Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies
The series Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies is edited by the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies (CAPAS) at Heidelberg University. The series highlights thought-provoking voices and wide-ranging perspectives that explore the ends of worlds and their various cultural, political, and material implications.
Topics
A rupture of life on Earth is currently unfolding. What, then, does this rupture signify, not only in terms of being alive during such an upheaval, but also in terms of being alive to upheaval itself? Petrified: Living During a Rupture of Life on Earth takes the reader on a journey deep into the nature of our home, to give us the tools to learn how, in the middle of that rupture, to comport ourselves with honesty, clarity, culpability and intelligence.
The purpose of this journey is straightforward: to formulate the basis of a philosophy for living during this rupture of life on earth. A philosophy for living in the twenty-first-and-last century of life as we have known it on our planet. A toolkit, as it were, for living at the confluence between being petrified at the prospect of extinction, and becoming petrified in the most real and physical sense.
Lyrical, playful, and deadly serious, Petrified aims to provide a new worldview for a new world coming, creating a present-day fable about achieving fidelity to the vicissitudes of the cosmos. Wherein, the book asks: if desperate times call for desperate measures, how can the response be measured against its only true correlate – the cosmos?
Providing an overview of the symbolism of different civilisational collapsing experiences, the book explores the complexity of the Mexican cultural context and analyses the different ways in which narratives of the end of a World exhibit several axiological dimensions. The book will focus on the multi-faceted character of the imaginary and its expressions as a way of exploring the content as well as the character of the eschatological and axiological narratives. The collection aims to be a book that deals with the different connections between imaginaries, narratives, and representations of the end of a world. Therefore the book’s organisation will be an adempt to understand the different ways in which the end-time imaginaries turns into a complex scope of images, focusing on the content and the character of eschatological narratives.
The notion of apocalypse is an age-old concept which has gained renewed interest in popular and scholarly discourse. The book highlights the versatile explications of apocalypse today, demonstrating that apocalyptic transformations – the various encounters with anthropogenic climate change, nuclear violence, polarized politics, colonial assault, and capitalist extractivism – navigate a range of interdisciplinary views on the present moment. Moving from old worlds to new worlds, from world-ending experiences to apocalyptic imaginaries and, finally, from authoritarianism to activism and advocacy, the contributions begin to map the emerging field of Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies. Foregrounding the myriad ways in which collective imaginations of apocalypse underpin ethical, political, and, sometimes, individual experience, the authors provide key points of reference for understanding old and new predicaments that are transforming our many worlds.
