In the wake of World War II, Americans struggled to grasp the shifting scale of violence brought on by the nuclear era. To grapple with the overwhelming suffering of the sociopolitical moment, new ways of thinking about violence—as structural, systemic, and senseless—emerged. Artists and writers, however, challenged the cultural impulse to make sense of these new horrors, mobilizing what Anna Ioanes calls “aesthetic violence.” Searching for the strategies artists employed to resist the normalization of new forms of crushing violence, Ioanes examines the works of major cultural figures, including Kara Walker, James Baldwin, Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, and Toni Morrison, as well as lesser-known artists such as playwright Maryat Lee and riot grrrl figure Kathleen Hanna.

Grounded in close reading, archival research, and theories of affect, aesthetics, and identity, Painful Forms shows that artists employed forms that short-circuited familiar interpretive strategies for making sense of suffering and, as a result, defamiliarized commonsense notions that sought to naturalize state-sanctioned violence. Rather than pulling heartstrings, stoking outrage, or straightforwardly critiquing injustice, Ioanes argues, aesthetic violence forecloses catharsis, maintains ambiguities, and refuses to fully make sense, allowing audiences to experience new ways of thinking, feeling, and knowing about suffering.