In his short story, “The Man Who Is No Longer a Father” (1990), Ibrahim Samu’il outlines the tragedy of Nadhir Rahim al-‘Umar, a political fugitive in al-Assad’s Syria. He disguises himself to avoid detection, but is eventually imprisoned. His pregnant wife, Maryam, has nothing left of him except a photograph: Nadhir, still in disguise. When their son is born, it is this photograph that he grows up with. Even after Nadhir is freed and reunites with his family, the son refuses to accept him as his father, becoming, as R. Shareah Taleghani puts it, “a captive of a psychological or emotional form of detention.” Nadhir, in turn, is “deprived of fatherhood” (2021).

Similarly, in Kashmir (in all its divisions), carceral experience and its representations appear in many forms. While there is writing composed within prison cells—most widely known being Anjum Zamarud Habib's memoir (2003)—other literary, narrative, and visual forms depict incarceration as not strictly limited to prison cells. For instance, the Kashmiri characters in Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator (2011) are not imprisoned but experience confinement beyond its strictly spatial understanding. In this work, the Indian military employs control tactics such as surveillance and display of dead bodies of militants killed by the military, making occupation itself a form of incarceration that goes beyond prison walls and spills into the land, the environment, and even the psychology of the victims. A more digital turn in depicting confinement has been taken by one New York-based Kashmiri artist, Mir Suhail, who depicts the experiences of local people in militarised Kashmir through cartoons. 

These examples demonstrate just one of the several concerns debated within the categories of prison literature, prison writing, and carceral literature. They highlight how the carceral experience can extend beyond the physical and reshape one’s identity. Taking this as a point of departure, this seminar wishes to explore prison literature as a corpus of texts, images, audio/visual work, etc., that not only documents the prison, but that also interrogates what imprisonment means, its implications, and how different narrative techniques may represent it. We present the Kashmiri and Syrian contexts here as case studies, but there are several contexts in which carceral literatures can be found, from First Nations to South Africa to Palestine and more, as outlined by academics like Deena Rymhs (2008) and Barbara Harlow (1992). 

We invite papers that explore both prison writing and other multimedia narratives that engage with the carceral experience across diverse geographical, sociopolitical, and historical contexts. We welcome submissions that address carceral representations from around the world and encourage transnational and interdisciplinary approaches. Possible themes include, but are not limited to:

• Carceral representation
• Memory and trauma
• Imprisonment and its representations
• Narrative and incarceration