Middle East Critique

Marxist Approaches to Literatures of the Global South

The recent critical return to the Global South has not always yielded an adequately materialist account of the historical forces that constitute it as a geopolitical, economic, and aesthetic formation. Literatures of the Global South are still too often approached through the vocabularies of trauma, memory, identity, representation, and cultural difference, while the structural conditions that organise these experiences, including capital accumulation, imperial violence, racialised extraction, labour exploitation, debt, dispossession, militarism, and ecological devastation, remain analytically secondary. This special issue begins from the premise that the Global South is neither a mere geographical designation nor a repository of postcolonial suffering, but a terrain historically produced through capitalist unevenness, anti-imperial struggle, and aesthetic experimentation.

Marxist criticism offers a powerful vocabulary for approaching these questions, yet it also requires rethinking from the standpoint of Global South literary production. This special issue, therefore, does not treat Marxism as a ready-made theoretical apparatus which can simply be applied to non-Western texts. It asks, instead, how literatures of the Global South might revise, extend, or unsettle inherited categories of Marxist analysis. How do literary texts from the Global South register the lived abstractions of capital, empire, labour, race, land, gender, and social reproduction? How do they give form to uneven development, dependency, occupation, debt, migration, ecological ruin, and revolutionary defeat? How might they compel us to move beyond the familiar opposition between materialist and postcolonial/decolonial criticism?

The issue proceeds from the conviction that class is still indispensable to the study of Global South literatures: not as a reductive master category, but as a necessary analytic for articulating the production of race, gender, coloniality, migration, ecology, and displacement within the historical conditions of capitalism and empire. It examines literary texts as sites of theorisation around capital, labour, coloniality, and resistance and moves beyond readings which isolate identity, trauma, or representation from the material histories of capitalism, imperialism, and colonial violence. It therefore seeks contributions which bring Marxist literary criticism into dialogue with decolonial theory, racial capitalism, materialist feminism, world-literature, and anti-imperial thought, and which consider the capacity of Global South literatures to challenge, extend, and transform the conceptual limits of Marxist criticism itself.

The issue invites articles that approach literature as a mediating space where the contradictions of global capitalism are registered, shaped, and critically negotiated. We are especially interested in work that reads literary form, genre, narration, temporality, translation, circulation, and aesthetic strategy as modes of historical thinking. The aim is to foreground scholarship that makes a critical and theoretical intervention in the study of Global South literatures, rather than merely adding new textual examples to established paradigms.

Contributions may engage fiction, poetry, drama, memoir, prison writing, testimonial literature, speculative fiction, refugee literature, migrant literature, diasporic literature, and other literary genres. Comparative, multilingual, diasporic, and transregional approaches are particularly welcome, especially those which engage Arab, Turkish, Kurdish, Persian, Palestinian, African, South Asian, Latin American, Caribbean, and other literary traditions of the Global South.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

- Marxism, postcolonialism, and decolonial critique

- Capitalism, imperialism, and literary form

- Uneven and combined development

- Dependency, world-systems theory, and peripheral modernity

- Necrocapitalism, war, occupation, and disposable life

- Settler colonialism, dispossession, and resistance

- Palestine and anti-imperial literary solidarity

- Racial capitalism, class, caste, ethnicity, and colonial difference

- Labour, migration, precarity, and informal economies

- Contemporary refugee, migrant, and diasporic literatures

- Border regimes and the political economy of displacement

- Social reproduction, gender, and materialist feminism

- Petrocapitalism, extractivism, and ecological crisis

- Land, agrarian struggle, and peasant resistance

- Borders, prisons, camps, and carceral regimes

- Revolution, defeat, exile, and left memory

- Translation, circulation, and Global South literary networks

- World-literature, realism, modernism, and capitalist totality

- Speculative fiction, dystopia, and capitalist catastrophe