Feb 6, 2023

Heterotopic World Fiction

Thinking Beyond Biopolitics with Woolf, Foucault, Ondaatje

Lesley Higgins and Marie-Christine Leps

Hosted by Iqra Shagufta Cheema

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Summary

Note: Sadly, Dr. Marie-Christine Leps passed away before the book came out. Via this conversation, we pay homage to her work that went into the making of this book and to her memories.

After more than a century of genocides and in the midst of a global pandemic, Lesley Higgins and Marie-Christine Leps's book Heterotopic World Fiction: Thinking Beyond Biopolitics with Woolf, Foucault, Ondaatje (Academic Studies Press, 2022) focuses on the critique of biopolitics (the government of life through individuals and the general population) and the counterdevelopment of biopoetics (an aesthetics of life elaborating a self as a practice of freedom) realized in texts by Virginia Woolf, Michel Foucault, and Michael Ondaatje. Their world fiction produces transhistorical, transnational experiences offered to the reader for collective responsibility in these critical times. Their books function as heterotopias: spaces and processes that recall and confront regimes of recognized truths to dismantle fixed identities and actualize possibilities for becoming other. Higgins and Leps define and explore a slant, biopoetic perspective that is feminist, materialist, anti-racist, and anti-war.

Iqra Shagufta Cheema writes and teaches in the areas of digital cultures, postcolonial literatures, transnational digital feminisms, gender and sexuality studies, and global south film studies. Check out their latest book: The Other #MeToos. Follow them on Twitter.