ABSTRACT Published in 2021, the novel The Island of Missing Trees by Turkish-British author Elif Shafak interlaces themes of love, loss, conflict, and struggle through alternating narrators both human and nonhuman, while switching geographically and temporally between Cyprus, both before and after the partition, and modern-day London. Within this multi-layered narrative structure, the reader is introduced to a number of characters whose stories of survival or demise unfold the damaging effects of war and the traumatic impact of migration. Among these experiences, two female registers stand out: those of a conscious fig tree and the love-lorn Defne, both of whom witness the horrors of atrocity and bear the scars of war intensely. Thus, this study examines the interconnectedness between these two characters within the framework of material ecocriticism with an emphasis on nomadic subjectivity to explore how the novel approaches the experience of migration as an entangled process. In the light of a discursive theoretical reading of the impact of migration on the human and nonhuman worlds, this work argues that both Defne and the fig tree share a common gendered experience of uprooting that empathetically intertwines the human and arboreal storyworlds represented in the novel.

ABSTRACT Manjula Padmanabhan’s speculative novels, Escape (2008) and The Island of Lost Girls (2015), insightfully portray women’s lives as wasted through their critique of femicide. Padmanabhan envisions a futuristic India where a misogynistic despot, the General, implements asexual reproduction techniques, rendering women obsolete. He orchestrates a femicide to cleanse society of women, whom he considers redundant and verminous. Meiji, the only survivor of the femicide, escapes the General’s country to Vane Island, a refuge for women. However, the Island mirrors the General’s sociogermophobic tendencies, upholding stereotypical femininity and ostracising Meiji as a contaminator for defying binary gender. Meiji resists the state of expendability by embracing her posthuman identity and forging intra-active bonds with animal cyborgs, challenging the very binaries that dehumanise and discard women as waste. We utilise Padmanabhan’s narratives to explore three key questions regarding the production of wasted lives, namely, how waste is defined by stigmatising women as vermin, how waste is eliminated through modernisation and replaceability, and how the state of waste can be transcended through posthuman possibilities. Our paper highlights how speculative fiction critiques the machinery of exclusion and dehumanisation that creates wasted lives, offering alternative frameworks for resistance and identity.

ABSTRACT Cynan Jones’s Everything I Found on the Beach (2011) is a sinister portrait of human life, showing how ambition and the search for better opportunities crash against the brutal reality of our contemporary times. Jones’s second novel is a profound meditation on how certain human beings dwell on the borders of our developed societies, while the pernicious consequences of neoliberal economy and globalisation cause unbearable marginalisation and injustice, thereby recalling Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of “wasted lives.” In my essay, I will discuss how Jones’s characters epitomise the growing volumes of human waste as an inevitable outcome of modernisation and globalisation, while the nonhuman acts as a witness to this sense of human waste and precarity. I will first address how the excluded and the economic migrants carry the stigma of their wasted lives, incarnating Bauman’s wasted humanity. I will then engage with how nonhuman matter infiltrates the narrative texture of Jones’s novel. By juxtaposing human voices with nonhuman matter, Everything I Found on the Beach allows all voices to be equally heard, thus showing how the struggle to survive brings together human beings, animals and inanimate objects through a polyphonic assemblage.

ABSTRACT This article demonstrates that, in response to justifications of slavery citing Whites’ civilising influence on supposedly wild, lawless Blacks, antislavery Blacks and White advocates strategically developed the trope of the “savage” White master whose excessive violence disqualified him from stewardship of the law, a racialised capacity with which White Britons and Europeans were supposedly endowed. In late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century literary and legal writings focusing on the West Indies and, in some cases, the American South, Black and White authors portray the White “brute” as they deplore violence towards the enslaved – violence that they represented as deemed excessive even by some planters, in the contexts of the early dearth of regulation and ineffectual later reforms. The article considers authors’ explanations of the development of White savagery, including intergenerational transmission, community contagion, and climatological degradation, and various solutions, including divine retribution, political reform, Black self-advocacy, military intervention, and the transplanting of British constitutional principles and due process to plantations.

ABSTRACT This article aims to shed light on the entanglement of images of migration and people’s affective reactions to those depicted. Our claim is that visual images carry and reproduce specific narratives about people migrating, which in turn influences legal decision-making and political responses to migration. For doing so, we will provide a qualitative, comparative study of the metaphorical structures of selected U.S. American and German magazine covers from 2015 to 2023. The corpus of visual texts and their framing has migration and mobility practices in relation to human rights as its topic. This time frame allows us to trace the public discourse about migration through several stages which were important for the German and U.S. American cultural-legal context. We claim that Germany and the U.S. are comparable in terms of how migration is narrativised: Similar visual means have found their way into migration discourse in both countries as can be seen in recurring visual tropes.

ABSTRACT This introduction celebrates the diversity, multiplicity, and regional specificity of English Studies world-wide and argues for practising a postnational English Studies.

ABSTRACT This special issue of the European Journal of English Studies explores a concept with high visibility and increasing popular currency: empathy. Its seven articles analyse the forms and effects of empathic interactions in language, literature, and culture throughout a variety of cultural products– films, poetry, science fiction, dystopia, children’s books. The title “Cultures of Empathy” is meant to emphasize to what extent social and (trans)cultural encounters are defined nowadays along the lines of empathy or of its lack. The articles carefully unpack “empathy”, the concept itself and pursue its many physical, ideological, and emotional entanglements. As these articles demonstrate, empathy remains at the centre of current debates about the fluid, affective overlaps involved in matters of inclusion, diversity, and social justice, and so it deserves further interdisciplinary research.