Claire Colebrook has won a significant book award for Who Would You Kill to Save the World? (Nebraska, 2023).

The inaugural Hugh J. Silverman Book Prize in Philosophy and Literature is given “For a cutting edge, single-authored book that productively explores or exploits the space(s) where philosophy and literary study intersect.” This is an important achievement in itself but especially because the book crosses several disciplines, as the book description articulates:

“Who Would You Kill to Save the World? examines how postapocalyptic cinema uses images from the past and present to depict what it means to preserve the world—and who is left out of the narrative of rebuilding society. Claire Colebrook redefines “the world” as affluent Western society and “saving the world” as preventing us from becoming the othered them who are viewed in their suffering. Colebrook further examines how the use of postapocalyptic cinema is a humanist—Western, capitalist, colonizing, white, heteronormative, and individualist—creation and challenges the notion that a world built on foundations of exploitation is worth saving.

“Colebrook combines postapocalyptic fiction, concern over the global climate crisis, colonialism, and anti-Blackness to explain how contemporary postapocalypse blockbusters circulate ideas of whiteness and the right of the privileged to rebuild the world. Who Would You Kill to Save the World? is a provocative addition to the field of extinction studies and challenges the conceptual frames we use to define ourselves.”