mining industry? Are their close relations affected by global changes in the price of uranium? And how do we describe their life worlds which straddle many homes, neighbourhoods, and establishments - sometimes even existing beyond the limits of the post-colonial city? Employing a reflexive narrative and based on two year's fieldwork, Jack Boulton explores the myriad ways in which intimacy develops and manifests for men in a city defined predominantly by racialised difference and local and global forces of inequality.

This collection is the first to focus exclusively on twenty-first-century young adult Gothic fiction. The essays demonstrate how the contemporary resurgence of the Gothic signals anxieties about (and hopes for) young people in the twenty-first century. Changing conceptions of young adults as liminal figures, operating between the modes of child and adult, can be mobilised when combined with Gothic spaces and concepts in texts for young people. In young adult Gothic literature, the crossing of boundaries typical of the Gothic is often motivated by a heterosexual romance plot, in which the human or monstrous female protagonist desires a boy who is not her ‘type’. Additionally, as the Gothic works to define what it means to be human – particularly in relation to gender, race, and identity – the volume also examines how contemporary shifts and flashpoints in identity politics are being negotiated under the metaphoric cloak of monstrosity.

Philosophy has inherited a powerful impulse to embrace either dualism or a reductive monism—either a radical separation of mind and body or the reduction of mind to body. But from its origins in the writings of the Stoics, the first thoroughgoing materialists, another view has acknowledged that no forms of materialism can be completely self-inclusive—space, time, the void, and sense are the incorporeal conditions of all that is corporeal or material. In The Incorporeal Elizabeth Grosz argues that the ideal is inherent in the material and the material in the ideal, and, by tracing its development over time, she makes the case that this same idea reasserts itself in different intellectual contexts. Grosz shows that not only are idealism and materialism inextricably linked but that this "belonging together" of the entirety of ideality and the entirety of materiality is not mediated or created by human consciousness. Instead, it is an ontological condition for the development of human consciousness. Grosz draws from Spinoza's material and ideal concept of substance, Nietzsche's amor fati, Deleuze and Guattari's plane of immanence, Simondon's preindividual, and Raymond Ruyer's self-survey or autoaffection to show that the world preexists the evolution of the human and that its material and incorporeal forces are the conditions for all forms of life, human and nonhuman alike. A masterwork by an eminent theoretician, The Incorporeal offers profound new insight into the mind-body problem