CALL FOR PAPERS: Special Issue on World Literature and Disappearance
Enforced disappearance is widely recognized as a crime in international law, with legislation that reflects the experiences of Latin American dictatorships and focuses on arbitrary detention and torture or extrajudicial killing by State agents. However, there has also been a rise in the practice of disappearance by non-State actors, which has shifted the terms for responding to contemporary modes of violence.
Multiple forms of disappearance have given rise to multiple and increasingly diverse forms of expression, speculation, grief, and justice-seeking in global cultural production. While scholars have studied disappearance and some of its literary and artistic representations for years, the emerging field of “disappearance studies” has only just begun to examine many of these new forms.
The splintered forms of disappearance have triggered a powerful sense of urgency among activists, writers, artists, and scholars. This special issue of ARIEL shares that same sense of urgency while also seeking to offer a new intervention through a complex understanding of the origins and effects of contemporary disappearance that might afford new questions, insights, strategies, and even solutions. We invite articles exploring the multifaceted issues surrounding the actions, actors, and victims of disappearance from a wide range of geographical, cultural, and disciplinary foci.
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