Most exile literature imagines return. Even when homecoming is structurally impossible, the originary homeland remains the gravitational centre around which the displaced writer orients. This seminar proposes a distinct and undertheorised category: the long exile, in which displacement spans centuries or millennia, return has been foreclosed by conquest, expulsion, or genocide, and literary production must reckon not with displacement itself but with its permanent, multigenerational inheritance.

Taking as its objects communities for whom statelessness is constitutive rather than episodic — for instance, the Parsis/Zoroastrians, the Sephardic Jews, the Armenians, the Asia Minor Greeks, the Tibetans, the Assyrians/Chaldeans — the seminar asks what permanent exile does, aesthetically and sociologically, to literary form, to language, and to the grammar of belonging, opening questions that existing frameworks of diaspora studies, postcolonial literary sociology, and postmemory theory do not yet answer. That postmemory theory is reaching its own limits at the multigenerational distances these communities inhabit is now acknowledged by Marianne Hirsch herself; this seminar proposes deep-time inheritance as the concept needed in its place. Crucially, the seminar also attends to what long exile is not: communities like the Huguenots, whose displacement ended in full assimilation, reveal by contrast how rarely genuine long-exile literary continuity is achieved.

The range of texts and problems is deliberately broad. How do we read Rohinton Mistry's Bombay fiction as the product of a 1,300-year Persian displacement — and when does it cease to be Parsi literature and become simply Indian literature? What does it mean that Ladino survived as a literary medium for five centuries while Spanish itself evolved without it — and what pressures face the contemporary Ladino poet writing for 60,000 remaining speakers? How do we situate Dido Sotiriou's Farewell Anatolia, canonical in Greece but invisible in comparative literature, within a framework of three-thousand-year continuity severed in 1922? Does the Tibetan Buddhist canon function as portable territory for poets like Tenzin Tsundue or Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, who have chosen English as deliberate political outreach, as the doctrinally untranslatable Avesta does for secular Parsi fiction? These examples are indicative: the seminar welcomes work across periods, languages, genres, and methods — from medieval manuscript traditions to contemporary autofiction, from epigraphy to social media writing in endangered languages.

Key questions  include: What happens to literary form when return is structurally impossible? What are the formal consequences of writing in a dying vernacular? How does a sacred textual corpus function as portable territory in the absence of national literary institutions? When does exile literature become homeland literature — and who decides?