This seminar seeks to bring together literary scholars, scholar-activists, and pedagogy specialists to think through the uses and meanings of literature during times of conflict, starting with the “Twelve-day War” in Iran in June 2025, taking into consideration the populace both inside and outside Iran. For example, a narrative that consistently appeared on Persian social media was excerpts from the medieval Persian epic, the Shahnameh [the Book of Kings] about the resilience of Iranians and the land of Iran. And for those of us moving between Persianate and anglophone worlds, there was – always has been, and continues to be – a critical impetus to offer literary narratives that counteract political grand narratives (often used to justify war). Subsequently, the value of literary studies more broadly in times of conflict and the emancipatory power of literature is a central preoccupation for this seminar, especially during a period of increased existential crises about the future of humanistic study, when the foundations of our work and the institutions we work in are under serious authoritarian threat. 

Jean Paul Sartre’s conception of littérature engage [engaged literature] in 1945, that led to the adabiyyat-e mote’ahed [committed literature] movement in 1960s Iran, parallel to and concomitant with the work of Latin American escritores comprometidos[committed writers], can provide a suitable framework for a discussion of the “uses” of literature and the different interpretations of this categorical formulation (along with challenges to it), as could Frantz Fanon’s conception of an anticolonial national culture in The Wretched of the Earth, or Barbara Harlow’s Resistance Literature. To that end, the placement of Persian literature within a wider tradition of Global South literary production is another focus of this panel. 

At the same time, arriving at literary meaning inherently requires complicating singular and nationalistic categories of literature. Thus, returning to the aforementioned emancipatory power of literature and literary studies, this seminar also invites pedagogical interventions that transgress the traditional structures of institutional instruction, in the vein of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People. Starting with Persian literature (both in Persian and in translation) as a case study and moving outside of Iran, we pose the following (non-exhaustive) questions: What does it mean to read, teach, write, translate literature in the time of war? What forms of reading and writing does atrocity make (im)possible? What is the role of educators and instructors of literature during times of war? In what ways may literature serve as an antidote and/or objection to war? How might it help process the trauma of war? How might a study of literature help generate radical hope for peaceful futures for the nation? For the planet?