The recent shift of focus from ‘Victim’ to ‘Perpetrator’ and ‘Implicated Subject’ (Rothberg, 2019) has brought forth newer debates vis-a-vis cultural imaginary and the field of Countering Violent Extremism (CVE). The continuously-unfolding as well as unconventional manifestations of mass violence, and the ensuing narratives for/towards the wholesale condoning of the same, have placed the domain of Perpetrator Studies in a precarious situation. While criticizing Trauma Studies for its coverage of the exclusively Euro-American events of trauma, as is evident in the works of Caruth (1996), Felman (1992), Laub (1992), Tal (1996), LaCapra (2001) and Whitehead (2004), scholars, such as Craps (2014), Visser (2015), Andermahar (2015) and several others, emphasize that there is a need to work on the trauma accounts of non-Europeans and non-Americans in a bid to reclaim and reestablish the initially universalizing appeal of Trauma scholarship. The domain of Perpetrator Studies is now also faced with similar questions: Who is a perpetrator, and who is not? Are those perpetrating violence in a bid to combat violence qualify to be called perpetrators? Can the ones fighting for ‘freedom’ against state machinery and perpetrating violence be termed as the perpetrators of violence? Can the state operating and resorting to violence in the name of maintaining law and order be called the perpetrator of violence? Staying true to the principles of literary anthropology and the relevant aesthetic response, how to identify the ‘Victim’ from the ‘Perpetrator’, while simultaneously sparing a space for the ‘Implicated Subject’ in the narratives that emerge from such imaginary settings, or which portray such settings in/from the real world? In what ways can researchers deal with narratives emerging from the cultural imaginary of such people who suffer from the perpetration of violence in the war zones?


With the current predominantly-universalist epistemological overtones of the way the perpetrator phenomenon has been dealt with by theorists and researchers alike - by either excluding or taking for granted, the subtle variations in the Cultural Memory (Assmann, 2011) of the subject who belongs to the Global South - the seminar invites papers which deal with the portrayal of the perpetrator in war narratives from the Global South. With the officially supported narratives which decide and propagate the official version to frame the perpetrator, in what ways can the analyses of the aesthetic response contribute to the literary anthropology in terms investigating the voice(s) of the victim? In what ways can the Perpetrator Studies be made more inclusive in terms of engaging voices from the Global South? Along with this, the possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Poetics and politics of perpetrator-framing


• Variations to the established perpetrator typologies 


• Perpetrator portrayal/framing in Global South