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Recognition of an atmosphere’s inherent relational capacity is coupled with the desire to control and operationalize; to parse, divide, and conquer. Even as the illusory fog of war is superseded by blatant acts of genocide and terrorism, we fail to sense how these engineered atmospheres of violence have long preceded their overwhelming, hyper-visible assemblages. 

Historical and structural violence haunts and sutures so-called reality, binding the world together. Frantz Fanon named such violence “atmospheric.” (1963, 30) Often anesthetic in itself, atmospheric violence is rendered sensible by the ways in which it ceaselessly produces and circulates evidence of its existence: material and sensorial traces that gesture toward but never fully depict, its underlying and enabling conditions. To Fanon, such an atmosphere does not merely produce a bubble-like container delimiting colonized space from uncolonized, but as a pressurized atmosphere that then invades the body and “ripples under the skin,”  breaking out sporadically as violence against the colonizer (1963, 31). It is fully invasive, and leaves no shred of flesh unattenuated by its violence. 

Entitled ‘Atmospheres of Violence,’ this special issue of Venti raises questions such as: What perceptual, critical, and creative modes are required to not only apprehend atmospheric violence but to address it? Which practices might help to stall or stop its reproduction and repetition? How does one temporally order the emergence of an Atmosphere of Violence, and how can we think, feel, write, and make, as we perceive these atmospheres to be un-subsiding?

“Explication of the atmosphere is not a one-time operation,” Yuriko Furuhata ponders, recognizing that any description or criticism of a conditioned environment follows iterations of attempting to emplace boundaries on something inherently unruly (2022, 168). How might repeated explication help us to parse seemingly banal spaces—civic and institutional, local and global, biological and geological—as atmospheres of violence? Is there hope of care, reparation, and restoration amidst these atmospheres? This issue seeks to contend with the messiness of figuring an atmosphere of violence, from its inception to its conditioning of social life, to its reconstitution of subjects. 

We welcome submissions contending with historical excavations of structural violence and its many iterations, genealogies of atmospheric and socio-technical control, the multi-pronged condensation of imperialist ideology, and the sensorial logics of colonial violence. We welcome all voices and interdisciplinary interventions ranging from art and media studies, literary studies, social sciences, visual art, and poetry/creative writing. We especially encourage contemplations on the long durée of atmospheric violence through the anecdotal, interpretive, and speculative. 

Works Cited:

 Frantz Fanon, “On Violence”, In The Wretched of the Earth, 30. New York: Grove Press, 1963.

 Yuriko Furuhata, “Conclusion”, In Climatic Media, 168. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022.