This special issue of Venti explores how violence, while often brutally visible, also moves as a subtle, elemental force within an atmosphere’s inherent relational capacity—one that can be harnessed for control, division, conquest, or potentially revolution. This resonance with Frantz Fanon’s depiction of colonial oppression as an ambient pressure saturating everyday life underlines our insistence that such conditions both haunt and suture perceived reality in ways at once overwhelming and elusive.¹ Contributors here probe how best to apprehend this intangible violence, asking which perceptual, critical, and creative practices are necessary not just to reveal its existence but to challenge or transform it.

In response to these critical interventions, this special issue investigates how the enduring legacies of structural violence, imperial ideologies, and the sensory dimensions of colonial rule are embedded across environmental, biological, social, and institutional systems.² Taking up Dipesh Chakrabarty’s insight, the contributions collected here foreground a central paradox: even as marginalized communities assert political agency through acts of resistance, they remain subject to ecological forces that neither recognize nor respond to human claims for justice.³ The overlapping histories of colonialism and capitalism surface in contemporary environmental crises—such as climate change, pollution, and global health emergencies—which unfold irrespective of the sociopolitical hierarchies they nonetheless impact. It is within this disjuncture between human-centered political struggle and the unresponsive material conditions of the natural world that aesthetic practices, which trace connections between past injustices and present ecological precarity, take on heightened significance.

Recalling the ecocritical work of Timothy Clark adds further dimension to these questions by showing how environmental crises dissolve illusions of an external “nature” through the same processes that blur political otherness: “To live in a space in which illusions of externality have dissolved is to see the slow erosion of the distinction between the distant waste dump and the housing estate, between the air and a sewer, between the open road and a car park, and between the self-satisfied affluence of a Sydney suburb and a drowning village in Bangladesh.”⁴ By revealing how local and global injustices bleed into one another, Clark’s breakdown of boundaries underscores the vital need to trace the invisible yet corrosive modes of structural harm that span social and ecological realms. If, as Chakrabarty suggests, becoming human in a political sense cannot alone contend with an atmosphere that acts on the level of species or planet, then we find ourselves pressed to rethink the very categories—of justice, agency, and belonging—that shaped anticolonial struggles in Fanon’s era.

Fanon’s conceptualization of violence as atmospheric makes the intangible painfully legible. His central question—how do latent atmospheres of violence become acts of revolutionary creation?—remains urgent for the authors and artists featured here (Fanon 1963). Chakrabarty’s acknowledgment of the physical, scientific atmosphere as “indifferent” disrupts any political schema that relies solely on human sovereignty or historical rights. At the same time, Fanon’s insistence that colonial oppression “ripples under the skin” illustrates how structures of domination embed themselves in collective sensoriums, intensifying until they erupt as unrest or rebellion. Together, these ideas illuminate the complex interplay between an environment that heeds no political status and human actors seeking to reclaim agency from oppressive regimes.

Our poetic contributors sharpen these tensions, each demonstrating how the air—shaped by capitalism, colonialism, and militarization—disregards neat borders, determining who is forced to inhale tear gas or toxic fumes. Fanon foregrounds revolutionary violence, yet these poets also highlight vulnerability and care as equally vital responses to atmospheric assaults, whether through pandemics, state repression, or ecological disasters.

CA Conrad details the uneven toll of the coronavirus, a disease transcending conventional boundaries and unsettling colonizers’ presumed immunity. Their poems, focused on bodily precarity, underscore healthcare inequities and echo the editorial claim that colonial violence persists at the molecular level of our shared air. YH Chang Heavy Industries, a multimedia duo, takes on the militarized atmosphere of policing, interlacing body camera footage with lyrical fragments that expose the unstoppable force of tear gas, drone surveillance, and oppression in protest zones. This explicit face of atmospheric violence resonates with Fanon’s insight that colonial powers, however covert, inevitably produce explosive confrontations. Meanwhile, Margaret Ronda’s work pivots to wildfire, displacement, agricultural degradation, and border enforcement, as seen in War Sonnet, Lullaby, and Fire History. Images of choking ash, scorched landscapes, and displaced populations refuse any stable line between “natural disaster” and structural violence. Ronda’s verse invokes questions like Was the earth younger in those days/Were you alone or with others, pushing us to ask how industrial farming, drought, and forced migration are historically bound up in violent genealogies. Taken together, these poems stress how harm and the possibility of care exist in continual tension. They urge us to consider who cares for those wounded by atmospheric violence, underscoring that care must accompany revolutionary energies if meaningful repair—indeed, survival—is to emerge.

Beyond poetry, two essays deepen our understanding of the historical, scientific, and socio-technical architectures that shape atmospheres of violence. Yang Wang’s “The Chinese are like barometers”: Philosophical Furniture, Atmospheric Susceptibility, & Emotional Sensitivity reveals how Enlightenment-era rhetoric cast entire populations as “barometers” vulnerable to environmental shifts—an argument used to justify colonial paternalism.⁵ By expanding on Fanon’s notion of ambient violence, the author shows how missionary medicine deployed languages of “vulnerability” to codify healthcare and architectural interventions that propped up colonial power. Barometric sensitivity, they argue, helped create a global sense of who was “naturally” suited to a civilizing mandate.

The second essay, Mannon Raffard’s The Atmospheric Cost of Class-Based Spatial Segregation in Nineteenth-Century Paris, centers on how malodors, tied to miasma theory, fueled the displacement of factories and working-class neighborhoods to peripheral areas. Drawing on sources from Zola, Hugo, and archival records, the essay demonstrates how “industrial stench” became both a stigma and a device of regulation, reinforcing class divisions through public health edicts. By naming this phenomenon olfactory violence (Tremblay, Hsu, and Cohene 2023), the author highlights the ways intangible forces—like smell—uphold or intensify socio-economic disparities. Both essays affirm this issue’s focus on historical investigations of structural violence and the entwined logic of imperialist and capitalist regimes, revealing how environmental rhetoric and scientific discourse become vehicles for exclusion and domination.

These works—critical essays alongside often-disquieting poems—asseverate Fanon’s diagnosis of “atmospheric violence,” which here operates as neither purely metaphorical nor reducible to local politics. Whether made manifest by a virus that ignores real and imagined boundaries and borders, or by toxic agents unleashed on protestors, such interactions of environment and power yield new intensities of harm. At the same time, these texts indicate openings toward more humane possibilities: CA Conrad foregrounds pandemic-era inequities, YH Chang reveals the militarized policing of protest zones, and Margaret Ronda layers the imagery of wildfire and migration to ask how solidarity or care might emerge under planetary constraints on the biological and conscious interiority of political subjects presumed to have agency.

As Furuhata reminds us, explication of atmosphere can never be a singular act.⁶ By focusing on the nearly invisible but deeply consequential flows of “atmospheres of violence,” each contribution here prompts us to sense the world differently, to imagine resistance and collaborative repair. In closing, we hold onto the hope that the poems, essays, and conversations gathered in these pages provoke a generative orientation toward environmental justice, collective care, and all the hidden, forceful currents—political, ecological, affective—that toxicate as much as empower our shared planetary breath.