For many migrants, the migration process is tainted with violence. This violence affects the body as much as the psyche of the migrants. Whether this violence manifests itself during the migration, pre-migration or post-migration stages, the question of labour appears to complicate the adjustment of migrant populations to their host destinations. Forced labour, exhausting job search and workers’ exploitation are forms of torture that migrant subjects experience and in some cases include in their narratives. In a variety of genres, numerous artworks revolve around on the persecution of labourers and on a spectrum going from autobiographical testimonies to literary fictions the mistreatment of individual migrants occupies a pivotal role in contemporary artistic production.
In view of this, some of the questions we aim to explore in ‘TORTURE’ include but are not limited to:
- Migration, labour and torture
- Writing, reading, capturing, staging, seeing torture
- Torture and genres, media, formats
- Torturer/Tortured/Bystander
- Time and places of torture
- Injuries, pain, suffering, trauma
- Torture as spectacle
- Class, gender, race, age and torture
- Colonialism and torture
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