War does not end; it migrates even after the guns fall silent, crawling into bodies, landscapes, archives, and the grammar of storytelling itself. This seminar inquires into how societies of South Asia and the Middle East, so often positioned as sites of conflicts rather than as theorists of their aftermath, have produced their own vocabularies for narrating what survives war. Michael Rothberg (2009) argues that memories of distinct historical violence do not compete for scarce recognition but can be mutually constitutive. This productive interaction nonetheless operates within a deeper structural asymmetry, argues Stef Craps (2013), in which suffering and, by extension, its memories are built on Eurocentric experiences and fail to account for what he calls ‘insidious trauma,’ a chronic, everyday reality resulting from systemic oppression. Positioning multidirectionality as a starting premise rather than a settled solution, this seminar asks what a comparative vocabulary for war’s afterlives would require if it did not assume the West as its diagnostic center and could hold memory’s diffuse forms alongside its catastrophic ones. South Asia and the Middle East offer precisely this terrain, not as a unified geography but as a shared positioning relative to power, where the aftermath of war often leads to ongoing conflict rather than clean peace. This seminar reads across a wide range of cultural forms—fiction, life, writings, graphic narratives, oral testimony, cinema, memorial architecture, and archives—to treat form itself as an argument about what war leaves behind and how it can be known. We welcome papers organized around three connected concerns: form as method, analyzing how fragmentation, unreliable narration, spatial disorientation, and non-linear temporality function as narrative strategies that enact the disordering effects of war and its aftermath; archive and its refusal, tracing how memory is transmitted where state historiography suppresses, erases, or falsifies; and transmission across distance, examining how diasporic or second- and third-generation communities inherit or refuse to inherit memory that is not directly theirs. We seek papers that engage with literature and other forms of cultural production from South Asia and the Middle East, read on their terms or in comparative dialogue with one another. We are attentive to contexts in which war memory operates under conditions of ongoing or recursive conflict, testing whether ‘aftermath’ remains a stable category. Single-region or single-text studies that push on the seminar’s theoretical questions are welcome, provided they resist collapsing historical and political specificity into a single template. The seminar, by convening these traditions, aims to build a shared, though not homogenizing, vocabulary for how cultural production narrates what war leaves behind: the slower, cumulative forms of harm and survival that outlast it.