In 1961, the leadership of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the newly formed military wing of the African National Congress, wrote, “The time comes in the life of any nation when there remain only two choices: submit or fight. That time has now come to South Africa.” The turn to armed struggle after decades of non-violent resistance marked not only a change in strategy, but a change in presenting the struggle against apartheid to international audiences, as a just war against an unjust, highly militarized state. It also represented a change in the role of literature as imagined by artists involved in national liberation struggles: those writing in solidarity with armed resistance movements and those actively involved in such movements. What Ghassan Kanafani described as resistance literature, and Frantz Fanon referred to as the literature of combat, marked a distinct phase of anti-colonial literary solidarity, with literature itself as an arena of struggle, embodied by movements like La Generación Comprometida.

The 1960s-70s saw a surge in the representation of armed resistance, as images of fighters from southern Africa, Cuba, Vietnam, Palestine, Nicaragua, Algeria, and the armed wing of the Black Power movement, became icons of a shared struggle against settler-colonialism and neo-imperialism in a supposedly postcolonial world. These joined an increasing number of literary and cinematic accounts of decolonization movements for international audiences. Such movements, and their literary and visual representations, raised questions about the relationship between international solidarity and armed resistance that are very much with us today, as civilians are treated as legitimate military targets, civil protest and direct action are violently criminalized, and the “war on terror” returns with a vengeance. The renewed attention to Kanafani’s work, alongside other martyred Palestinian writers, is a response both to the unabating Israeli genocide but also Palestinians' continuing struggle for liberation. This might return us to the work of an earlier generation of writers engaged in decolonial literary solidarity in the midst of armed struggle. 

This seminar will consider past and present examples of appeals for solidarity and forms of literary resistance in contexts broadly construed as “times of war,” including but not limited to decolonization and its legacies. We invite papers on any aspect of this topic, with a particular interest in visual and/or narrative representations of armed resistance, culture wars around militant positions, manifestos, embedded journalism, the poetics of resistance, clandestine publishing, writing from the front lines, correspondence, student movements, criticism as solidarity (or its opposite), and international volunteers.

This seminar is organized by members of the International Solidarity Action Research Network (https://isarn.org/). We welcome abstracts from new as well as past participants in our events.