ReportAGES: Literary Journalism and War

Project director

BAK John S.

Project Partners

           

 

Project Sponsor

International Association for Literary Journalism Studies (IALJS)

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Description

Few would dispute that the violence of war is one of the most horrific experiences to which the human community is exposed. Yet, in modern journalism discourse, we have tended to objectify war to a safe, sublimated distance. In effect, we have made of war a euphemism, which, as the poet Joseph Brodsky observed, “is, generally, the inertia of terror” we do not wish to acknowledge. This is why some journalists turn to literary journalism to account for war, and why the genre is so necessary, even critical, because it helps us to perceive better through the aesthetics of experience the monster of war we have created.

This project proposes first to establish the parameters of the term literary journalism (creative nonfiction, realistic novel, memoir, reportage, journalisme littéraire, etc.) and the notions of war (not only ‘hot’ wars or ‘cold’ wars but also other conflicts, such as cyber wars). Second, it will examine how those wars have been covered differently by literary journalism than by the traditional press. Third, it will analyze various examples of literary journalism from countries around the world to see if literary journalism unifies the humanities in how it covers war, all the while the war that is being covered divides us further from each other. Topics included will be case studies of wars from colonialist Africa to World War I and from Russia’s involvement in Chechnia to America’s military engagements during the Arab Spring. Research in the form of conference presentations, seminars and book and journal publications (a special issue of Literary Journalism Studies will be edited) will examine how literary journalism tries to balance the bloody with the banal in war reporting.

The long-term project will be to disseminate the project’s research findings to various communities. An online, interactive website will provide a database of literary war journalism written throughout the world. Internauts will be able to click on a country in Europe or Africa, select a site where a war was centralized, and access the various literary journalistic pieces written about that particular site by literary journalists of multiple nations. Additional media will be made available as well, including manuscripts, notebooks, letters, photos, and videos linked to the war and the journalistic piece.

Goals & Output

Following up on a seminal book, Literary Journalism across the Globe (U Massachusetts P, 2011) and the more recent Routledge Companion to World Literary Journalism (Routledge, 2022), both which define literary journalism within an international context, this project puts these books to practical use in using some of their theories in application to war coverage in the nontraditional press. As of now, there is no research center in the world that deals exclusively with literary journalism as a research object, let alone with literary journalism and war.

 

Program 2025-26

The academic year 2025-26 will be very busy for the ReportAGES project.

In mid-November 2025, several of the JorLITSAF team will meet in Aix for a three-day writing workshop at the Université d’Aix-Marseille to present and revise in group discussions research articles (sent to everyone in advance) for a new collected volume on the representions of France and South Africa in each others’ print cultures. JorLitSAF is expanding its original research consortium and scientific parameters beyond literary journalism to look at various representations of South Africa and its people in France, and France and the French in South Africa.

This expansion of the original project, now entitled “Tracing the Historical Intersections of South Africa and Europe through Narrative,” produced a formal CIVIS application last February, with a response from CIVIS anticipated in early November. While Phase Two of this new project was held in Cape Town this past June and July following the IAMHIST conference and included discussion sessions on our research work-in-progress, Phase Three is planned for November 2025, when the JorLitSAF team and its several new members, including representatives from CIVIS universities, will gather in Aix to workshop articles that will be collected into a new book on representations of – and links between – France and South Africa in both countries’ culture and imagination.

There was some good news as well in September. John was able to secure an additional grant for the project, this time from the French embassy in Pretoria. The grant of 2,860 euros will be used to help defray the costs of members from South Africa to attend the JorLitSAF workshop to be held in Aix, France, during the second week of November 2025. That week eventually produced a two-day online workshop with colleagues around Franch and Belgium, where they discussed their research in progress.

In December, John was also invited to Vrije Universiteit Brussel to deliver a keynote address during the CLIC research center's symposium on Literary and Journalism. His talk is entitled “H. Rider Haggard, Jean Carrère, and Literary Journalistic Representations of the Boers in the French Press during the Anglo-Boer War, 1899–1902?” 

Also in late December (actually early February 2026), John and Lesley 

Cover of the special issue

published their special issue of Literary Journalism Studies, entitled "Narrative Nonfiction and Literary Journalism in South Africa". All of the JorLitSAF members have contributed articles, reviews, or interview.

Click here to access the entire special issue: https://ialjs.org/january-2026-vol-16-no-2/.

While the fall program is now complete, the spring term activities look to be exciting as well. In May 2026, Nancy will be hosting the 20th Congress of the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies (IALJS-20), which will be celebrating the 20th anniversary of IALJS founded in Nancy back in 2006. The theme for this next congress will be "Literary Journalism & A Sense of Home." 

IALJS 20 

For a long time, literary journalism was an academic refugee, calling home to any place that would welcome it. It lived, and lives still, on several different shelves of the library and the bookstore, just as it still lives in various university departments throughout the world. Longing for a home of its own, literary journalism – those who write it, those who study it – found a kindred spirit over the years in the IALJS, and, in coming home to Nancy, it bears witness to the decades of research and researchers (from those living to those we have lost) dedicated to its many forms, its many faces, its many names. Literary journalism, as a genre, was homeless for a long time, which is precisely why it empathizes so much with those who still are.

There are many ways “home” could be explored within literary journalism studies. From the works themselves to the authors who wrote them to the scholars who have studied them over the last twenty years (as a genre, as a discipline, as a hermeneutic). Potential papers and panels can inquire: What has IALJS achieved these past two decades? What still remains to be done? What are the future prospects for literary journalism research and IALJS in a world growing openly hostile to refugees and the homeless? A sense of “home” can thus be interpreted in many different ways and from many various perspectives.

The International Association for Literary Journalism Studies is a multi-disciplinary learned society whose essential purpose is the encouragement and improvement of scholarly research and education in Literary Journalism. As an association in a relatively recently defined field of academic study, it is our agreed intent to be both explicitly inclusive and warmly supportive of a variety of scholarly approaches.

IALJS 20 (UNIVERSITE DE LORRAINE), PANEL PROPOSAL

Type: Research

Title of Panel: “Narco-narratives in Documentary Comics”

Keywords: Comics journalism, narco-narrative, BD reportage, graphic literary journalism

Description of Panel (150-250 words):

Narco-narratives are stories that exploit the violent nature of drug crime in Latin America. Although a means to expose cartel crime, narco-narratives were also a weapon the government wielded to keep its citizens frightened and, consequently, supportive of the government in power that was promising to protect them. For this panel, the Franco-Colombian research project “GABO” (“NaviGAting French and ColomBian Literary Journalism Over the Past Century”) and the Franco-Japanese research project “Mangix” are combining their resources on the narco-narrative journalistic tradition and the documentary manga in Colombia, France, the United States, and Japan to examine the creation, publication, and distribution of more recent auto-fictional accounts of violence (narco-narratives) and the “true crime” narratives they have inspired in each nation. One direction the narco-narrative has recently taken is the narkomic, a comic strip or book that exaggerates the greed, violence and hubris of narcotraffickers in the hopes that parody will accomplish what serious reportage on the cartels has failed to do: de-romanticize narco-culture. Cartoonist for Ríodoce, the Mexican weekly dedicated to coverage of organized crime and the war on drugs, Ricardo Sánchez Bobadilla draws on gallows humor to mock narco-culture in his comic strip “El Ñacas y El Tacuachi,” illustrating the surreal world of the cartels, and the inefficient authorities who try to combat them. This panel will explore the narco-narrative and the narkomic’s means to denounce it, thereby countering the mythologizing of cartel crimes that feeds public hunger for dark and sinister stories dominated by antiheros such as Pablo Escobar.

Following just on the heals of this congress will be the 4th Transnational Literary Journalism Summer School, again to be held in Nancy from 1 - 5 June 2026. The theme for this fourth Ecole d'été will be linked to the Mangix project, "Comics Journalism, Documentary Manga, BD Reportage: Graphic Literary Journalism around the World."

“Comics Journalism, BD Reportage, and Documentary Manga in Nancy”

During the first week of June, the Université de Lorraine hosted its 4th international summer school on literary journalism. The week-long school, again funded by the LUE with a RÉCOLTE grant, tackled the topic of nonfiction comics as an emerging source of literary journalism.

The school, whose title was “Comics Journalism, BD Reportage, Documentary Manga: Graphic Literary Journalism around the World,” welcomed nine professors from Colombia, Japan, the U.S., Germany, England and Poland – as well as professional cartoonist Yan Lindingre – all of whom dealt with various types of comics and BDs from the classics (Joe Sacco, Marjane Satrapi, Art Spiegelman) to lesser-known graphic journalists (Keiji Nakazawa, Krzysztof Gawronkiewicz, and Paco Roca).

Topics discussed ranged from memoir manga about the bombing of Hiroshima to narco comics about Pablo Escobar to the artwork of Dina Gottliebova Babbitt while interned in Auschwitz by the Nazis. The majority of comics journalism tends to deal with trauma and tragedy, so the sunny weather outside helped assuage the darkness being studied inside.  

The school welcomed five Polish students (undergraduates to PhD students) who came to Nancy thanks to an ERASMUS+ Blended program established between the UL and the University of Lower Silesia and the University of Gdansk, as well as a EURECA-PRO grant with Silesian University of Technology. The courses were delivered in English but included comics written in Spanish, Japanese, French, and Polish.

In addition to the Polish students – who were joined by several undergraduate and graduate students from the UL (among whom were Arson McLaren, Léa de Caestecker and Maeva Legnaghi), the summer school welcomed three professors of graphic arts from the Escuela Superior de Diseño de La Rioja in Spain and Aachen University in Germany. All told, about twenty people attended each day, by and far the most successful of the ReportAGES summer schools.

The school concluded with a masterclass in comics art and journalistic reporting by Yan Lindingre, who has worked for the organization “Cartooning for Peace.” After discussing his own art work, from political editorials and caricatures to documentary comics, Yan offered the students some individual advice about their own comics, which they had to produce during the work in order to complete the summer school.

All told, the summer school was a delightful moment for professors and students to work together as one, without a sense of the traditional hierarchy found in the university classroom. They worked together in the classroom and shared their lunches each day, and celebrated during an end-of-week dinner in the Old Town of Nancy.

Program 2024-25

The academic year started off with some very good news. The Mangix project, "Comics/Manga Journalism: Reportage Traditions and Illustration Praxes in Graphic Literary Journalism," was granted two-year seed funding by the Univ. of Lorraine (France) and Tohoku (Japan). The project, which can be found here, will officially begin on 10 Dec. 2024 with an introductory seminar (the program to be announced later). 

Click here to read more about the Mangix project.

In addition to the Mangix project, the JorLitSAF project looks to be continued for another half-year in order to complete the "Spotlight on South Africa" special issue of Literary Journalism Studies (for which Lesley Cowling and John S. Bak are serving as co-editors) and create a CIVIS project in journalism histories between Wits, Aix and Bruxelles Libres universities.

On 22 November, John Bak, joined by Indiana Lods, led a round table discussion on "True Crime Nonfiction" with literary journalists Puja Changoiwala (India) and Taha Siddiqui (Pakistan) as part of the one-day symposium, "The Itineraries of Puja Changoiwala’s Artivist Practices: From Production to Reception," held at the Université de Lorraine.

Then, on 10 December, he, Christopher Craig and Sara Izzo held the inaugural seminar for the Mangix project. John introduced the project publicly for the first time, and then each of them present a mini-talk on their comics/manga journalism works in progress.