Call for Contributions: Edited collection of essays "London 2010plus: Representations of the City in Contemporary British Culture and Literature" (eds. Oliver Lindner & Ralf Schneider)

The opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games on the evening of 27 July in London’s Olympic Stadium, a spectacular showcasing of the British nation, its culture and its capital, fascinated viewers all over the world. By hosting the Olympic Games, London has cemented its status as a, or perhaps even the cosmopolitan city. Only one year before the Games, the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, on 29 April 2011, had likewise attracted immense media attention. The carriage procession of Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012 was also broadcast worldwide. Thus, the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century has furnished the capital of Great Britain with a virtually unprecedented amount of media coverage, not only via TV or radio, but also on the internet with its manifold social media networks and news sites.

Since 2010, the city has not only hosted a string of celebratory national and global media events, but has also witnessed riots and anti-capitalist protest, and thereby brought into focus London’s status as a site of political action and urban subversion. Over the past five years, immigration has also remained a hotly debated issue. The 2011 census revealed that, for the first time, less than half of London’s population was actually white, testifying to the city’s ever-growing ethnic diversity. Indeed, although London, in today’s increasingly globalised and globalising world, is regarded as the ‘paradigmatic world city’, the Tory government’s recent policy of deterring immigration from south-eastern Europe and non-EU countries, even via TV spots and mobile billboard adverts, has ushered in a new era of immigration policy.

While the building of the Shard London Bridge, inaugurated in 2012 as London’s highest skyscraper, reshaped the city’s skyline and demonstrated the apparent limitlessness of the business world as well as the affluence of the super-rich inhabiting the upper floors, the economic crisis of 2008 sent shockwaves through the City which continue to undermine London’s status as a hub of global finance. Finally, the fatal assault on a British soldier in May 2013 by attackers claiming to have acted in the name of Islam has reignited the city’s fear of ‘homegrown terrorism’ and has put the metropolis back on the frontline for the first time since the attacks of July 2007.

Even in consideration of London’s long and eventful history, the last five years have seen an extraordinary accumulation of outstanding cultural, social and political events, making some of the traditional metropolitan issues and the social, economic, topographical and political tensions of the city appear in a new light. The aim of this collection of essays is to explore the new qualities of London as a metropolis of the 21st century and as a site of negotiation. We invite contributors to address these events and issues and to capture their cultural, filmic and literary repercussions. Proposals for papers may, for example, wish to investigate:

- the branding of London as Olympic city
- post-Olympic London and the East End
- the new role of London in staging monarchy
- the 2011 London riots
- multicultural London after the 7/7 bombings
- London as site of political struggles by LGBT people and other minority groups
- the recent development of immigration/immigration policy in London
- London in the aftermath of the economic crisis/metropolitan austerity
- London in contemporary film and literature
- London in digital arts, photography, music
- London and/in Web 2.0

Please send us your abstracts (250-300 words). The call for papers will close on 15 December 2013.
The finished articles will be due on 30 June 2014. We intend this collection of essays to be published by an international publisher in 2014/2015.