Given recent attempts to redefine life along non-biological and more-than-organic lines, questions of extinction need to be extended past the living and the sentient as traditionally understood. We are interested in papers that examine how the growing awareness of threatened plant and animal species as well as of those life forms that are extinct already has impacted the priorities, methods, and practices of theory across a whole range of fields and subfields. What are we to make of extinct or quasi-extinct (“obsolete,” “discontinued,” etc.) so-called inanimate things, some of which can be viewed these days solely in archives, museums, antique stores, and cobweb-filled attics? What about literary and cultural forms that are not popular anymore? What about no longer spoken languages, whose thriving, Darwin thought, is subject to laws comparable to animal life and biological survival? With these interrogations, this issue aims to step outside the human and its anthropocentric view of things and persons altogether and look not only at the human as a potentially extinct species itself in an Anthropocene that got out of (our) control, but also at the entire spectrum of beings whose existence is currently jeopardized by human actions. Accepted contributions will discuss how the way we do theory nowadays, whether in relation to gender, genre, decolonialization, class, materiality, the unconscious, pop culture, Big Data, World Literature, or any other subject of this import, is being shaped by the problematics and urgencies of extinction.

Focus Editors: Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Christian Moraru

Deadline for submissions: July 1, 2026. Learn more about the submissions process.