Toxicity in Contemporary Global Fiction: Perspectives from the Environmental Humanities
Due Date: 10-06-2025
A growing body of fiction across the globe—from novels and films to plays, graphic narratives, and experimental forms—has begun to seriously grapple with the human and environmental toll of industrial agriculture, chemical contamination, and extractive development. In the wake of decades of toxic agrochemical use and the growing presence of microplastics and heavy metals in soils, waters, and bodies, contemporary works of fiction bring increasing focus to the toxic legacies and uneven distribution of environmental harm. While scholars have approached many “toxic fictions” from within their respective national or regional contexts, these works have been less frequently studied as part of a larger global and transdisciplinary context.
This volume thus proposes to bring together chapters on representations of chemical toxicity in contemporary global fiction, with a particular focus on environmental humanities perspectives. Contributions might assess the impact of pesticides, plastic pollution, post-industrial waste, pharmaceuticals, mining residues, or nuclear fallout. Central to the volume is the recognition that toxicity is not only a scientific or ecological condition, but also a cultural, political, and historical one—shaped by structural factors such as colonial violence, racial capitalism, gendered labor, and infrastructural neglect. The volume seeks contributions that investigate how fiction—broadly defined—narrates, critiques, and responds to toxic exposure and its bodily, social, and environmental consequences.
Chapters will ideally focus on late-20th- and 21st-century topics; they may be comparative or focused on a single case or text; they may address fictional works from any region; and they might treat one or more of the following topics:
Agrochemical contamination and corporate harm
Environmental racism and environmental justice
Environmental and medical humanities perspectives
Toxicity in colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial contexts
Gendered and reproductive dimensions of toxic exposure
Posthuman, interspecies, or non-anthropocentric approaches
Representations of “slow violence” and the invisibility of harm
Experimental or speculative narrative strategies for representing pollution
The ethics of documentary or testimonial fiction in polluted contexts
Cross-media or multimodal representations of environmental contamination
Completed chapters should be approximately 5,000 words, including references and endnotes (not exceeding 25 pages). A range of methodological approaches—including literary analysis, cultural studies, ecocriticism, decolonial theory, and environmental justice studies—and contributions from diverse geographical and disciplinary perspectives are welcome. The final manuscript will be approximately 300 pages in length.
Potential chapters may include:
Toxicity and Coloniality
Reading the Bhopal Tragedy: Entanglements, Exchanges, and Technology
How Toxic Exposure Engenders Life in Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation
The Production and Consumption of Bodies in Cadáver exquisito
Toxic Realities in Under the Feet of Jesus
Ethical Questions in Documentary Fiction: Plastic Mulch in Farming
Please send chapter proposals of no more than 500 words as a Word attachment to the editor, David A. Vivian, at dvivian@soka.edu, no later than 5 p.m., Monday, 6 Oct., 2025. Acceptance of proposals will be communicated by the end of October. Completed chapters will be due by Sunday, 1 Feb., 2026. Questions may be sent to dvivian@soka.edu.