Call for Papers for a Special Issue:

Forms of the Nation: Borders and Migration in the Contemporary Novel (Winter 2027)

Editors: Dr. Gabriele Lazzari (University of Surrey) and Dr. Peter Ely (Northeastern University London)

Since Benedict Anderson’s 1983 theorization of imagined communities, the historical alliance between the novel and the nation has been a key problematic of literary studies. And yet, in the post–Cold War decades, the centrality of the nation and its ideological weight seemed to wane. The rise of neoliberalism produced an ideology of free circulation of capital and goods, which heralded a new era of weakening national borders and enhanced cultural exchanges. In literary studies, this period saw the rise of a new critical field, world literature (Moretti, Damrosch), and the theorization of a World Republic of Letters (Casanova), which held a similarly borderless aspiration. Today, the resurgence of ethnonationalism and increasingly militarized borders demonstrate a return of a reactionary vision of the nation, departing markedly from Jameson’s inauspicious 1986 prognosis of nationalism as having been “liquidated” in countries like the USA and characteristic only of the literature and politics of the “third world.” This newly emboldened nationalism seeks to reclaim symbols of a racially and culturally homogeneous nation through the compulsion to exclude undesired migrants and racialized populations. 

This special issue starts from the premise that, whilst borders and migration are increasingly central thematic concerns for contemporary writers and critics, their representation continues to pose challenges to the novel as an aesthetic form and a technology which reproduces nationalist imaginaries. To explore these challenges, we seek contributions that address how contemporary novels frame border regimes’ encroaching power as ordering principles of civic life, as well as how novels engaging with borders and migration can work to contest these practices.

In recent years, new theoretical paradigms have articulated the politics of “border abolitionism” (Tazzioli and De Genova 2023) and the aesthetic potential of migration literature (Adair et al. 2024). At the same time, we should not underestimate how “internal borders” (El-Enany 2020)—premised on racial hierarchies and coloniality—continue to shape legal and discursive regimes. We are thus interested in contributions that take the novel as a peculiarly adequate form to explore how bordering practices and border crossings reinforce, rethink, or challenge national and transnational imaginaries. How do contemporary novels mediate these questions, and how has the stylistic of the novel changed in the past few decades? Is the maximalist, encyclopedic, or totalizing novel more conducive to the serious representation of nations, borders, and global migrations? Or are fragmented, speculative, and experimental forms better suited to framing these issues? Do autofiction and an aesthetic of “immediacy” (Kornbluh 2024) prevent the mediated articulation of global yet selectively bordered societies? And are canonical categories, such as realism and modernism, being redefined by these works?

We are interested in essays that approach these questions from a range of disciplinary and linguistic perspectives, not limited to Anglophone novels. Postcolonial, global, and comparative approaches are particularly welcomed, as well as perspectives that connect questions of form and novelistic discourse to the key thematics of the special issue.

The deadline to submit an abstract (500 words max) and a short bio (100 words max) is March 31, 2026. For those invited, full essays of 6,000-9,000 words (including footnotes and works cited) will be due on October 1, 2026. Send submissions or any questions to the issue’s editors: Gabriele Lazzari (g.lazzari@surrey.ac.uk) and Peter Ely (peterely88@gmail.com).