This seminar invites proposals that explore the cultural, literary, and intellectual entanglements between Latin America/the Caribbean and the Middle East/North Africa from a comparative perspective. Our aim is to foster dialogue between scholars working across geographies, languages, periods, and disciplines, and to highlight emerging intersections in Latin America/Caribbean–Middle East/North African studies. We seek to center transregional flows—of people, texts, ideas, aesthetics, and political imaginaries—that link these two complex, heterogeneous regions.

We welcome papers that engage with a wide range of themes, including but not limited to:

• Early Modern connections between the regions
• Migration, exile, and diaspora (e.g., Arab migration to Latin America and vice versa)
• Comparative literatures, poetics, and translation across Caribbean languages, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Turkish, and Indigenous languages
• Anti-colonial thought and revolutionary imaginaries
• Postcolonial and decolonial approaches to comparative literature
• Orientalism, Occidentalism, and their critiques
• Religion, secularism, and cultural politics across regions
• The politics and aesthetics of memory, trauma, and representation

By inviting contributions from across periods and disciplines, we hope to foster conversation among the selected panelists, with the goal of shaping an intellectual community that looks beyond national and regional silos. We aim to reserve ample time for discussion between panelists.