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This book focuses on non-fictional, visual narratives (including comics; graphic narratives; animated documentaries and online, interactive documentaries) that attempt to represent violent experiences, primarily in the Levant. In doing so it explores, from a philosophical perspective, the problem of representing trauma when language seems inadequate to describe our experiences and how the visual narrative form may help us with this. The book uses the concept of the ineffable to expand the notion of representation beyond the confines of a western, individualist notion of trauma as event based. In so doing, it engages a postcolonial perspective of trauma, which treats violence as ongoing and connected to several incidents of violence across time and space. This book demonstrates how the formal qualities of visual, non-fiction may help close the gap between representation and experience through the process of ‘dark’ writing.

Some aspects of violent experiences seem difficult to express. Furthermore, directly describing what one knows about these experiences seems to be of limited value in enhancing one’s understanding of them. Thus, merely representing what one already knows about violence and conflict seems inadequate. To overcome this, this paper proposes the accommodation of the ineffable in representations of violence and trauma to destabilise reductive, binary representations of violence and trauma common within colonial discourse. It argues that one fruitful area in which to engage the ineffable without explaining it away, is through examining aesthetic representations of violence and trauma. Furthermore, such aesthetic representations, because they are affective and facilitate both reflective and performative truth also support political engagement and may thus be effective in combatting epistemic erasure of marginal positions in a way that helps to open up spaces to hear the ‘Other’ on his/her own terms. This argument is applied to an analysis of Okeowo’s (2017) novel, A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa and Axe and Hamilton’s graphic narrative Army of God: Joseph Kony’s War in Africa, which both deal with conflict in and around the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1997–2003). The close consideration of alternative representations of violence that brings the ineffable into the frame is crucial to moving beyond the impasse presented by the legacy of prejudice inherent in the West’s interpretations of Africa, where the ‘Other’ is still too often written out of an ongoing colonial discourse. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

In disallowing the inaccuracies of memory to infiltrate stories of war, one condemns oneself to remain forever blinded by the obvious, shielded from the invisible violence that often lurks beneath the visible. Following Žižek, this article posits that invisible violence should be glimpsed indirectly, through aesthetic representations often excluded from the annals of the official history of war. The argument is made through a close reading of Joe Sacco's representation of the 1956 Khan Younis massacre as depicted in Footnotes in Gaza. In this text, Sacco himself and Omm Nafez – one of the protagonists of his story – express, in detail, their memories of the massacre, despite the initial reluctance of the media and publishing houses to publish their accounts. The position of Sacco and Omm Nafez is described as being that of ‘productive myopia’ because the inaccuracies and confusions that their accounts accommodate – instead of being limiting – are considered an avenue through which they may approach what has hitherto been invisible in other accounts of this massacre. Nora's validation of memory as way of producing knowledge and Žižek's notion of invisible/objective violence as an important driver of the visible/subjective cycle of violence are used to show how these memories may be inserted into the realm of history by embracing their shadows and complexities rather than disallowing them. It is conjectured that doing this may allow one to glimpse aspects of violence that have remained hitherto unseen. Refereed/Peer-reviewed