Short Abstract

This roundtable convenes scholars working on disappearance, the negative and opacity to discuss ways of attending to violence and its aftermath. Of particular concern are the intersections and tensions between powerful processes of disappearance and willful ways of working with and through opacity.

Long Abstract

In an era marked by displacement and state violence, discussions in anthropology have turned towards disappearance as a condition of subalternity and a modality of power (e.g., Baser et al. 2025; Huttunen & Perl 2023; Schindel & Colombo 2014). Engaging issues ranging from forced disappearance to border regimes and mass violence, these discussions have sharpened our vocabulary of ‘dark anthropology’ (Ortner 2016) - i.e. the study of suffering, power, and inequality. Specifically, these scholars have explored possible methods for engaging the ‘negative’ (Navaro 2020), such as by analytically and ethically responding to the absences and debris through which it is constituted. While engagements with enforced disappearance and large-scale atrocities have examined the ontologies and effects of haunting and resistant counter-forensic practices, Saidiya Hartman’s ‘critical fabulation’ offers a mode of reimagining histories of the slave trade and plantation worlds through creative storytelling (2008, 2019). These works further overlap with – but also rub against – Édouard Glissant's ‘opacity’ as a right asserted against de-humanising regimes of visibility (1990). This roundtable convenes scholars working with different epistemic approaches to explore the synergies and tensions among responses to disappearance: what are the purposes, terms and subjectivities involved in rendering the disappeared (il-)legible? What should be brought into appearance, speculatively conjured or rendered opaque? How do forces of disappearance, practices of speculation and claims to opacity interact? What – discursive, affective, embodied, aesthetic, collective – forms of knowledge are engaged? How do strategies of producing counter-knowledge relate to calls for the willed ‘unworlding’ (Halberstam 2024) of existing worlds, including extant archives?