Introduction

This collectively written essay in four parts makes an original contribution to crisis research by exploring how crisis narratives structure time and space, that is, the ways ‘crisis’ as a framework, concept, rhetoric, affective, and discursive structure forms or taps into specific chronotopes. In our hyper-interconnected times, the simultaneous experience of many transversal crises—past and present, global and local, chronic and short-lived—is particularly acute. This simultaneity and transversality of crises invite rigorous theorization, critical responses, and finding new languages to speak to this complexity. Through Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope, we broach questions of crisis, time, and space, as experienced, imagined, and represented across various contexts, including Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. Chronotopes of crisis partake in complex constellations of meanings, discourses, and affective structures that call for interdisciplinary engagement. This book combines several disciplinary perspectives to consider how contemporary crises—economic, environmental, social, political, humanitarian—trigger memories of earlier narratives, traumas, or practices of resistance, and how they foster or foreclose visions of the future. Reading crisis through the chronotope, we also revisit the relation of crisis with critique, aiming to address problematic mobilizations of crisis today and discern future trajectories for thinking and living in and through crisis.