Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry
Bruce Robbins. Atrocity: A Literary History. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2025. 294 pp.
Review by Sayan Parial
18 June 2026
In Atrocity: A Literary History, Bruce Robbins attempts to answer an unsettling inquiry: “When and how and where did it become possible for writers to accuse their own country or collectivity of atrocities committed against the inhabitants of some other country or collectivity?” (p. 10) The genesis of the inquiry reciprocates a personal anecdote of the author himself. Robbins’s father was a US B-17 pilot who flew a 1945 bombing mission over Halberstadt, Germany, an event that killed thousands of civilians. This left him wrestling with his innate, inherited connection to mass violence. For much of human history, mass violence against noncombatants was comprehended as an ineluctable hyper-event or even celebrated as a heroic right of conquest. In order for the extermination of civilians to be validated as an atrocity, passive suffering had to be paired with indignation, a political affect entrenched in a sense of dignity and the perception of an injustice. Robbins debates that the formulation of this concept, and the subsequent agency of citizens to indict their own nations for violence against foreigners, is a moral triumph for humanity. However, this moral progress did not spring from modern egalitarianism or humanitarian empathy, rather, it infiltrated through the back door of conservative class anxieties. Critically probing in early modern self-indictments of imperial brutality, such as Edmund Burke’s renunciation of the British in India or Bartolomé de Las Casas’s reproof of the Spanish in the Americas, Robbins showcases that these writers were zealots for natural social hierarchies. Atrocity became distinct to them as moral disrepute because colonial debauchery augmented upwardly mobile “upstarts” whose purloined wealth jeopardized the traditional social fabric back home in Europe (p. 231).
Robbins also contends that human rights and humanitarian discourses tend to alienate civilian afflictions of their historical, political, and national contexts in a monolithic quest of perpetrator accountability. He warns that by looking into context as an elusion of guilt, we fail to apprehend the structured causes of violence, such as imperialism. Additionally, his critique of the “fatalism” prevalent in modern literature leads him to question works like David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (2004), where barbarism is treated as a recurring human condition, and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), where the refrain “so it goes” and the assertion that “there is no why” expose the reduction of the conscious massacre of civilians to a futile absurdity (pp. 110, 114). The author navigates prolepsis (used by authors like Haruki Murakami, Salman Rushdie, and Gabriel García Márquez) to stretch the temporality of a massacre and incorporate a future moral dictum or an expansive historical context that the immediate victims and perpetrators lack access to. He forwards, then, his examination of child narrators and victims to showcase how they can be used to obscure the social and class complicities surrounding violence. Atrocity: A Literary History insists that we resist the urge to frame history as chaotic violence occurring as a result of humanity's compromised morality, and that the aptitude for shame and righteous rage in the face of violence committed in our names is a critical historical win.
