Abstract

This book explores the concept of complicity with regard to the politics of representation. Over the past decades, complicity critique has evolved and become integral to literary and cultural studies. Nonetheless, the concept of complicity remains fundamentally underresearched. Addressing topical and exigent concerns such as white supremacy, war and displacement, child abuse and mentalism, this timely volume explores how producers, texts, consumers and critics can either intentionally or unwittingly become complicit in the creation and perpetuation of social harm – and how the structures supporting such complicities can be resisted. The contributors aim to raise awareness and lay the groundwork for a utopian ‘radical unfolding’ that enables not just non-complicity, i.e. the refusal to be complicit, but anti-complicity – the active and collective resistance to social harm.
Cornelia Wächter is Assistant Professor of British Cultural Studies at the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. She is the author of Place-ing the Prison Officer: The ‘Warder’ in the British Literary and Cultural Imagination (Brill, 2015) and co-edited Middlebrow and Gender, 1890-1945 (Brill, 2016) with Christoph Ehland.

Robert Wirth is a Research Assistant in the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Paderborn, Germany, lecturing in English Language and British Cultural and Literary Studies.