Picturing Violence in the Age of Annihilation

Violence—and the challenge it presents to representation—is a black hole at the heart of narrative. Textual, film, news media, and artistic narratives all must confront the question of how to represent violence, and how to authentically and meaningfully depict horrifying acts. Often, these narratives fall short of doing so in ethical ways, relying instead on erasure, censorship, amplification, or decontextualization. From concerns that the imagined violence on movie screens might translate into practice; Facebook censorship of “sensitive content” being applied to video evidence of war crimes; or even the use of euphemism, passive language, or “fade to black” techniques being used in text, we see traditional forms of narrative and media struggle with the issue of violence.

By contrast, we have also seen the rise of alternative modes of representation that reengage and reconceptualize violence. The failures of official narrative, mainstream media, or traditional textual forms of representation have opened up room for alternative and experimental ways of communicating violence—this might include hybrid literary forms, experimental fiction, graphic journalism, social media, comedy, or other genres, as well as radical techniques in traditional genres. In response to this proliferation of new modes of imagining and representing violence, we invite papers that address how violence can be represented through alternative representational modes or innovative techniques. How are texts, films, or media responding meaningfully to the challenge of representing violence? How are these new forms more fully contextualizing, historicizing, or sympathizing with victims of violence? What kind of images of violence are circulating, and what challenges must we overcome to circulate them ethically?
We invite papers that engage with any of the following topics:

The (in)ability of storytelling to inspire empathy/sympathy or combat apathy
Memorializing, reconstructing, or preserving those who have been erased or cannot speak due to violence
Colonial/imperial/capitalist/institutional violence and its representation
The necessity of “objective” narrative vs. the potential of “subjective” narrative
Change in images or tropes of violence over time in textual and visual culture
Traditional news coverage of the genocide in Palestine, Congo, or Sudan and the potential of new media forms
Counter-histories, resistance narratives, and prison literature
The challenge of representing the hegemon and state-sanctioned violence
The ethics of representing violence or censoring violence in narrative
Childhood and exposure to violence
Representing imagined vs. real violence
Environmental violence, biological warfare, and violence in the Anthropocene
Teaching narratives/accounts of violence

We are open to related or other proposals on relevant questions.