The purpose of this special session is to study acts of writing during genocides. Rather than regard creative expression as something that takes place in exile away from the setting of the atrocities, this panel seeks to examine how cultural spaces were eked out in Guatemala, France and the Dominican Republic during moments of racial and ethnic cleansing. Creating spaces, be they real or textual, where free expression and imagination can flourish despite the surrounding reality of repression, torture and suffering is the ultimate act of being human. The existence of such spaces, deliberately carved out of hostile environments, is an affirmation that inhumanity must continually be faced with ingenuity, imagination and creativity.

In addition to exploring acts of writing that occur simultaneously during genocides, each paper in our panel concentrates of acts of writing that take place within the national borders where the atrocities are occurring. For the poets of Nuevo Signo and Rin-78 in Guatemala, the Jews in Nazi-occupied France or the novelist Freddy Prestol Castillo in the Dominican Republic, escape and exile were not options. These individuals made conscious decisions of writing over silence, and in the process, they created cultural spaces that defied authoritarian regimes and affirmed their basic humanity. Nevertheless, as each individual paper shows, these contested spaces took on characteristics of their own, each of which is worthy of further study. In this sense, the special session "Writing during Genocide" examines these unexpected texts produced while mass killings are in progress.

Each paper will be allotted eighteen minutes of time in order to have the final fifteen minutes for discussion. The first paper by Frances Jaeger, "Writing during Genocide: The Creative Defiance of Nuevo Signo and RIN-78 in Guatemala", examines how poets of two distinct literary movements managed to write, publish, organize "happenings" and share their work despite decades of military rule and repression. By opening this session with this example, the stage is set to examine the paradox of creating cultural spaces during violent oppression. The poetry of Nuevo Signo was outspoken in its portrayal of the injustices suffered by indigenous populations. Similarly, the heterogeneous collective of writers of RIN-78 were conscious of the risk of publishing the Quiché poet Sam Colop's work at a time when mass exterminations of the indigenous populations were in progress. The writings and actions of both groups are a testament to their commitment to give a voice to the native populations that were targeted by the military juntas. By reading the works of Nuevo Signo and RIN-78 within the context of writing during genocide, instead of the traditional critical basis of political ideology or literary criticism, a new reading of these works emerges: one in which the non-Mayans of the capital use their position of relative privilege in order to give voice to the voiceless.

The second paper, Katherine Roseau's "Spurred to Create in the 'Face of Erasure': Writings of Jews in French Camps and Hiding Spaces During the Holocaust" begins by asking whether writing can help a writer survive genocide. Avoiding any attempt to minimize the magnitude of the Holocaust, she concentrates on the fact that acts of creativity are means by which writers affirm their existence and avoid erasure. Specifically, her focus is on how we can view the graffiti and diaries of Jews in occupied France as an evolutionary “need to control experience as opposed to being acted upon by external circumstances” (Easterlin 663). While continued creation or even the proliferation of art during genocide could seem surprising, art has developed the most in human history during uncertain circumstances (674) and in times of extreme stress (668). In this paper, Roseau proposes that the wall and diary writings by Jews in Nazi-occupied France are a form of art to which the writers resorted in order to respond to the chaos and attempt to take back control.

The final paper by Megan Myers "Then and Now: Memorializing the 1937 Haitian Massacre" centers on Rafael Leonidas Trujillo's month-long massacre of 15,000 Haitian immigrants living in the Dominican Republic. Dominican author, Freddy Prestol Castillo arrived days before the start of atrocities, and although he waited long after the death of Trujillo to publish El masacre se pasa a pie, the vignettes of border residents – of both Haitian and Dominican descent – shared in the novel bear witness to the state-sponsored crime and represent a first attempt to memorialize the Massacre. In 2017, the 80^th anniversary of the Haitian Massacre, contemporary attempts to pay tribute to the innocent lives lost in 1937 are multi-vocal and multidisciplinary; they include physical memorials located on the geophysical border, music albums, social movements of island- and diaspora-based organizations, and literary and artistic renderings of the border region. This paper moves from considering early novelistic memorials of the Massacre such as El Masacre se pasa a pie – written during and after the event – to looking primarily at a recent collection of testimonies, Nos cambió la vida, published by a non-profit in the Dominican Republic (Reconoci.do) and the forthcoming album by Azuei, a group of Dominican and Haitian artists.

What sets this special session apart is that while this topic of writing during genocide is explored in three distinct countries (Guatemala, France, Haiti/Dominican Republic) where three distinct ethnic and racial groups were prosecuted (Mayans, Jews, Haitian immigrants), the very act of writing in the face of so much state-sponsored killing creates certain communalities that allow a revision of how we understand and teach genocide. As each paper explores a unique critical approach to how we regard texts produced during genocide, there emerge issues related to bridging cultural gaps between the indigenous and non-indigenous worldview, to regarding graffiti as a creative act beyond a mere survival coping mechanism and to reexamining how we write about and memorialize acts of genocide. What unites these three approaches is the conviction that even in the most challenging of circumstances, being human, and remaining human, is linked to acts of writing.