Political Fiction Research Articles

Figuring Femme

Abstract Approaching femme as a figuration, a political fiction that merges critique of the here-and-now with an ethics of affirmation, driven by desires for an elsewhere/otherwise, the article engages in an experimental – autophenomenographic, poetic, and philosophical – figuring process. The aim is to foreground critical-affirmative potentials of femme and femme-inism in queer and posthumanist perspectives. Starting from a poem that spells out the author’s process of becoming-femme, the article establishes a conversation between the poem’s personal framing and theoretical interventions, selected from archives of critical posthumanist, queer, philosophy in the feminine, transgender and femme theory. The figuring process is based on a vignette methodology. Each of the poem’s stanzas give rise to a vignette, linking the poetic images with resonating theory fragments stitched together to an assemblage. Rather than as an attempt to synthesize a seamlessly interwoven theorization of femme, the figuring process is a meditation on the assembling of unruly fragments.

Transparency in action or political fiction? The pre-inquiry phase of the UK COVID-19 Inquiry

AbstractThis article examines how public inquiries come into being through a detailed analysis of the pre-inquiry phase of the UK COVID-19 Inquiry. We focus on two key points of contestation—around the timing of the inquiry and its terms of reference—and suggest that what is at stake during the pre-stage of an inquiry is its ontological and epistemological orientation. Our analysis traces the emergence of two distinct positions during this phase: a grassroots position (conceiving of the inquiry as a response to the experience of collective grief) and an official position (conceiving of the inquiry as a means of learning lessons). Particular attention is given to the latter position and what it reveals about the rhetorical function of transparency in confirming a political commitment to institutional accountability, at the same time as working towards a particular conception of the inquiry as a practical task, expansive in remit, and future oriented.

Narration of Contemporary Kurdish Politics in Jan Dost's Novels

This article explores the political novels of the renowned Kurdish author Jan Dost, focusing on how they narrate contemporary Kurdish politics and reflect the complex socio-political landscape of Kurdistan. While Dost is widely known for his historical novels, this study highlights his works that directly engage with recent political events in the region. Drawing parallels with epic and modern literary traditions that intertwine with war and political turmoil, the article situates Dost’s novels within the broader context of political fiction. It argues that Dost’s narratives provide a critical lens through which to examine power dynamics, social relations, and the ongoing struggles within Kurdish society. By analyzing the thematic content and narrative strategies in these novels, the article sheds light on Dost’s contribution to Kurdish literature and his ability to capture the political consciousness of his time.

The Interplay Between Ethnic and National Identity of Immigrants in Samira Ahmed’s Internment

The post-9/11 has inspired a great deal of scholarship in the discipline of ethnic and cultural studies, and young adult fiction is no exception to this. Exploring the problems of identity, this article seeks to explain the interplay between an old ethnic and the newly acquired national identity in Internment, a political fiction by Indian American writer Samira Ahmed. Combining Homi K. Bhabha’s model of national identity with Stuart Hall’s model of cultural identity, this article argues that national identity is also shaped and affected by one’s ethnic identity, but prominent nation-states like the limitations of the US to nationality are germane to its racist policies, which in turn cause identity conflicts, especially in second-generation migrants who take themselves as both US nationals and Indian Muslims. In this way, the paper discusses the thematization of oppression of an ethnic minority by national politics questioning their social and political efficacy and their rejection into the mainstream culture. The nuanced understanding of the novel about identities allows us to conclude that the failure to integrate minor ethnicities into the mainstream is also expressed in real-world political decisions and has become a pertinent issue in Young Adult fiction.

Dissent and Posthuman Consciousness in Prabda Yoon’s Basement Moon

Abstract This paper examines Thai author Prabda Yoon’s Basement Moon, a 2018 science fictional novel that embodies the belief that art and science can play a vital role in triggering critical consciousness that keeps alive the spirit of dissent. A close reading of the novel also reveals that it mirrors several key concepts and ideas promoted by Gramsci pertaining to power relations between the ruling class and those under them and the educational roles of art and science. Of great significance is that this novel is exemplary of an innovative mode of political fiction in its employment of key posthumanist ideas that challenge human aspiration for absolute power and control. In discussing Basement Moon, I draw on Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony as well as relevant literature in dystopia, posthumanism and metafiction.

Towards a planetary coalition (a Preamble)

When ‘megafires’ and ‘superstorms’ proliferate, who is the real sovereign of the Anthropocene: anthropos, or nature become monstrous? In the Teracene (‘tera’ meaning ‘monster’), I argue that sovereignty should mean the right to refuse that which turns our existential situation into a horror film, in order to defend what preserves life’s endangered conditions of possibility. To build this right, I first need to deconstruct the concept of sovereignty and to reveal its groundlessness. Acknowledging this groundlessness, I propose an ‘ecopolitics without guarantees’ in which the otherness at the core of possible new Constitutions would not engender an alternative sovereign subject (a subject that would just replace anthropos or the ruling class), but rather an unconditional requirement and the rights that it legitimates. I explain that this unconditional requirement concerns the necessity of caring not only for future generations but also for past ones. I finish my article with a political fiction: the outline of a Preamble for a Constitution able to give voice to the damned of the Teracene. To acknowledge the existence of those suffering from the ongoing exploitation and colonization of the Earth and of those who wither from a future erased in advance, this speculative Preamble is centered not around the present but around the heteronomous, divergent temporality of that which never existed enough and that which threatens to fall out of existence entirely.

Political Fiction: History, Origins and Main Writers

Political Fiction: History, Origins and Main Writers

Identities in the “posthuman” condition: locality of war and global world

“Posthuman” is considered now to be one of the most important concepts in contemporary political philosophy, cultural studies, theory of literature and art, sociology of the body and identity, etc., which keeps in focus a detailed discourse regarding the knowledge of the “posthumanity” condition (R. Braidotti, N. Gane, N.K. Hayles, F. Fukuyama, and others). This concept is no longer necessarily confined to the image of a “cyborg” as an ironic political fiction that skillfully reinvents social reality and everyday life in the context of eroding boundaries between nature and culture, or a metaphor that remains symbolically significant due to the ethical impulse and social commitment of its author (D. Haraway). Even a fragmentary involvement in the “posthuman” discourse cannot but encourage reflection on the structure of our common identity as people in the modern global world of high technology and local wars, complex interactions between science and technology, commodification of the natural world, as well as politics and international priorities; this cannot but promote rethinking the imperatives of anthropocentrism. In the case of identities, whether individual or collective, we are talking about partial, contradictory and always open constructions, about their impossibility of relying upon a single essentialist foundation, which can be skillfully intercepted by ideological and political rhetoric but not recognize obvious social and cultural differences; however, such a foundation is unlikely to lose the image of possible unifications in future, effective attraction and solidarity-driven identifications. Depending on the degree of subjects’ involvement in the transitional states of interaction between nature and culture, identities are fragmented and “denaturalized” in various ways; and it is precisely these transitional states, flows that cross borders, whether they are defined metaphorically or instrumentally, that become, first of all, the objects of control strategies, not without activating the mechanisms of informatics of domination, ignoring local knowledge in a military context, which takes into account the status of partial explanation but does not insist on the total substantiation of statements, conclusions and perspectives.

From Civilization Crisis to Utopia in Political Fiction: The Diriliş Party of Sezai Karakoç

Bu çalışma, Sezai Karakoç’un medeniyet tasavvurundan hareketle ortaya koyduğu siyaset perspektifinin imkân ve sınırlarını tartışmaya açmaktadır. Entelektüel serüveni şairliğinin gölgesinde kalan Karakoç, diriliş kavramsallaştırmasıyla özdeşleşen bir fikir sistematiği geliştirmiştir. Yıllara yayılan fikrî metinlerinde teorik düzlemde istikrarlı ve tutarlı bir siyasal çizgiyi takip etmek mümkündür. Bu bağlamda Türk düşün dünyasında nevi şahsına münhasır bir konumu bulunduğu ifade edilebilir. Birçok aydın gibi yaşadığı dönemin siyasal ve toplumsal gelişmelerinden ziyadesiyle etkilenen Karakoç’u çağdaşlarından ayıran hususlardan belki en önemlisi, geliştirdiği düşün çizgisiyle içerisinde bulunduğu dönemi fikrî yönde etkileme kapasitesinden ileri gelir. Nitekim İslâm’ın siyasal yorumundan beslenerek medeniyet tahlilini ortaya koyan ve diriliş mefhumuyla kendine özgü bir devlet perspektifi geliştiren Karakoç’un Türkiye özelinde 20. yüzyıl siyasal İslâmcılığı ve genel olarak merkez sağ cenah üzerinde etkisi hissedilir. Pratiğe dönüşmeyen teorinin bir eksiklik göstergesi olduğunu savunan mütefekkir, siyasete de dâhil olur. Öncülüğünde kurulan ve ölümüne kadar genel başkanlık sıfatını taşıyacağı Diriliş Partisi ve Yüce Diriliş Partisi ile farklı bir siyasal lider portresi çizer. Buradan hareketle çalışmada, Karakoç’un düşün dünyası ekseninde (Yüce) Diriliş Partisi’nin siyaseten taşıdığı anlama odaklanılmaktadır. Bu hedef doğrultusunda yazarın siyasal düşüncesini merkeze alan kitaplarından yararlanılmıştır. Ek olarak parti programları ve tüzükleri incelenmiş, Karakoç’un parti konuşmalarının yer aldığı derlemeler taranmıştır. Çalışmanın nihai amacı Karakoç’un medeniyet tasavvuru ile devlet perspektifi arasındaki ilişkinin tespiti üzerine kuruludur. Böylelikle (Yüce) Diriliş Partisi’nin Türkiye siyasetinde bulduğu karşılık ütopik ve realist bulgular ışığında analiz edilecektir.

Ovidio global: variaciones ovidianas en la edad de Góngora

Abstract The writers of Góngora’s age found in Ovid the quintessential master of poetic art. This article examines three properties of the Sulmona poet’s writing that could explain his position of supremacy: his wit and humor, his invention of a political fiction that dresses the monarch and his court with the attributes of the Olympian gods, and finally, the elegiac subjectivity that permeates all his creations.

From the Editor

From the Editor

De betrokkenheid van de communistische afgevaardigde Théo Dejace bij de partijcel Bensberg (1951-1961)

The commitment of the MP Théo Dejace to the Communist Party cell Bensberg, 1951-1961
 This contribution uses a political fiction written by Théo Dejace, a Belgian communist MP, as a starting point. Through this story, Dejace outlines why he thinks it is essential to be involved in his neighbourhood and tells about the revival of a cell (the lowest structure in the Belgian Communist Party), called ‘cellule Bensberg’ (Liège). The first part reveals how fiction and biography are closely related, then gives some personal explanations of Dejace’s decision to take in charge the local cell. This commitment has also to be seen in the context of the political decrease of the Belgian communism after WWII. The core of the text describes first the socioeconomic environment of the Bensberg cell. It then focusses on the membership recruitment and the various activities to support the Party but also to retain members. This allows the reader to approach the local communist culture from below.

Science Fiction, Legal Fiction, Political Fiction, and the 100-Year Life

Science Fiction, Legal Fiction, Political Fiction, and the 100-Year Life

Adaptive Audacity: Uncovering Queer Attachments and Re-evaluating Marriage Narratives in John William De Forest's Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty

Adaptive Audacity: Uncovering Queer Attachments and Re-evaluating Marriage Narratives in John William De Forest's <i>Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty</i>

Introduction: Genre Liaisons in Restoration Prose Fiction: Influences, Texts and Reception

Introduction:Genre Liaisons in Restoration Prose Fiction: Influences, Texts and Reception Sonia Villegas-López This special issue approaches Restoration prose fiction from the perspective of literary genre, suggesting that there is more than meets the eye when reading and interpreting the narrative texts that were published in England in the late seventeenth century.1 The term that best illustrates these fictional experiments is "variety": of origins, forms, styles and topics. Part of this variety is due to its transnational nature, as some of the articles in this issue demonstrate. Indeed, it could be argued that the early novel in English was the repository in which different European and non-European traditions converged. Mainly French models, but also Italian, Spanish, and to a lesser degree eastern influences contributed to create the diversity of prose fiction in this period. A survey of the titles of printed fiction between 1660 and 1700 suggests that there were no unifying criteria for what the form was, and the same evidence can also be used to study the multiplicity of texts that attracted the attention of the growing readership of the Restoration: romances, versions of nouvelle historique and nouvelle galante, epistolary narratives, allegorical and political fictions, secret histories and oriental tales among them.2 The articles in this issue illustrate this variety of sources and origins that constitute the polyphonic nature of the early novel. Prose fiction has traditionally been considered the lay sister of the other Restoration genres, raising little interest among scholars of seventeenth-century literature until very recently. In particular, the study of the "origins of the novel" question since its early days in the 1950s repeatedly excluded the fiction of the Restoration with few exceptions, [End Page 3] precisely due to that fiction's lack of uniformity, its tendency to anonymity and its association with less prestigious forms. However, the situation has been reversed in recent years and renewed attention is being paid by critics to the workings of fictional genres and the cross-fertilization between literary forms which explain the development of the early novel. These studies include such influential works as Ros Ballaster's Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East, 1662–1786 (2005), Kate Loveman's Reading Fictions, 1660–1740 (2008), Gerd Bayer's Novel Horizons: The Genre Making of Restoration Fiction (2016), Jacqueline Glomski and Isabelle Moreau's Seventeenth-Century Fiction: Text & Transmission (2016), Rebecca Bullard and Rachel Carnell's The Secret History in Literature, 1660–1820 (2017), and Leah Orr's Novel Ventures: Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690–1730 (2017). In these critical studies, Restoration printed fiction is addressed in its entirety and complexity. Their authors reject the "great authors" approach in favour of a more comprehensive analysis of the corpus as a whole, in the belief, as Bayer puts it, that Restoration fiction can be thought of as an archive of sorts, "a circumscript body of works that exist for later writers to build on or merely pillage from."3 In fact, translation, imitation, adaptation and plagiarism often recur in these early productions, providing an enthusiastic audience, thirsty for knowledge or just sheer entertainment, with a multitude of texts and editions to choose from. When looking at those texts, one is tempted to think that Restoration fiction evaded uniformity, purity and stability, which are actually features genres adopt to consolidate and compete among themselves. Yet the fact remains that authors who could effectively evade censorship benefitted from a degree of freedom to play with the new genre, since boundaries were not fixed. Restoration printed fiction also proved a fertile ground for other forms to expand and for genres to blend—verse, drama, and history, to name but a few—as Gabrielle Starr in Lyric Generations: Poetry and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century (2004), Moreau and Glomsky's 2016 above-mentioned edition, or John McTague's Things that Didn't Happen: Writing, Politics and the Counterhistorical, 1678–1743 (2019) have shown. This tendency towards experimentation and genre instability, which could be applicable to the fiction of the whole seventeenth century, became even more acute during the Restoration, mainly due to the influence of specific cultural or political events, like the foundation of the...

One President at a Time? How the President‐Elect Shapes U.S. Foreign Policy during the Transition

AbstractOver the past six decades, the presidential transition scholarship has grown increasingly rich, yet little systematic attention has been paid to the foreign policy activities of the president‐elect. The idea that the United States has “one president at a time” may be a constitutional reality, but it is also a political fiction, more honored in the breach than in the observance. This article demonstrates how U.S. foreign policy operates along several simultaneous tracks during the formal transition period between the election and inauguration. We develop and illustrate a new framework for understanding the underexplored role and significance of the president‐elect as a foreign policy actor during the era of the “modern presidency.” By refuting the notion that the president‐elect is a nonentity, this article lays the foundation for more active exploration of the foreign activities of presidents‐elect and their impact on U.S. foreign policy.

’Is There No Alternative?’: Capitalist Realism and Genre in Contemporary Political Fiction

’Is There No Alternative?’: Capitalist Realism and Genre in Contemporary Political Fiction

Mary Shelley's The Last Man: Existentialism and IR meet the post-apocalyptic pandemic novel

AbstractMary Shelley mined the ideas of international thought to help develop three new subgenres of modern political science fiction (‘poliscifi’): post-apocalyptic, existential, and dystopian. Her two great works of poliscifi, Frankenstein (1818), and The Last Man (1826) – confront the social problems that arise from humanity's technological and cultural interventions in the wider environment. This article recovers The Last Man not only as the first modern post-apocalyptic pandemic novel, but also as an important source for the existentialist tradition, dystopian literature, and their intersections with what I call ‘Literary IR’. Comparing The Last Man with its probable sources and influences – from Thucydides and Vattel to Orwell and Camus – reveals Shelley's ethical and political concerns with the overlapping problems of interpersonal and international conflict. The Last Man dramatises how interpersonal conflict, if left unchecked, can spiral into the wider sociopolitical injustices of violence, war, and other human-made disasters such as species extinction, pandemics, and more metaphorical ‘existential’ plagues like loneliness and despair. Despite these dark themes and legacies, Shelley's authorship of the great plague novel of the nineteenth century also inspired a truly hopeful post-apocalyptic existential response to crisis and conflict in feminist poliscifi by Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, and Emily St. John Mandel.

The Political Fiction of “Immigrants” and the Coming Community in the Anthropocene Age

The Political Fiction of “Immigrants” and the Coming Community in the Anthropocene Age

‘Fantasies of Catastrophe’: Politics and Race in the Early Novels of Julio Cortázar

This paper examines politics and race in the early novels of Julio Cortázar - those written before Rayuela (1963), sometimes called his ‘Argentine trilogy’, and published after the author’s death. Despite Cortázar’s later public statements about the importance of an author’s engagement with politics, it is the analytical acumen in the realist aspects of these often fantastical novels, rather than a commitment to a stance, or a political message, that ensures the continued potency of his works as political fictions. Furthermore, recent critical investigations of race and racism in Argentina deepen our understanding of the author’s politics through reference to these questions. Cortázar admitted later in life that his former self shared many of the prejudices of his narrators and characters. We aim to nuance Beckman’s recent assertion that Cortázar displays ‘racist […] assumptions embedded within his vision of universality’ (2018) by setting these works against the background of race and politics in Argentina.