Volume 24, Number 1-2, 2026 Surveillance and Literature Guest-edited by Stephanie J. Brown

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This article serves as the editor’s introduction to the Surveillance & Society special issue on “Surveillance and Literature.” It offers a synopsis of important developments in the relationship between literary studies and surveillance studies, with an emphasis on the years since surveillance studies’ late-2000s “cultural turn” (Monahan 2011). These developments include the broadening of the category of surveillance art to include literature and other media that are not primarily visual; the deeply-felt influence of scholars of race in general, and Blackness in particular, on both surveillance and literary studies; and a reckoning with “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff 2019) as an holistic framework for grasping the forces structuring contemporary surveillance. The article surveys recent work in literary surveillance studies and the essays in the issue, highlighting a shared focus on the affordances of literary work. These affordances include: understanding and responding to historical and contemporary surveillance practices, delineating forms of relationship among the watcher, the watched, and the powers that authorize surveillance, exploring the sensorium made available through narratives of surveillance, narrating resistance under surveillance regimes, and examining the various political projects mobilized by surveillance literature. The introduction maps out the issue’s expansive historical and geographic coverage and indicates how the issue’s authors take up some of surveillance studies’ key concepts. It concludes by gesturing to future directions for literary and surveillance scholars, and to the project of excavating modes of futurity imagined by literary surveillance narratives.

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This article investigates twenty-first-century literary depictions of contestations between the nuclear surveillance infrastructures of two of the largest democracies in the world—the United States and India. Recognizing that these disputes have shaped US-India relations since Indian independence from colonial British rule in 1947, this article examines how themes of deception—central to Cold War spy fiction—appear in contemporary literary works about surveillance conflicts between the two nations. These texts reflect mutual distrust: American surveillance portrays India as an irresponsible postcolonial nuclear power, while Indian countersurveillance depicts the US as a hypocritical and coercive hegemon who enables Pakistan’s nuclear program. With reference to these strategic conflicts over the politics and logic of knowledge about nuclear materials, infrastructures, bodies, ideas, and motivations, this article critically analyzes representative texts: an American novel and an Indian novel series—the American diplomat Matthew Palmer’s novel Secrets of State (2015) and the Indian novelist Shaunak Agarkhedkar’s tetralogy Let Bhutto Eat Grass (2017–2022). In revealing behind-the-scenes machinations of nuclear surveillance, this article highlights how literary productions are key cultural conduits for underscoring the importance of mutual trust in nuclear politics. Such trust, as the texts examined here show, requires moving beyond the rigid cycle of hiding and exposing secrets that has long characterized—and may still define—the tense relationship between two nuclear democracies, the United States of America and India.

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This article examines how modern ideas about and experiences with surveillance were formed in twentieth-century Iran by close reading and contextualizing the first modern science fiction in Persian literature, written by ‘Abd al-Ḥosayn San’atizāda in 1937 in Iran. This novella, Rostam in the Twenty-second Century, is a humorous commentary on the emerging modern surveillance in Pahlavi Iran. This article analyses the novella’s narrative strategies as a lens into the formation of Pahlavi surveillance. It begins by outlining the rudimental development of a surveillance regime as the state increasingly sought to monitor and control the public sphere, regulating not only people’s appearance and behavior but also their understanding of the past and their collective memory. Drawing from media theory, this state-based development is conceptualized as “surveillance dispositive,” which aims to detail how the Pahlavi state apparatus remediated and enforced a new national literary heritage as a strategy to observe and control the Iranian populations. The article then examines how this surveillance dispositif shaped emerging social experiences with state supervision and control. Drawing on surveillance studies and taking the novella as the primary object of analysis, it invokes the concept of the “surveillance imaginary” to elucidate how Iranian society grappled with a new condition of being watched under the Pahlavi surveillance regime. The novella is shown to diagram a narrative abstraction that reveals the relationship between the surveillance dispositif and its corresponding imaginary.

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Based on a formally sampled survey of 120 post-9/11 transatlantic science fiction (SF) novels in English published between 2002–2011 inclusive, and a thematic reading of thirty-eight of these works, this paper analyses the place and treatment of surveillance and security in the culture of Empire. The paper identifies several important post-9/11 interventions in SF and argues that, in comparison to some of the weak mainstream literary work on 9/11 and the Long War, SF has produced some of the bleakest and most insightful responses. However, it also argues that there is a clear transatlantic division between the critical, sharp, and cynical work being produced by British SF authors and the predominantly nostalgic, militaristic, or techno-utopian responses of North American SF authors. It concludes with some reflections not just on the place of post-9/11 surveillance and security in SF but on the continuing relevance of SF to critical surveillance and security studies, and in broader social terms.

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This article explores the interplay between theological and utilitarian conceptions of omniscience and moral accountability through a comparative analysis of hymns from Swedish trial services (1686–1989) and Jeremy Bentham’s writings on surveillance architecture, particularly the chapel, examining how they illuminate contrasting frameworks for transforming human behavior under an omniscient gaze. While Lutheran hymns depict God’s omniscience as a transcendent, relational presence fostering repentance and spiritual renewal through divine grace, Bentham’s panopticon reimagines omniscience as a secular mechanism of behavioral regulation, achieved through perpetual surveillance. The analysis identifies thematic as well as social parallels—such as the transformative impact of observation and the role of moral reform—while highlighting key divergences. Hymns emphasize voluntary spiritual transformation anchored in divine mercy, whereas the panopticon enforces conformity through external pressure and institutional control. Theological reflections on omniscience, omnipresence, and justice in the hymns underscore a relational and redemptive paradigm, in contrast to the panopticon’s utilitarian focus on societal order and efficiency. This study contributes to previous research and the interdisciplinary discourse on surveillance, ethics, and religion, revealing how theological and secular paradigms of observation shape divergent understandings of justice, moral accountability, and human transformation.

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This article argues that literature offers distinctive ways of theorizing and resisting surveillance by foregrounding multisensory experience, materiality, and human–nonhuman entanglement. Within surveillance studies, resistance is often framed through visual or data-centric practices such as sousveillance, stealth, or counter-monitoring. By contrast, literary texts can disrupt surveillance at the level of perception itself. Focusing on Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know (2014), the article proposes a multisensory ecological aesthetics of resistance that shifts attention away from visibility and human agency toward atmosphere, ordinary matter, and nonhuman actors. Through recurring motifs of dust, air, and smell, the novel challenges colonial and anthropocentric regimes that seek to render environments and bodies fully legible. These sensory and material elements generate forms of opacity and relationality that exceed the visual and informational logics of surveillance. By reading literature as a multisensory medium that reconfigures how surveillance is perceived and contested, the article shows how literary analysis expands surveillance studies beyond visuality and toward an ecological understanding of resistance.

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Dave Eggers’s novels The Circle (2013) and The Every (2021) explore the unsettling consequences of life under unrelenting digital scrutiny, shedding light on how constant connectivity can erode personal autonomy and reshape identity. In The Circle, Mae Holland’s rise from a private individual to a public figure demonstrates how technologies that promise social and professional benefits can, in practice, commodify human experiences. In The Every, Delaney Wells’s attempts to sabotage the company that succeeds the Circle reveal the overwhelming power of data-driven platforms and the difficulty of breaking free from them. Building on Shoshana Zuboff’s (2019a) concept of surveillance capitalism, this study examines how Eggers critiques a world where behaviour is traced, analysed, and exploited for profit. As characters navigate environments that demand perpetual sharing and content creation, they become cogs in an ecosystem that rewards performative participation over authentic connection. Sherry Turkle’s (1995, 2012, 2015) work on digital intimacy further illuminates the emotional toll of virtual interactions, illustrating how Eggers’s characters struggle to maintain genuine relationships when validation depends on algorithmic metrics. Eggers’s narratives raise urgent questions about privacy, selfhood, and agency. The relentless pursuit of transparency and “perfect” data reduces individuals to mere sources of information, leaving them vulnerable to burnout, social alienation, and a hollow sense of belonging. By focusing on Mae’s and Delaney’s personal journeys, the novels expose the hidden costs of algorithmic governance and corporate surveillance, ultimately warning readers about how unchecked data practices can undermine trust, fragment relationships, and reshape what it means to be human in a digitally dominated world.

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Dystopian fiction routinely employs the trope of surveillance, the various mechanisms for which, while often exemplifying the level of technological advancement the given society has achieved, also demonstrate how scientific innovations invariably become instruments of oppression for the regime in power. This paper, however, deals with surveillance not as a mere apparatus for the incumbent regime but as a mode of production that has coevolved with capitalism called surveillance capitalism. The theoretical lens of the paper is majorly derived from Shoshana Zuboff’s (2019) theorisation of surveillance capitalism. The paper closely reads the dystopian novel Chosen Spirits (2020) by the Indian writer Samit Basu to uncover the ways in which the primary imperative of surveillance in controlling populations conjoins with capital’s drive for exploitation for the production of surplus. The intention of the paper is to demonstrate the dystopian ordering of an instrumentarian society that could give rise to the condition of ubiquitous labour. Contrary to the common assumptions about the universality of dystopian conditions and Zuboff’s (2019) own assumptions regarding the homogenizing experience of surveillance capital, the paper establishes that both surveillance capital and a dystopia built on its structures are experienced differentially depending on one’s social position.

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In 1996, Gloria Naylor (2005) recounts a traumatic encounter with the surveillance state, one that begins with sonic harassment but ends with psychological instability. Uncertain what voices fill her mind, Naylor composes what she calls a fictionalized memoir, in which she projects the paranoia of surveillance onto the unstable medium of narrative voice. The indignity of “hearing things,” which features prominently in Naylor’s story, evokes a critical tradition that ranges from Eve Sedgwick’s (1997) theorization of paranoia to Joseph Masco and Lisa Wedeen’s (2024) more recent reimagination of “conspiracy/theory.” Although this interdisciplinary body of scholarship has established the indelibly literary demeanor of the surveilled life, it has yet to address hearing things as a fundamental problem of the digital world. As this essay argues, 1996 contests state surveillance not by reciprocating the data-collection process, but through fantasies of mystery voices and unverifiable—that is, acousmatic—sounds. The second section of this essay contends that increasingly ubiquitous and imperceptible surveillance technologies have made Naylor’s narrative strategy even more essential today. In 2016, American diplomats began to report hearing inexplicable noises as well as an array of neurological symptoms that news media have come to name Havana Syndrome. The diplomats’ government agencies largely dismissed their symptoms, and the experience of hearing things fell outside the procedures of clinical medicine, leading many to rehabilitate their minds through aesthetic means. This essay links the provocative narrative form of 1996 with the art therapies at Walter Reed Medical Center, before forecasting Naylor’s influence on the emerging counter-surveillant practices of the digital age.

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How can literary works recast visual models of surveillance systems when writing is itself a visual technology? Writing’s essential visual affordances mean that novels cannot claim to impart aesthetic experiences that inherently disrupt the surveillant knowledge regimes to which they are bound. Within this article, I outline recent scholarship that troubles this relationship. I compare literary representations of the surveillance state and surveillance resistance in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) to Jeff VanderMeer’s experimental, multimodal novel Dead Astronauts (2019). Nineteen Eighty-Four has long been considered outdated, in metaphor and systemic reality. But what more can one expect when the affordances of writing are left unraveled? Dead Astronauts is a text to which we might turn for this undoing. Visual knowledge is taken to task through its form—tactile and visual ways of reading are combined to render the novel’s multi-species dialogue around surveillance resistance. Dead Astronauts offers an updated aesthetic approach to how novels can, at the level of form, disrupt visual knowledge systems. It is because the novel experiments with the boundaries of written language that it manages to successfully voice critiques of racialized surveillance capitalism, ecological crisis, and the failure of anthropocentric priorities in resistance movements. An allegorical cast of non-human, chimeric characters are exploited by the novel’s formal structure, enacting surveillance capitalism’s extraction of data’s raw materials: mind, imagination, and future behavior. The novel’s form is a cipher that troubles whether a readerly interest in solution begets reward. Dead Astronauts shows that exemplary surveillance novels must do more than mirror the warping nature of a multisensory surveillance assemblage through traditional narrative. Multimodal novels that thoroughly metabolize algorithmic surveillance via the proximal dissection of language might recruit resistant, critical subjects, or readers who understand that visuality is a limited paradigm for perceiving a future whose face we increasingly fail to recognize.

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How do people negotiate their agency while they are deeply entangled with the reality filtered or revised by the authorities via pervasive surveillance? How does science fiction, or literature in general, identify the issue and stage the confrontation between the watchers and the watched? This paper discusses the politics of silence under surveillance in two Chinese science fiction (SF) stories, Ma Boyong’s “The City of Silence” (2005) and Zhang Ran’s “Ether” (2012). Placing the texts in the trajectory of Chinese SF’s critical reflection of and intervention into social reality, I argue that the two SF stories speak out the unspeakable, literarily and metaphorically, thematically and aesthetically. The unspeakable means a state of being silent due to the probing eyes and ears of technology. In narrative, the stories delineate how silence is imposed and employed as a rejection to the pervasive eyes and ears. While it is a matter of disempowerment, not letting the surveillant hear also disrupts the power of surveillance. In aesthetics, science fiction is a genre that speaks out within the system, in which non-conformist/different voices are silenced. To speak or not speak, hide or not hide, disguise or not disguise: such dilemmas bring up ethical and moral challenges as surveillance is legitimized and normalized.

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This article examines how early nineteenth-century British novels employed horizontal surveillance—peer-based observation—to regulate women’s behavior and reinforce social norms. Focusing on Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1833 [1811]) and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1824 [1801]), it explores how different sensory modes of scrutiny—auditory in Austen’s world of whispered speculation, gossip, and overhearing, and visual in Edgeworth’s depiction of public spectacle—converge to produce a rich vocabulary of social control. Although separated by distinct social milieus, both authors responded to the shifting cultures of surveillance in the Romantic period, forging literary frameworks that anticipate both Victorian social policing and our own era’s digitally mediated modes of communal monitoring. Austen’s Marianne Dashwood and Edgeworth’s Harriet Freke emerge as instructive figures: Marianne’s emotional openness and Harriet’s nonconformity each invite intense scrutiny, compelling them and those around them to internalize regulatory norms. However, both also enact forms of resistance: one rooted in sincerity, the other in performance and defiance. As the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth occurred in December 2025, re-examining these novels through surveillance theory highlights their continued relevance. These novels illuminate how informal systems of social control operated across time and how women’s responses to surveillance can be both constrained and strategic.

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This essay reads Guyanese poet, Martin Carter’s Poems of Resistance from British Guiana (2006 [1954]) as well as letters from a declassified M15 file collected in the state of emergency declared when the British invaded the colony in 1953. Using surveillance theories, particularly by Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2015), the paper discusses how surveillance works as a colonizing strategy through fear and insecurity. It argues that the heightened surveillance enacted under the emergency presents an obscene familiarity that Carter captures in close sensory imagery evoking the distortive transformation of familiar physical spaces, quotidian routines, and geographies of the mind. The close analysis of the poems focuses on Carter’s use of sound and time to come to terms with this intimate assault.

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This article analyzes the fiction of the Russian author Evgenii Kharitonov through the lens of Steve Mann’s (2013) theorization of “sousveillance” and Édouard Glissant’s (2010) conception of the right to opacity. As a gay man and dissident writer, Kharitonov was under observation by the KGB throughout his life, and his stories frequently confront the inherent violence of homophobic surveillance in the Soviet Union. However, this article demonstrates how Kharitonov actively resists Soviet surveillance by drawing attention to the performance of gay invisibility that it enforces and challenging the implicit conceptions of homosexuality that it entails. Through a close reading of several short stories from his collection, Under House Arrest [Pod domashnim arestom] (1998), I argue that Kharitonov’s stories use strategies of sousveillance to explore the opaque spaces where gay communities could exist outside the visibility and conceptual legibility of official surveillance.

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This article discusses the formal choices and strategies adopted by Scottish author Ali Smith in her novel How to Be Both (2014) to contribute to our understanding of contemporary surveillance practices, delve into the complexities of subjective experiences of surveillance—especially in its gendered aspects—and explore the possibility of agency and resistance. Such strategies include mobilizing seemingly outdated genres, adopting a non-linear narrative structure that produces a defamiliarizing effect, and drawing on modes such as humour and irony. When the novel appeared in 2014, Edward Snowden’s revelations on mass state surveillance were very much on readers’ minds. How to Be Both addresses the challenges raised by the scandal in terms of representation and conceptualization by drawing on generic resources such as the spy novel or the film noir, developing a subplot around one of the protagonists’ deceased mother, who may or may not have been spied upon in connection with her political activism. But the novel also goes beyond the immediate context of the Snowden revelations by following the mourning daughter in whose daily life surveillance is deeply imbricated. Through their subjective experiences, the novel raises unsettling—and deliberately unsettled—questions about the entanglement of surveillance with desire, the longing for recognition and interpersonal connections, and the possibility of forms of counter-surveillance that articulate the individual and collective levels, and that are playfully referred to as “mazing the minotaur back.”

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This paper examines how surveillance socially controls individuals and designates them as subjects in Sonallah Ibrahim’s The Committee (2001) and Basma Abdel Aziz’s The Queue (2016b), employing surveillance studies and Louis Althusser’s (1971) theory of state apparatuses—focusing equally on both repressive state apparatuses (RSAs) and ideological state apparatuses (ISAs)—and concept of interpellation as its theoretical framework. In The Committee, interpellation is enforced through the state apparatuses; characters internalize their being under the constant gaze of the State and develop a kind of self-discipline that ensures their automatic conformity to the dominant ideology. Similarly, The Queue portrays the effects of social control and surveillance on individuals. The queue becomes a symbol of the complete subjection of the people to the almost incomprehensible dictates of the authoritarian regime. By analyzing the dynamics of power and the interplay of surveillance and/by the state apparatuses in these two novels, this paper demonstrates how surveillance operates as a powerful mechanism of social control, shaping individual consciousness and behavior in profound ways. It highlights the enduring relevance of surveillance studies in understanding the complex relationship between the power of the gaze and individual subjection in contemporary societies.