To think about the limits (of a text, of a being, of a place) is to think about adulteration. It is to recognise that, at their limits, things merge with other things.

This essay proposes that such thinking has taken on a particular urgency in our own time, an urgency that is at once biopolitical and geopolitical. The spread of a virus has forced us to examine our individual biopolitical limits, as the collapse of a geopolitical ideology – one which allied US capital to progressive democratisation – has forced us to examine the boundaries, between east and west, between north and south, that have shaped the global distribution of wealth and force.

Under these conditions there is a tendency to immerse ourselves in our own person, to withdraw from the porous limits of self, of household, of nation, to some ground zero of being. We look to the imagined grounds of a minimal life that is self-directed and self-sufficient, that is proof against contamination by whatever lies beyond its pale.

We might call this contracted state a condition of mere being – the mere being that remains when our political life, our being in relation to others, is attenuated or forsaken. But this essay suggests that close attention to literary accounts of mere being, from Henry James to Wallace Stevens to Samuel Beckett, helps us to see that poetic mereness is not a denial of shared being, but a particular means of imagining it, a means of approaching that place where we are conjoined with others. In tracing a poetic tradition of mere being, the essay argues that what we find in the dramatically denuded self is not a retreat from limits, but an encounter with them – an encounter which grants us a new way of imagining what Densher calls, in The Wings of the Dove, ‘our being as we are’.

It is a key element of DeLillo’s late style, this essay argues, that the tautology becomes its dominant formal feature. We might think of The Body Artist: ‘The word for moonlight is moonlight’. Or we might think of Zero K: ‘The ceiling was low, the bed was bedlike, the chair was a chair’.

This essay asks what the function and effect of the tautology is in late DeLillo, as this relates to his relationship with history on one hand, and with the materiality of embodied being on the other. In one sense, the tautology might appear to be the mark of a loss of attachment to the world, or to a historical materialism. The tautology might enact the failure of language to refer to anything beyond itself. But if this is so, the essay suggests that the tautology is the mark not only of a kind of failure of reference in late DeLillo, but also a new kind of referential structure, a new way in which language refers both to the body and to history, both to space and to time.

Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote has exerted a unique influence on the history of the novel, because it tests, more exhaustively than any other, the bonds that tie fiction to the world that it partly invents.

This essay argues that the work of J. M. Coetzee is shaped, to a significate degree, by his long dialogue with Cervantes, which turns around a critical examination of what is here called the ‘anatomy of realism’ – the capacity of realist works of art to enter into the structuring of our life worlds. Coetzee’s engagement with Cervantes can be felt throughout his writing career, but it comes into particularly sharp relief in his later work, and particularly in his 2013 novel The Childhood of Jesus. It is in this work, the essay argues, that Coetzee’s reanimation of Don Quixote is most productive, as it reaches towards a dramatically shifted conception of realism, and of the relation between the imagination and the world.

A focus on the nutrition of women before and during pregnancy was important in establishing the field of the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD). Maternal nutrition provided a means by which poor living conditions could be embodied and affect the development of the unborn baby. Historical evidence linking women’s nutrition to the size of the baby at birth was limited, but a plethora of research with laboratory animals ensued, with maternal diets manipulated to determine consequences for the offspring. This was necessary for the scientific acceptance of the theory. However, a narrow view of nutrition and its role in the first 1,000 days has held prominence, with pregnant women provided nutritional advice, behavioural interventions, and marketed products. This obscures the broad scope and implications of the DOHaD theory for health inequalities. We take a feminist science and technology studies (STS) approach to show how hegemonic nutrition and biopolitics pervade DOHaD research and pregnancy care in ways that render invisible the gendered dimensions of precarity, mothering, and food. We argue that both the scientific method and socio-political influences have constrained responses to DOHaD as an issue of social and reproductive justice.

The genre at the center of this essay—the Anglophone transmasculinity narrative in the long eighteenth century—was a popular and ubiquitous genre for imagining gender transformation and queer relations to sex, desire, and embodiment. I argue that the transmasculine figure was a crucial one for imagining transatlantic biopolitics, often embodying aspects of transformability long associated specifically with white masculinity in a settler colony. Thus, the genre is arguably more representative for the history of whiteness than it is for the history of either queer or trans imaginative or embodied life in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. However, it offers a compelling case study of a genre that can seem spectacularly hyperlegible for contemporary identification. These texts show how sexuality and gender came to be narrative genres in a print/public sphere with privileged relations to intertwined origin stories of the nation, American literary history, and modern queer/trans identities—and a very useful case study in the limits of looking for queer/trans representation in the genres that seem most readily assimilable into a legible prehistory of “queer American literature.”

The introduction provides an overview of current theoretical concepts in animal and environmental studies for examining historical equine-human relations and previews the book chapters. The author argues that the embodied experiences of historical horses created real-world entanglements with the political and social structures that aimed to define or control them. This animal imprint, made visible in governance structures, was one way that animals participated in early modern social relations and imperial ecologies, and also gave rise to numerous possibilities for feral or counter-intentional responses within an expanding early modern empire.

This chapter will address contrasting ways in which Argentine literature has reflected on, and borrowed from, scientific theories and practices. Many nineteenth-century writers (such as José Mármol, Eugenio Cambaceres, and Lucio V. Mansilla) drew on (pseudo-)scientific discourses to lend legitimacy to their arguments, while others developed a critical approach to the legacies of positivism in Argentina. Dystopian visions of the imbrication of science, technology, and the politics of authoritarianism dominate the twentieth century, in texts that explore the experience of mass society or dictatorship. However, this chapter will also highlight cases of much greater ambivalence, such as that of Roberto Arlt, in whose work the pursuit of science and technology becomes both an instrument of violence and a fount of beauty and liberation. Furthermore, it will construct an important genealogy of authors – from Eduardo Holmberg in the final decades of the nineteenth century through to the contemporary writer Marcelo Cohen – who have conducted innovative metafictional explorations into the relationship between literature and science, and who have understood the porous boundary between them to be a source of great creativity.

This chapter examines complex interplays of utopia/dystopia in the context of European colonization through two works: Alberto Yáñez’s postcolonial zombie narrative, “Burn the Ships,” and Yuri Herrera’s dystopian Signs Preceding the End of the World. These works grapple with biopolitical dialectics between utopia and dystopia, belonging and exclusion, and competing identities and epistemologies of mestizaje hybridity. Using as a starting point codices produced by mestiz@ scribes in the dystopian post-Conquest society of sixteenth-century New Spain, analysis draws from Damián Baca’s Mestiz@ rhetoric to demonstrate how these texts exemplify what he defines as a “powerful Mestiz@ rhetorical strategy” of nepantlism – “a strategy of thinking from a border space.” By self-reflexively engaging this Mestiz@ rhetoric through diegetic elements, these texts subvert hegemonic narratives of assimilation in the context of imperialism and the border.

The framework of environmental violence seeks to address the environmental and human health harms inflicted by the processes of production, especially including climate change and pollution. This paper brings a slow violence and critical knowledge production approach to strengthen the theoretical and methodological foundations in the environmental violence framework. We emphasize the contingent, political processes of the production of scientific knowledge, and how those processes change understandings of both violence and the environment. Our selection of the 1986 Chornobyl disaster as the case study for this chapter illustrates the mutually constructive processes of politics and knowledge production and how understating that mutual dynamic reveals the ways in which the slow environmental harms of Chornobyl were made visible. We aim to accomplish this task by using examples from the social monitoring program of the Department of Social Expertise (of the Institute of Sociology in the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine) in its tracking of the embodied environmental effects among sufferers of the Chornobyl disaster. Using the Department of Social Expertise’s data on Chornobyl sufferers, we demonstrate how focusing on the processes of knowledge production is a useful tool in assessing the harms of slow environmental violence.

This chapter aims to locate an emergent eco-consciousness in the poetry of Robert Lowell. It argues that in Life Studies and beyond, Lowell’s poetry explores the political production of uncertainty, and considers how anxiety was employed as a political tool used to enforce vigilance and compliance. In poems addressing the prospect of nuclear war, Lowell positions this production of anxiety as a biopolitical process aimed at both managing resistance to nuclear politics and normalizing the fallout – both literal and figurative – from US political, military, and industrial interests in atomic technologies. From an ecocritical perspective, Lowell’s poems demonstrate how, in the nuclear age, the Cold War state renders the natural environment an object of government control. Both the real and the psychological fallout of the atomic age are a prescient ecological threat predicated upon a cruel optimism that conditions Cold War subjects to be complicit in their own ecological ruin.

Michel Foucault argued that in the nineteenth century, the species became a population and became subject to political management. Foucault’s claim defines the political stakes of this book, whose point of departure is the loss of a theological ground for the species concept. As species become targets of political power, they become mutable and historically contingent. The book argues that a result is that species come to be identified with aesthetic categories and with symptomatic or unmotivated behaviors.

This chapter uses Don Delillo’s novel Zero K to consider the historical and structural relationship between bioethics and biocapitalism, particularly in the development of consent forms and contract labour. In this way, the essay examines the role human capital theory and transhumanism have played in influencing definitions of human nature and the bioethical frameworks predicated on these definitions. Using the techniques of literary narrative bioethics and feminist relational bioethics, the essay carefully interprets Zero K’s treatment of cryonics as a bioethical dilemma too often contained and constrained by historical and ideological conceptions of consent, which the novel seeks to critique. Ultimately, the chapter offers a form of posthuman literary narrative bioethics as an alternative methodology.

Exploring key trajectories of feminist anthropologies of reproduction, this chapter demonstrates how issues surrounding procreation and its prevention have provided the terrain for major insights about cultural and political dynamics since the very beginning of anthropology itself. The notion of stratified reproduction proved pivotal for broadening the ethnographic gaze on reproductive practices to include global processes, inspiring feminist anthropologists to highlight the multiple forms of inequality and the multiplication of inequalities within and across borders. The author focuses on theoretical debates that have both influenced the feminist anthropologies of reproduction and, in turn, been impacted by it – questions of Foucauldian biopolitics. The author begins by outlining Foucault’s notion of biopower, and then explores some of the diverse ways that feminist anthropologists have related to concepts of biopolitics in theorizing the study of reproduction. The third section illuminates anthropologies of abortion that have variously pursued feminist politics, and/or the analytical concerns of biopolitics, at times bringing them together and at others considering them to be discrete agendas. Finally, the chapter explores feminist anthropologies of abortion in state socialist and postsocialist societies, arguing that these political-economic and social contexts offer important directions for understanding reproduction, the state, and biopolitics.

Reformers chastised the colonial administration for its extractive military-fiscalism and its inability to generate new “state-ideas” as a peacetime power. Public works constructed under native rule had widely fallen into despair; in the Company era, the government rarely expended more than 1 percent of its revenue on their maintenance. In Chapter 3, I argue that reformers considered this parsimony to be an anomalous departure from both pre-colonial and metropolitan precedents. Aligning themselves with Sir Arthur Cotton, a doyen of irrigative canal engineering, they developed a biopolitical state-idea that tasked the colonial state with the preservation of human life. At the same time, they rebuked the colonial bureaucracy for its culture of obfuscation and demanded the establishment of a new “state-system” rooted in transparency.

This chapter explores a range of narrative fiction in Arabic in addition to two novels that hybridize Anglophone Arab literature with Arabic poetic influences. Theoretically anchored in critiques of bio/necropolitics, forced displacement, magical realist environmentalisms, and planetarity, the chapter examines eco-ambiguous visions of desertness in Ibrahim Al-Koni’s Gold Dust, forest/border thresholds in Hassan Blasim’s “Ali’s Bag,” bio-connective ambivalence in Rawi Hage’s Cockroach and Beirut Hellfire Society, and (eco)lienation in Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance. Stretching from the North African desert to the European forest, from the North American city to contested spaces in the Middle East, the (dis)located works by the diasporic writers addressed here trace the contours of a planetary geoaesthetics that is concerned with borders and their transgression, resistance to immunitary bio/necropower, and reconstructions of comemorative geographies. An Arabic diasporic literary geography hence emerges as an ever-expanding space of encounter for unbounded modes of being, witnessing, telling, and resisting.