Overview

Beyond Safety argues that concerns about the ethical impossibility of individual safety in the face of risks with increasingly obvious global consequences alters representations of neoliberal contemporary life. As the climate crises in the Caribbean and Australia, ongoing European refugee and American border crises, and, most recently, anxieties about Coronavirus illustrate, contemporary life is characterized by global connections that produce and reflect precarious outcomes and dangers. The ability to ignore risk or shift it to others underscores the fact that it is mitigable for particular segments of society while inescapable for others. Emily Johansen investigates depictions of global danger and safety in contemporary transnational fictional and popular texts—those characterized by a narrative or representational emphasis on border crossing and global interdependences. She demonstrates how these texts use risk to question and re-imagine the norms and practices of contemporary global citizenship. Beyond Safety thus brings together three of the central keywords of contemporary literary criticism of the last ten years (cosmopolitanism, precarity, neoliberalism) and shows how their intersection allows for a fuller conception of contemporary life and imagines a new global future.

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9781501377013

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Reviews

Risk, precarity, and cosmopolitanism are key terms for capturing our contemporary malaise. With enviable conceptual clarity and through a series of incisive comparative readings, Beyond Safety demonstrates how recent literary fiction has reorganized these items into a new political grammar. Beautifully written and carefully argued, the book affirms the power of literature to challenge the residual privilege inherent in these terms and to risk connections beyond the individual and the nation. * Pieter Vermeulen, Associate Professor of American and Comparative Literature, University of Leuven, Belgium *

Risk, precarity, and cosmopolitanism are key terms for capturing our contemporary malaise. With enviable conceptual clarity and through a series of incisive comparative readings, Beyond Safety demonstrates how recent literary fiction has reorganized these items into a new political grammar. Beautifully written and carefully argued, the book affirms the power of literature to challenge the residual privilege inherent in these terms and to risk connections beyond the individual and the nation. * Pieter Vermeulen, Associate Professor of American and Comparative Literature, University of Leuven, Belgium * Beyond Safety is an impressive read, which makes an invaluable contribution to the study of a contemporary culture of precarity. Drawing together a remarkable range of scholarship, Emily Johansen provides us with alternative ways to read contemporary individualism. By pairing narratives of risk with the possibilities of cosmopolitanism, Johansen opens up the spaces for solidarity and connection in contemporary cultural texts. Whether she is reading literary fiction, zombie movies or restaurant criticism, Johansen offers deft, intelligent, and political cultural critique. * Liam Connell, Senior Lecturer, University of Brighton, UK *

Risk, precarity, and cosmopolitanism are key terms for capturing our contemporary malaise. With enviable conceptual clarity and through a series of incisive comparative readings, Beyond Safety demonstrates how recent literary fiction has reorganized these items into a new political grammar. Beautifully written and carefully argued, the book affirms the power of literature to challenge the residual privilege inherent in these terms and to risk connections beyond the individual and the nation. * Pieter Vermeulen, Associate Professor of American and Comparative Literature, University of Leuven, Belgium * Beyond Safety is an impressive read, which makes an invaluable contribution to the study of a contemporary culture of precarity. Drawing together a remarkable range of scholarship, Emily Johansen provides us with alternative ways to read contemporary individualism. By pairing narratives of risk with the possibilities of cosmopolitanism, Johansen opens up the spaces for solidarity and connection in contemporary cultural texts. Whether she is reading literary fiction, zombie movies or restaurant criticism, Johansen offers deft, intelligent, and political cultural critique. * Liam Connell, Senior Lecturer, University of Brighton, UK * Beyond Safety offers a nuanced, incisive, and timely account of cosmopolitan precarity and neoliberal risk. Exploring how novels represent the daily risks associated with food, viruses, and climate change, this book theorises a risky subject that sits at the heart of tensions around precarity and privilege in a globalising world. This book offers an important and exciting contribution to our understanding of how capitalist dynamics affect identity, social connection, and ethical possibility. It will be essential reading for those seeking to understand the cultural operations of a risk economy. * Shameem Black, Fellow, School of Culture, History and Language, Australian National University, Australia * Johansen delivers an urgent and brilliantly insightful study responding the risks and shifting cultural interdependences of the contemporary moment. Beyond Safety will have a transformative effect on how we think about global citizenship as we face an increasingly uncertain future. A vital addition to the field of cosmopolitan studies. * Kristian Shaw, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, University of Lincoln, UK *

Author Information

Emily Johansen is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University, USA. She is the author of Cosmopolitanism and Place: Spatial Forms in Contemporary Anglophone Literature (2014) and co-editor, with Alissa G. Karl, of Neoliberalism and the Novel (2018) and Rereading Empathy (2022). She has published articles in Ariel, Contemporary Literature, and Textual Practice.

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