Literary and Cultural Perspectives on Communities in Fiction
Guest editors
Adrián Arana-Armesto (Universidad del País Vasco)
Patricia García Santos (Universidad de Córdoba)
Call for Papers for a Special Issue of the Journal of Artistic Creation and Literary Research (JACLR)
Deadline: 15th February 2027
If there is one key defining concept without which the ‘cultural turns’ (Bachman-Medick's term) of the past decades cannot be fully understood, it is the notion of community. The profound social, political, cultural, and scientific transformations that mark modernity and our contemporary days have radically changed the way collective structures relate to one another and within their own formation. Consequently, the concept of community has increasingly gained popularity due to its centrality to contemporary debates on belonging, identity, relationality, and (non-)human coexistence.
Traditional readings of community define it around shared identity, territory, ethnicity, religion, or national belonging. Conversely, and moving beyond these essentialist categories, foundational works by Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, Roberto Esposito, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Victor Turner, and J. Hillis Miller have argued in favor of community as a fragile, relational, and ethically unfinished mode of coexistence. Therefore, these challenges have resulted in the opening of new perspectives to grasp literature, culture, politics, and ethics from a renewed communitarian lens.
Miller defines ‘community’ in his foreword to the volume of Secrecy and Community in 21st-century Fiction as “a group of people who share many assumptions and experiences” (2021, xiii). This apparently simple definition complicates the whole debate because contemporary literary studies have increasingly turned to questions of relationality, hospitality, intimacy, secrecy, trust, vulnerability, trauma, ecology, and collective memory to understand community, therefore, demonstrating the centrality of the concept as a critical framework for understanding both texts and the worlds they imagine.
This special issue seeks to bring together scholars working on community from diverse angles. We welcome contributions that engage with Community Studies exploring how literary and cultural productions imagine, construct, challenge, or reconfigure forms of being-in-common. In doing so, the issue also builds on a growing body of scholarship that has examined the significance of community in twentieth- and twenty-first- century literature, including the foundational work of Martín-Salván, Rodríguez Salas, and Jiménez Heffernan (2013), as well as López and Villar-Argáiz (2021) and Pérez-de-Luque and Martín-Salván (2025). This special issue aims to extend these conversations by fostering new interdisciplinary dialogues on the multiple forms, possibilities, and limits of being together in contemporary culture.
Topics of Interest
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Community, alterity, and vulnerability: studies of how communities negotiate difference, otherness, and exclusion.
- Community and the politics of transparency, opacity and secrecy: approaches that examine secrecy, unknowability, and the limits of mutual understanding and/or its counterpart: visibility, disclosure, surveillance, and the demand for openness within communal life.
- Poetics of affects, intimacy, and community: investigations of personal relationships as sites of communal formation and negotiation and analyses of emotions, attachment, and shared feelings in the construction of communities.
- Representations of violence in community: investigations of how communities are sustained, challenged, or fractured through violence.
- Ecological and multispecies communities: examinations of relationships between human and non-human forms of life.
- Indigenous communities and decolonial perspectives: studies of Indigenous forms of belonging and decolonial critiques of dominant community models.
- Community and Genres: explorations of literary and sociopolitical genres from the lens of communitarian theory.
- Community in Western and frontier narratives: examinations of settlement, mobility, violence, and belonging in frontier spaces.
- Community and migration: studies of displacement, mobility, and the formation of new communal bonds.
- Community and diaspora: explorations of transnational identities, memory, and dispersed forms of belonging.
- Community, trauma and memory: investigations of shared suffering, postmemory, and communal recovery.
- Comparative approaches to community across cultures: cross-cultural and transnational analyses of communal practices, representations, and theories.
Submissions may focus on any literary period, genre, national tradition, or cultural medium.
Authors can reach the guest editors with any question at adrian.arana@ehu.eus and patricia.garcia@uco.es.
Submission Guidelines
Please follow the submission guidelines of the journal, as well as the templates when submitting: https://reunido.uniovi.es/index.php/jaclr/about/submissions. Please indicate that you are sending your contribution to the special issue Literary and Cultural Perspectives on Communities in Fiction.
- Full Articles. Potential authors can contact the guest editors regarding their proposals.
- Film and book reviews.
- Creative pieces (e.g., poems, short stories, short videos, etc.).
Accepted articles should:
- Be written in English.
- Follow MLA 9th edition style.
- Be between 4,000 and 8,000 words, including notes and works cited.
- Present original and unpublished research.
- Undergo double-blind peer review.
Recommended bibliography
Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Translated by Michael Hardt, U of Minnesota P, 1993.
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford UP, 1998.
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh UP, 2004.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised ed., Verso, 2006.
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. U of Chicago P, 1958.
Blanchot, Maurice. The Unavowable Community. Translated by Pierre Joris, Station Hill Press, 1988.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Hospitality. Translated by Rachel Bowlby, Stanford UP, 2000.
Esposito, Roberto. Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community. Translated by Timothy Campbell, Stanford UP, 2010.
Esposito, Roberto. Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life. Translated by Zakiya Hanafi, Polity Press, 2011.
Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing, U of Michigan P, 1997.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis, Duquesne UP, 1969.
López, María J. “Introduction: Secrecy and Community in Twenty-First- Century Fiction.” Secrecy and Community in Twenty-First-Century Fiction, edited by María J. López and Pilar Villar-Argáiz, Bloomsbury Academic, 2021, pp. 1–19.
Martín-Salván, Paula, Gerardo Rodríguez-Salas, and Julián Jiménez Heffernan, editors. Community in Twentieth-Century Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Miller, J. Hillis. The Conflagration of Community: Fiction before and after Auschwitz. U of Chicago P, 2011.
Miller, J. Hillis. Communities in Fiction. Fordham UP, 2015.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural. Translated by Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O'Byrne, Stanford UP, 2000.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Inoperative Community. Edited by Peter Connor, translated by Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney, U of Minnesota P, 1991.
Pérez-de-Luque, Juan L., and Paula Martín-Salván, editors. Democracy, Secrecy and Dissidence in Contemporary Fiction in English. Peter Lang, 2026.
Pérez-de-Luque, Juan L., and Paula Martín-Salván, editors. Modernist Belongings. Studies on Community, Identity, Adscription. Comares, 2025.
Simmel, Georg. “The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 11, no. 4, 1906, pp. 441–498.
Tönnies, Ferdinand. Community and Civil Society. Edited by José Harris, translated by José Harris and Margaret Hollis, Cambridge UP, 2001.
Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Aldine Publishing Company, 1969.
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. Oxford UP, 1973.