Transscalar Critique

Brings together Black studies, African American literature and public policy to argue for the causal role that literature plays in shaping a more sustainable and equitable future The history of the contemporary is a history of crisis - most centrally, the twinned crises of environmental destruction and anti-Black violence. Transscalar Critique argues that contemporary Black literature navigates this by taking a transscalar approach, understanding crisis as working on multiple scales simultaneously, from the molecular to the geological, from the economic to the aesthetic. As a consequence, it proposes transscalar critique as a mode of literary criticism. Organised around specific crises and authors, Transscalar Critique argues that crisis offers a window into how competing analytical, artistic and planetary frameworks collide. In a moment of crisis, questions of race, geology, politics, epistemology and ontology are brought into focus in surprising and unexpected ways and Transscalar Critique uses the literary, critical and public policy responses to these events to reveal connections between the human and nonhuman worlds. Henry Ivry is a lecturer in 20th and 21st Century Literature in the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow.