Analyzing apocalyptic narratives from a global, trans-historical, and inter-media perspective, Out of Time pushes us to rethink collapse, survival, and persistence outside the major Euro-American models.

By bringing minority and postcolonial authors into focus, Out of Time re-frames and pluralizes our perspective on the end of the world. The authors explore how writers, filmmakers, and artists from the Global South draw on indigenous knowledge and subaltern memory to fashion “ex-centric” futurisms.

Understudied works from the peripheries of the world expose the false universalism of Euro-American apocalyptic writers. This volume features texts from Argentina, Ghana, Haiti, and Indonesia that fashion “locally sourced” dystopian experiences out of their unique pre- and postcolonial political-ecological trajectories. While an obsession with a monolithic modernity marks many of the theoretical and literary texts of the Euro-American canon, contributors to this volume stage how the experimental fictions, B-movies, and graphic novels of China, Iraq, Japan, Mexico, and South Africa work with uneven and unpredictable temporalities.

In this spirit, Out of Time includes scholars of the medieval, early modern, and colonial periods who radically de-center and re-cast the expansive global genealogies of apocalyptic and dystopian imaginings. Together, this collection enables readers to trace new kinships, constellations, and solidarities across eras and continents.