This panel explores how narrative genres--thriller, mystery, and terrorist fiction--are tactically inhabited to reframe dominant affective and ethical expectations surrounding violence, memory, and moral judgment. Across distinct cultural and historical contexts, the panelists examine how genre functions not as a passive formal container but as a strategic system for managing narrative expectation, emotional legibility, and political recognition. Each of the papers investigates how genre conventions--far from merely organizing the plot--are actively deployed to reroute empathy, destabilize knowledge, or withhold resolution.

While genre theory has traditionally oscillated between structuralist taxonomy (Frye, Cawelti) and postmodern play (Hutcheon, Jameson), this panel proposes a third mode of engagement: genre as a tactical and affective form that mediates readerly desire and conditions interpretive frameworks. Drawing on A.W. Eaton's work on morally contaminated protagonists, Noël Carroll's theory of narrative engagement, José Esteban Muñoz's concept of disidentification, Jasbir Puar's theory of debility, as well as frameworks from social memory theory and genre analysis, the panelists reconceptualize genre as a mode of ideological and affective calibration. Rather than signaling resistance through formal rupture, the texts under discussion weaponize familiarity itself--mobilizing generic convention to suspend moral clarity, complicate the liberal-humanitarian drive towards empathetic legibility, and foreground epistemic (un)certainty.

Heidi Ka-Sin Lee begins the session with "The Rough Hero and Moral Drift: Affective Engagement Across The Day of The Jackal," a study of the political thriller's affective and ethical architecture across novel, film, and television. Educated in Hong Kong and Japan and currently teaching in Tokyo, Lee draws from transnational media studies and character theory to analyze Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal (1971) and its adaptations (Fred Zinneman, 1973; Sky Atlantic, 2024). Engaging Carroll's and Eaton's models of narrative engagement and moral ambiguity, she shows how the thriller genre fosters identification with a professional assassin--through procedural detail, suspense, and charismatic detachment--before gradually destabilizing that alignment. Rather than dismantling genre conventions, Lee argues, they are strategically deployed to provoke ethical ambiguity and complicity. In doing so, Lee's paper establishes the panel's shared concern with how genre modulates audience complicity and character legibility.

Melissa Rocha, a longtime community college instructor and current PhD student in Interdisciplinary Humanities, continues the conversation with "Elephants Can Remember: Mystery, Memory, and the Scripted Performance of Knowing in Agatha Christie." Focusing on Christie's late-career Poirot novels Elephants Can Remember and Five Little Pigs, Rocha, in conversation with social memory theory and genre analysis, analyzes how the detective genre is used to explore the epistemological (in)stability of memory. The presentation contends that Christie adheres to genre tropes--red herrings, rational deduction, confession--only to withhold the comfort of certainty. Rocha's intersex female identity, along with her interest in queer embodiment and epistemology, informs her reading of Christie's fascination with how minds and bodies are interpreted, misread, and contained within the genre. Her paper, thus, demonstrates how mystery fiction can become a site for dramatizing the fragility of knowledge itself.

Azharuddin closes the panel with "Zones of Ambivalence: Small Feelings and Disidentification in The Association of Small Bombs (2016)," which examines how contemporary terrorist fiction reconfigures the affective and political legibility of the Muslim "terrorist" figure. Drawing on his training in postcolonial and global anglophone literature--and informed by his experience navigating marginality as an Indian Muslim scholar--Azharuddin analyzes how Karan Mahajan refuses the liberal script of empathetic recovery of terrorist subjectivity. Instead, he argues that Mahajan foregrounds what Muñoz calls disidentification and what Puar theorizes as debility, emphasizing small feelings--envy, irritation, silence--and bodily vulnerability as signs not of redemptive terrorist humanity but of structural precarity. Therefore, Mahajan's terrorist narrative, rather than illuminating or explaining, cultivates opacity. Azharuddin's presentation concludes that Mahajan disrupts the reader's desire to know the radical Other and, in doing so, reframes terrorist fiction as a form that invites a more subtle and introspective form of engaging with the terrorist subjectivity.

In conclusion, taken together, the panelists probe how genre structures the conditions under which violence is made legible, memory rendered (in)coherent, and characters granted--or denied--ethical access. In doing so, they demonstrate that genre functions as a regulatory system for affect and knowledge. Whether through the charismatic assassin, the unreliable memory of a crime, or the unreadable terrorist subject, the texts under discussion refuse familiar resolutions and instead demand new modes of character and genre engagement. In conclusion, the panel positions genre not simply as an organizational tool but as a dynamic form through which narrative, power, and recognition are constantly being contested.