Contribution short abstract:

Gaia Giuliani's last book Monsters, Catastrophes and the Anthropocene: A Postcolonial Critique (Routledge 2021) explores European and broader Western imaginaries of natural disaster, mass migration and terrorism through a postcolonial inquiry into modern conceptions of monstrosity and catastrophe.

Contribution long abstract:

This paper introduces Gaia Giuliani's last book Monsters, Catastrophes and the Anthropocene: A Postcolonial Critique, which explores European and broader Western imaginaries of natural disaster, mass migration and terrorism through a postcolonial inquiry into modern conceptions of monstrosity and catastrophe. This book examines established icons of popular visual culture in sci-fi, doomsday and horror films and TV series, as well as in images reproduced by the news media to trace the genealogy of modern fears as well as of ontologies and logics of the Anthropocene. By logics of the Anthropocene, the book refers to a set of principles based on ontologies of exploitation, extermination and natural resource exhaustion processes that determine who is worthy of benefiting from value extraction and being saved from catastrophes and who is expendable. Fears for the loss of isolation from the unworthy and the expendable are investigated here as originating anxieties against migrants’ invasions, terrorist attacks and planetary catastrophes, in a thread that weaves together re-emerging ‘past nightmares’ and future visions.