This seminar examines modernities shaped not by stability and consolidation, but by war, border change, and territorial contestation. While modernist studies has traditionally centered its inquiry on metropolitan capitals whose cultural authority appeared secure, this seminar turns instead to territories whose modernity was forged under conditions of instability: regions redrawn by shifting borders, occupied or partitioned, or caught in the aftermath of war and imperial collapse. In these spaces, modernity did not unfold as a steady process of progress or innovation but as something contested, interrupted, and repeatedly renegotiated. We propose the term instabilism to name this condition: instabilismnames modernist expression that emerges from, rather than despite, conditions of political and territorial instability. Rather than treating war, displacement, and contested sovereignty as mere backdrop, instabilism approaches them as constitutive of modernist form itself. 

Moving beyond the limitations of the center-periphery model toward a networked understanding of modernism, one attentive to previously unexplored circuits of literary interaction that blur national, geographic, and linguistic boundaries, this seminar approaches contested territories not as fixed margins but as nodes within shifting, often violently reconfigured networks of political and cultural exchange. Drawing further on frameworks from geocriticism, postcolonial theory, and critical geopolitics, we treat territory as an unstable, contested category that actively shapes literary form and cultural meaning, rather than a static backdrop against which modernist innovation occurs elsewhere.  What aesthetic, formal, or narrative strategies emerge from territories whose political status, sovereignty, or borders remained perpetually in question? How do war, displacement, and territorial dispute produce distinct modes of modernist and late modernist expression, ones that unsettle assumptions of continuity, center, and cultural coherence? 

We aim to bring together scholars working across regional and disciplinary boundaries to reconsider modernity through its most unstable ground and invite papers on any geographic or historical context (including but not limited to the Middle East, the Balkans, South Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America) that explore how political instability, war, and border change have shaped literary and cultural modernity. 

Please submit your presentation abstract on the ACLA website, and e-mail a short bio with institutional affiliation and scholarly background to [email protected] and [email protected]