Global Conflict Alluvium Issue

Birkbeck's open access journal of 21st-century literary criticism, Alluvium, has recently published a new guest-edited special issue titled "Global Conflict." Edited by Dr Daniel O'Gorman, the issue examines contemporary fictions that address conflict situations – from the Iraq War, ongoing drone strikes, displacement during the Sudanese civil war, and the question of "grievability" in contemporary war reportage, to the collapse of space caused by displacement and the ambiguous position of international humanitarian agencies such as the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR), Amnesty International, and the World Food Programme.

 

 

The issue is composed of three articles which each offer a different approach to these challenging issues. Emily Hogg's "Displaced Perspective" considers Ugandan author Goretti Kyomuhendo’s 2003 short story, "Do You Remember?", which criticises institutional responses to displacement through war. Dorothy Butchard's "Drones and Dissociation" analyses the "empathy gap" in contemporary responses to hyper-technologised drone warfare under the Obama presidency in fiction by Atef Abu Saif and Teju Cole. Finally, Dana Bönisch's "Pixels/Tissue" offers a comparative reading of drone warfare and the suicide attack, examining the use of aerial perspective in fiction by Thomas Lehr, David Mitchell and Julia Loktev’s film Day Night Day Night (2006).

 

 

Featured image by AK Rockefeller under a CC BY license.

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Author: CCL

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