“Double-edged tools”: Reading genre from the margins

This introduction to the special issue “Breaking Convention: Genre Fiction in a Global Frame” begins by tracing the “world-literariness” of genre fiction, both in terms of the global reach of individual texts and the movement of genre tropes and conventions into a wide range of geographic and cultural contexts. Following John Frow, it approaches genre as unfixed and dialogic, but also foregrounds the role of the market in shaping “genre worlds”, in which power remains unequally distributed. Although genres like sci-fi, crime fiction, and romance have been disparaged as formulaic and reinforcing hegemonic ideologies, the articles in the issue grapple with their simultaneous potential for resistance, which should be of great interest to scholars engaged with the legacies of empire today. The authors explore how genre conventions can be transgressed and reimagined to challenge prevailing norms of gender and sexuality, class and caste, race and ethnicity, or wider geo-political structures of power. Ultimately, it is hoped that the issue will open up new and non-hierarchical lines of enquiry with genre as a means of cross-regional comparison and connection between the local and the global.