Call for papers - Deadline 31 October 2026 Apocalypse now what? Capitalism and the end of the world

Famously, infamously, and cited ad nauseum, Fredric Jameson wrote in 1994’s Seeds of Time that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism, a formulation that Slavoj Zizek later borrowed to ask why we cannot even seek to reform capitalism at all. More recently, the late Mark Fisher returned to this line of inquiry to demonstrate how Capitalist Realism depends upon the mantra that there is no viable alternative to capitalism. At last, we have begun to see some scattered indications that our apocalyptic imaginaries may have begun to cross this threshold, carving out fictional spaces wherein we can imagine otherwise or mourn our own entrapment in a system that will survive us all. At last, our “monsters” may be taking on post-capitalist forms. Their images do not merely furnish fertile ground for the imagination — they oblige us to think what may come after capitalism’s collapse.

Reading contemporary pop-cultural texts through Fredric Jameson’s critique of late capitalism and his theorization of the apocalypse as the horizon of ideological imagination, we ask how it is possible to stage the persistence of capital, grief, and meaning after the end of history has already been announced or enacted. A paradigmatic example is the 28 Later series. The 2002 film 28 Days later arguably rebooted the zombie apocalypse as faster, stronger, and scarier pandemic nightmare for the new millennium, an apt rebrand for the undead in the era of advanced capitalism. But can the first two installments of the 28 Years Later cycle (2025, Danny Boyle & Alex Garland), sequels to the 2002 film, be read as imagining the emergence of hope that humanity might persist beyond the collapse of capitalism through communities organized around mutual aid, shared resources, and collective protection? Or does this narrative suggest that a few will always revert to strategies of appropriation over collaboration (as exemplified by Jimmy’s marauding gang)?

The imagination of apocalypse can also be subverted. Rather than staging catastrophe as spectacular rupture, some texts reimagine the “post-apocalypse” as displaced continuation. The Leftovers (HBO, 2014–2017) is exemplary here, recasting the post-apocalyptic not as the end of the world but as its afterlife — an extended, undramatic continuation organized around endless, unresolved mourning. In this afterlife of social relations, catastrophe is no longer an event but becomes an ordinary form of existence. Rupture is no longer something to be survived but a condition to be inhabited. A different variation on this logic can be found in Fallout, which invites us to reflect on the post-apocalypse as a continuation of capitalist realism rather than its rupture. Here, ruin becomes aestheticized order and survival is fully absorbed into systems of extraction and control, repackaged as commodity, spectacle, and routine. The series stages a world in which the end of the world is endlessly repeated, without exit, a catastrophe normalized to the extent that it forecloses any possible outside, except for nostalgic affects.

These texts are valuable not because they accurately depict a future society marked by failure or mourning, but because they estrange the present. In Jameson's sense, they reveal that what appears natural and inevitable—capitalism, private property, wage labour, and the organization of social life itself—is historically contingent and therefore open to transformation.

By contrast, the recent series Pluribus (admittedly still an unfinished text, with only its first season released) asks us a different question altogether: whether the end of the individual subject position-- and with it the end of an exploitative system working for the benefit only of the few-- would really amount to an apocalypse, or could it be the Utopia we haven’t dared to dream of. These are just some of the many recent apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic texts that ask us to consider where we are, in this moment so steeped in apocalyptic affect, in relation to Jameson’s proclamation that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The decisive issue is not whether these narratives depict a more perfect society, but whether they expand the horizon of what can be politically imagined.

We welcome submissions on any recent (pre- to post covid) pop cultural texts that contribute to our contemporary understanding of apocalyptic imaginaries. While we expect submissions on film, television, videogames, literature and graphic novels, we would be happy to consider offerings that defy medial boundaries or work within other disciplines, such as performance or art. We welcome contributions that transcend the fictional conventions of known genres but also works that flesh out apocalyptic imaginaries by drawing from unconventional aesthetic means.

Prospective contributors may consider examining texts such as:

• Mourning capitalism's triumph: affects, grief and meaning at “the end of history”

• Apocalyptic temporalities (post-apocalypse as displaced continuation, ruin as aestheticized order, capitalist realism without exit)

• Genre and form across the apocalyptic imaginary (sci-fi, analog horror, cli-fi, zombie fiction and outbreak narratives, surrealism, satire)

• Extraction, control, and the politics of survival (resource-sharing communities vs. marauding appropriation, systems that absorb survival into themselves)

• The end of the subject as utopia or dystopia (collective vs. individual personhood, exploitative systems and their unmaking)

• Pandemic and outbreak imaginaries (zombie apocalypse, viral nightmare, post-2020 reboots of contagion narrative)

• Apocalyptic storytelling across media (film, television, videogames, graphic novels)

• Capitalist Realism and the foreclosure of alternatives (Jameson, Fraser, Žižek, Fisher, Berlant)

• World-ending as repetition vs. rupture (slow apocalypse, endless apocalypse, displaced continuation, exit and non-exit)

We imagine contemporary pop-cultural case studies speaking to these themes could engage convincingly with a large variety of texts (Pluribus, Disco Elysium, Fallout, Station Eleven, The Last of Us, Severance, 28 Years Later vol. 1 & 2, Department of Truth and others)

We also welcome submissions engaging other perspectives and topics.

Please submit your abstract (250 words) alongside a short biographical note (50 words) by October 31, 2026.

If your abstract is accepted, we will invite you to submit a full article by January 31, 2027. Full articles will be about 8,000 – 9,000 words long (including an abstract of 250 words, 3-5 keywords, references, footnotes, etc.)

All submissions must use author-date reference style, 12pt font, and at least 1.5 line spacing. Please check our style guide prior to submission.

Image caption: Artist Mateusz Szczypiński, “Tha ball of the fading stars,” ed.5 + 2AP, 2020, image used with permission.

Please submit your article via email at slauro@ut.edu

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