The Uses of Literature in the Time of War
Description
This seminar seeks to bring together literary scholars, scholar-activists, and pedagogy specialists to think through the uses and meanings of literature during times of conflict, starting with the “Twelve-day War” in Iran in June 2025, taking into consideration the populace both inside and outside Iran. For example, a narrative that consistently appeared on Persian social media was excerpts from the medieval Persian epic, the Shahnameh [the Book of Kings] about the resilience of Iranians and the land of Iran. And for those of us moving between Persianate and anglophone worlds, there was – always has been, and continues to be – a critical impetus to offer literary narratives that counteract political grand narratives (often used to justify war). Subsequently, the value of literary studies more broadly in times of conflict and the emancipatory power of literature is a central preoccupation for this seminar, especially during a period of increased existential crises about the future of humanistic study, when the foundations of our work and the institutions we work in are under serious authoritarian threat.
Jean Paul Sartre’s conception of littérature engage [engaged literature] in 1945, that led to the adabiyyat-e mote’ahed [committed literature] movement in 1960s Iran, parallel to and concomitant with the work of Latin American escritores comprometidos[committed writers], can provide a suitable framework for a discussion of the “uses” of literature and the different interpretations of this categorical formulation (along with challenges to it), as could Frantz Fanon’s conception of an anticolonial national culture in The Wretched of the Earth, or Barbara Harlow’s Resistance Literature. To that end, the placement of Persian literature within a wider tradition of Global South literary production is another focus of this panel.
At the same time, arriving at literary meaning inherently requires complicating singular and nationalistic categories of literature. Thus, returning to the aforementioned emancipatory power of literature and literary studies, this seminar also invites pedagogical interventions that transgress the traditional structures of institutional instruction, in the vein of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People. Starting with Persian literature (both in Persian and in translation) as a case study and moving outside of Iran, we pose the following (non-exhaustive) questions: What does it mean to read, teach, write, translate literature in the time of war? What forms of reading and writing does atrocity make (im)possible? What is the role of educators and instructors of literature during times of war? In what ways may literature serve as an antidote and/or objection to war? How might it help process the trauma of war? How might a study of literature help generate radical hope for peaceful futures for the nation? For the planet?
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Fatemeh Shams is associate professor of Persian literature at University of Pennsylvania. She earned her Ph.D in Middle Eastern Studies from University of Oxford. Her monograph, A Revolution in Rhyme: Poetic Co-option Under the Islamic Republic (Oxford University Press, 2021) is a study of the evolution of poetry and patronage in the Persian literary tradition and the representation and transformation of this relationship in modern Iran.
Speaker Bio
Mohsen Maleki is an Iranian literary critic, currently pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. His research examines modernism in Iran, Turkey, and the Arab world from a comparative perspective. He is the author of two books in Persian: one exploring messianism in modern Persian poetry, and the other analyzing the post-revolutionary Iranian novel and its diverse responses to the trauma of the Islamic Revolution.
Speaker Bio
Atefeh Akbari Shahmirzadi is Assistant Professor of English at Barnard College. She received her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, with an advanced certificate in Comparative Literature and Society. Her forthcoming book excavates the global intertextuality and cosmopolitan ethos in key works of Iranian literature from the 1960s, which she draws upon to propose alternative models for the discipline and study of World Literature.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Raisa Rasheeka is a doctoral student in the Department of Cultural Studies at Trent University, Canada and a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Media and Communication, Independent University, Bangladesh. Her academic and research interest spans five interconnected areas: gender and sexuality studies, postcolonial and decolonial thought, media and digital studies, cultural theory and affect studies, and identity and diaspora studies.
Speaker Bio
Mitul Joseph Koickakudy is a researcher in media studies with a focus on digital cultures in India. His work examines audience engagement, memes, and multimodal narratives in Malayalam memes and political discourse. He recently completed his PhD at CHRIST University, Bangalore and will be starting his career at Manipal Academy of Higher Education.