What is the relationship between literature, conflict and peace studies? How do conflict and post-conflict narratives mediate the multiple planetary and epistemological entanglements of peacebuilding processes? How do literary texts imagine peace in ways more pragmatic politics of peacebuilding cannot? Surely, since time immemorial\u2014from The Iliad <\/em>to Henry V<\/em>, from War and Peace <\/em>to Slaughterhouse <\/em>5, from All Quiet on the Western Front <\/em>to The Three Day Road<\/em>, from The Kite Runner<\/em> to Half of a Yellow Sun<\/em>\u2014 literary epic narratives of war and collective violence have told the simultaneously glorifying and horrifying stories of bloody battles, the destruction of entire peoples and environments, all in the name of internal and external colonial expansion and pacification, national sovereignty and border security, greed, and power. Within the Western tradition, peace narratives comprise counter-discursive projects that seek to expose the structural and subjective workings of war and violence. Since Aristophanes\u2019 play Peace, <\/em>peace narratives, to put it in very simplistic terms, emphasize and, at times, prescribe conflict resolution and pacificism as a collective telos, while nostalgically longing for a pre-war state of imagined social bliss. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But here is the crux of representing war and peacebuilding processes in film and literature: Not only is peacebuilding<\/em> often misread as a euphemism for morally legitimated \u201cjust war\u201d (St. Augustine) or martial peacemaking<\/em> missions, but representations of war and, inadvertently, of peace easily descend into Hollywood-style propaganda and rescue narratives that deploy and capitalize on \u201cthe pain of others\u201d (Susan Sontag).\u00a0 Though vastly different, Cary Fukunaga\u2019s literary film adaptation of the child soldier narrative Beasts of No Nation<\/em> (2015), Steven Spielberg\u2019s military narrative of heroic sacrifice, Saving Private Ryan <\/em>(1998), Antoine Fuqua\u2019s humanitarian war romance Tears of the Sun<\/em> (2003),<\/em> and such controversial war movies as Stanley Kubrick\u2019s Path of Glory<\/em> (1957) and Francis Ford Coppola\u2019s Apocalypse Now<\/em> (1979) come to mind. What representations of war and peace must inevitably and creatively negotiate is a complex dialectic of violence. For, on the one hand, war and peace are waged on the \u201cground\u201d and in cinematic \u201celectronic mental space\u201d (Baudrillard 48) and, on the other hand, this dialectic holds, as Walter Benjamin famously observed, that every \u201cdocument of civilization\u201d is at the same time \u201ca document of barbarism\u201d (256).\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Above Image: Still from Apocalypse Now<\/em> (1979). This iconic shot of the use of Napalm bombs during the Vietnam War illustrates Benjamin\u2019s dialectic of violence and its aestheticization.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Writing in 1935, in the dark shadow of Nazi Germany\u2019s newly decreed \u201crace laws\u201d and Leni Riefenstahl\u2019s Nazi propaganda film The Triumph of the Will<\/em> (1935), Benjamin knew all too well about the ideological perils inherent in fictionalizing and representing war through aesthetic means. In fact, the \u201caestheticization of politics,\u201d he warned, ushers in the rise of fascism, the futurist apotheosis of technology and progress, and the normalization of war as a militarized cultural and political habit of mind. The proper antidote, Benjamin insisted, is to politicize art. With hindsight, Benjamin\u2019s exhortation refers perhaps neither to the instrumentalism of Soviet socialist realism nor to the aesthetic autonomy and anti-instrumentalism of the arts championed as an articulation of Western freedom by the CIA\u2019s covert art programs throughout the Cold War (Caroline Levine). Rather, Benjamin implies that art cannot but be political, and that peace requires a profound transformation of received modes of thinking. Benjamin and Levine also taught me that critique, though necessary, may not be enough. It is necessary to mobilize the creative imagination and its far-reaching capacity \u201cto speak truth to power\u201d (Edward Said) and to shape, communicate, and bring about alternative worlds, new collectivities, and social and political ways of living in common that are not restorative but reparative. Thus, training the creative imagination to affect \u201ca change in mindset\u201d (2017 UN Guidance Note on Sustaining Peace) fosters peacebuilding as a communicative, cultural, and political practice. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I use the term \u201cpost-conflict\u201d narratives to gesture towards the persistence of conflict, its ongoing and multifarious effects on different actors\/subjectivities and multiple entanglements in different sites of violence, and the messy and often surprising forages and failures involved in mediating peacebuilding strategies. Post-conflict narratives are not synonymous with \u201cpeace literature\u201d (Anthony Adolf), which, while reading literature, as one must, in its various social, historical, economic and political contexts, favors a reader-response approach and cultivates Western democratic civic and moral virtues such as tolerance and \u201cunity in diversity<\/em>\u201d (Adolf 9). Post-conflict narratives, including many contemporary child soldier narratives, are often translational, speculative, visceral, and planetary, less certain about national and liberal parameters of conflict resolution and their controversial politics of recognition. Instead, post-conflict narratives address the liminal constitution of victims and aggressors, of life and death (Turner 1995), and they remain vigilant about the ways in which particular social and cultural, racialized and gendered grammars of violence persist and reinvent themselves in times of peace. In my analysis of contemporary child soldier narratives and Jenny Erpenbeck\u2019s post-conflict refugee novel Go, Went, Gone, <\/em>included in Pukallus and Connaughton\u2019s Routledge Handbook of Conflict and Peace Communication<\/em>, I also turn the critical gaze to the reader. However, I argue that reading post-conflict narratives attentively and responsibly constitutes a reparative and decolonial practice that guarantees no immediate access to unequivocal meanings, truths, or resolutions. Rather, reparative readings, a concept I adapt from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and queer theory, draw from the wisdom of embodied knowledge. They configure peacebuilding as an open, polyphonous, and humbling process of multiple \u201centanglements\u201d that seeks to balance all forms of organic and inorganic terrestrial life (Torrent 2021). They posit readers as agents and co-producers of stories and invite them to unlearn and recompose unreflected claims to power and exclusionary mindsets in speculative and inclusive\u2014yet not homogenizing\u2014ways. As such, post-conflict reparative narratives remain receptive to painful surprises and open to a \u201cfuture. . . different from the present\u201d and to a \u201cpast [that]. . .could have happened differently from the way it actually did\u201d (Sedgewick 146). I will end with an example from Erpenbeck\u2019s novel.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/hcpb.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/HCPB1-1024x290.jpg\")
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