Introduction

Crisis” is a polysemic concept which lends itself to a multiplicity of interpretations that depend both on the types of ideological and cultural approaches used to give it meaning, and on the usage that has been made of it to make sense of historical events, institutional transformations, structural, material and cultural changes against diverse, volatile and often antagonistic social and economic environments. This issue of LCM investigates, and starts a conversation on, the notion of “crisis” through the lens of the manifold analytical, narra¬tological, affective, literary, linguistic and discursive strategies which are being developed across different cultural, historical and geographical environments. At the same time, we suggested contributors could explore relations regarding process, affect, context, subjec¬tivity, emplacement and embodiment, which we deem to be particularly relevant and fruitful axes intersecting and connecting diverse research areas and particularly apt to foster interdisciplinary developments. The issue collects essays pertaining to a variety of interests – such as, but not exclusively, cultural and literary studies, history, geography, anthropology, sociology, law – which might help shed new light on the processes of contamination, hybridization and globalization under way in contemporary society, as well as on the communicative, linguistic and cultural mediation dynamics on which they rely. Contributors were invited to highlight the cultural dimen¬sions of “crisis”, or of particular crises, related to multiple geographical, historical, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds, both from the perspec¬tive of the present and within a longue durée framework. Consequently, the authors participating in this issue explore different nodes and inflections of the semantic and ideological knots represented by “crisis”. They approach this interdisciplinary, open-ended conver¬sation by offering probes and conceptual explorations of specific events, authors, ideas, and representations. Above all, they resist the unreflective use that many public discussions of “crisis” propose today and, through their literary, cultural, ideological, linguistic, and geographical contex¬tualizations, respond to the risk that the meaning overload of “crisis” might translate into oversimplification and irrelevance. Although these contributions illuminate different angles and entail various approaches, their diversity concurs to sketch a critical geography which is all but random and helps to broaden and compli¬cate current takes on “crisis” across the disciplines. To begin with, they favour a dialogue between usually discrete sources and references.