Contemporary writers across diasporic, racialized, disabled, and transnational communities frequently turn away from traditionally coherent narratives of identity. Instead, they embrace fragmentation, rupture, embodied difference, contradiction, silence, and incompletion as aesthetic and political practices. This seminar asks: What possibilities emerge when the self refuses wholeness as a condition of recognition?

Building from conversations in Arab American studies, Black studies, disability studies, autobiography studies, feminist theory, and comparative literature, this seminar examines the relationship between form and identity. How do writers represent selves that have been displaced, racialized, medicalized, gendered, translated, or otherwise made illegible? How might fragmented forms, nonlinear narratives, multilingual texts, embodied archives, and experimental aesthetics challenge the expectation that marginalized subjects must make themselves transparent?

We invite papers considering questions such as:

• fragmented, hybrid, or experimental autobiography
• disability, embodiment, illness, and narrative form
• Arab American, SWANA, Black, Indigenous, and comparative ethnic literatures
• multilingualism and translation as identity practice
• archives, memory, inheritance, and absence
• women’s life writing and feminist self-representation
• diaspora, migration, exile, and belonging
• genre disruption and aesthetic resistance

Rather than approaching fragmentation as loss, this seminar asks how broken, unfinished, embodied, or nonlinear forms become alternative modes of knowing. How do texts teach us to read identities that are always in process?