Enforced disappearance has become a lingua franca of transitional-justice processes around the world. Reflecting the experiences of Latin American dictatorships, this crime is defined by arbitrary detention and torture or extrajudicial killing by State agents. Enforced disappearance as a category in international law has been accompanied by a boom in memory studies and genres such as ‘testimonio.’ In fiction, critics have observed a proliferation of tropes of doubling, reconsiderations of prosopopeia, and spectrality as literary reflections of enforced disappearance as a tool of State terror. 

Recently, scholars have questioned the centrality of the State in contemporary forms of disappearance. Several analytics—social disappearance, mundane disappearance, neoliberal disappearance—seek to name the splintering of disappearance from the dictator-driven elimination of political foes to disappearances of varied kinds at the hands of State and non-State actors. This splintering, in turn, has shifted the terms for responding to contemporary modes of violence against social, political, and ontological being. 

Multiple forms of disappearance have given rise to multiple and increasingly diverse forms of expression, narration, speculation, grief, and justice-seeking in global cultural production: poetry constellating around Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women (MMIW) in North America; novels of civil war and disappearance in Nigeria and Sri Lanka; Irish dystopian fiction with echoes of IRA disappearances; Palestinian engagement with disappearance as a legal and literary device; nonfiction narratives about African migrants and disappearance in the Mediterranean; and more. Disappearance as a global phenomenon has led to a growing sense of urgency among activists as well as writers and artists, and this seminar seeks to continue and expand upon recent conversations about these critical texts and issues.

We invite contributions from those who work on disappearance and its relationship to literature in a broad range of frameworks, geographies, genres, and time periods. Contributors might consider: 

• Theoretical frameworks for literature’s engagement with varying types of disappearance
  
   


• The effect of absence on global cultural forms 
  
   


• Literatures of disappearance and the relationship between law and memory in societies undergoing transitional-justice processes 
  
   


• Disappearance and the specter in law and literature
  
   


• Comparative approaches to literatures of disappearance
  
   


• International law and world literature’s interactions as worldmaking processes in the context of new forms of disappearance 
  
   


• Literature’s role in human rights responses to disappearance