2 Changing the World of Feminist Demodystopias Caren Irr The European dream of Weltliteratur, especially that focused on a single novel describing the world and expressing universal human values, has largely fallen out of favor. Franco Moretti (2000), for one, has infuentially demonstrated the tight ft between the ambitions for the novel and Western cultural imperialism. Feminist critics such as Robin Truth Goodman (2004) take the argument a step farther, asserting that the individualist values of the imperial north obscure important strains of feminist engagement with the public sphere in the literature of the Global South. How authentically global can the privatized values of the frst world novel be if it excludes those who hold up half the sky, they ask. Rather than contributing to the globalization of a narrow conception of the world novel, then, we can follow Mariano Siskind (2010) and take up the question of the novelization of the global. That is, while seeking out a multinational archive, we can examine the visions of the world articulated in explicitly feminist fction. In so doing, we can discover what prospects they envision for geopolitical futures in the context of postimperial environmental crisis. One of the primary forms that second- and third-wave feminist writers have used to imagine the world is the demodystopia. This genre is explicitly concerned with prospects for the human species as a collectivity. More specifcally, as coined by Anton Kuijsten (1999) and elaborated by Andreu Domingo (2008), the neologism demodystopia refers to works that concern themselves with the deleterious effects of demographic trends. Commonly, demodystopian fctions bemoan an apparent expansion of the species beyond the carrying capacity of the planet as a whole. They typically project BLO_02_FELI_C002_docbook_new_indd.indd 41 BLO_02_FELI_C002_docbook_new_indd.indd 41 6/17/2022 7:29:00 PM 6/17/2022 7:29:00 PM