CALL FOR PAPERS: Special Issue on World Literature and Disappearance

For a Special Issue of ARIEL - A Review of International English Literature. https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/ariel

Enforced disappearance is widely recognized as a crime in international law, with legislation that reflects the experiences of Latin America 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, which include novels, short stories, poetry, protest, performance, personal narratives, histories, films, murals, memorials, files, archives, testimonies, court records, digital media, and more.

For a Special Issue of ARIEL - A Review of International English Literature. https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/ariel

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, which include novels, short stories, poetry, protest, performance, personal narratives, histories, films, murals, memorials, files, archives, testimonies, court records, digital media, and more.

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. We seek innovative ways of thinking about disappearance through and alongside literature and other forms of artistic and political expression, including print culture, digital activism, public ritual, and performance. Potential topics include:

• Theoretical frameworks for literature’s engagement with varying types of disappearance (enforced disappearance, as well as “social disappearance,” disappearance by non-State actors, among others)
• The effect of (enforced) absence on global cultural forms
• Literatures of disappearance and the relationship between law and memory in societies undergoing transitional-justice processes
• Disappearance and the spectre 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 (enforced) disappearance
• Longue durée approaches to disappearance (e.g., genocide of Indigenous peoples and terrifying phenomena such as the Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women; coloniality and the disappearance of African migrants in the Mediterranean)
• Literature, disappearance, and postcolonial thought

Please submit an abstract (250-500 words) and short biographical note (no more than 100 words) to the guest editors, Peter Leman (peter_leman@byu.edu) and Joseph Wager (joseph.wager@siu.edu), by February 1, 2026. Decisions about abstracts sent by March 1, 2026.