Call for Papers (Closed)

16th EURAMAL CONFERENCE

University of St Andrews
School of Modern Languages
Department of Arabic & Persian
22-25/26 June 2026

 Catastrophe and Beyond: Representations of Violence and Trauma in Modern Arabic Literature

 Arab modernity has been marked by the traumas caused by the material and epistemic violence exercised on Arab societies. In the postcolonial era, violence has been a feature of numerous watershed events that have shaped Arab politics, moulded Arab time (defining both historical and cultural taxonomies), impacted Arab culture: the 1948 Nakba, the 1967 Naksa, the 1975–1990 Lebanese Civil War, the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s, the Gulf Wars and the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Arab Revolutions of 2010–2011, the numerous conflicts in Sudan, etc. Today, instability, conflicts and displacements happen on a seemingly unprecedented scale. The recent, almost complete devastation of the Gaza Strip perpetrated by Israel with the aid of most of its western allies is perhaps the most tragic example of how a whole population can be subjected to unprecedented extinction, expulsion and other forms of annihilating violence. 

Of course, violence cannot be seen as a distinctive feature of Arab history alone. However, because of its geopolitical strategic importance, the Arab world has undoubtedly been one of the most violently contested regions of the world. The peoples living in this region have often fallen victim to aggressive practices perpetrated by indigenous and exogenous powers. Here, as elsewhere in the world, indigenous, foundational violence has been carried out in the name of nationalism and independence. Most of the regimes that emerged in the post-independence era in the Arab world have been authoritarian in nature and exercised force in an attempt to silencing internal opposition. This has been bravely reflected by Arab writers, the majority of whom have embraced iltizām (commitment, engagement with socio-political issues). As a consequence of this, modern Arab literature has a long tradition of engagement with violence and its traumas. One only needs to consider adab al-sujūn (prison literature) and, just to mention a few notable examples, novels like Najīb Maḥfūẓ’s al-Karnak (1974) and Ilyās Khūrī’s Yālū (2002), and the novella ‘al-ʿAskarī al-aswad’ (1962), in which Yūsuf Idrīs deals with the trauma violence exercises on its perpetrator, and not only on its victim. 2 

Writers and poets have also engaged with the many instances of exogenous violent interventions that have befallen the Arab world. Aḥmad Saʿdāwī’s Frānkishtāyn fī Baghdād (2013) is only one of the many novels that explore the violent period of instability inaugurated by the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Israel’s violent colonial practices of occupation, dispossession and erasure have been countered by the works of many Palestinian authors. For example, Maḥmūd Darwīsh’s entire work engages with Israel’s occupation and its historical and political dominant discourse that negates the Palestinians’ identity and rights. More recently, ʿAdaniyya Shiblī explored Palestinian identity under threat of erasure in her novel Tafṣīl thānawī (2017) and Ibtisām ʿĀzim staged the dystopic trauma of the disappearance of all Palestinians living within Israel in her novel Sifr al-ikhtifāʾ (2014). 

The long poem Qārrāt al-awbiʾa (1995) by the late Iraqi poet Fawzī Karīm is an excellent, if overlooked, example of an artistically sophisticated indictment of the violence exercised on Iraqis by indigenous regimes and by western powers, a violence that led to the displacement of people and to the degradation and the dispossession of the natural environment they inhabited. In the previous EURAMAL conference (Prague 2024), scholars shed much needed critical light on how Arab writers reflected in their works on the violence perpetrated on the environment. Violence is not only physical and material. It is beyond doubt that more subtle forms of violence have a similarly debilitating effect on societies. For example, colonial and neo-colonial regimes exercised epistemic violence that aimed at rupturing indigenous, traditional practices. Perhaps this and other forms of violence have been overlooked in critical studies on modern Arabic literature. Further critical analyses ought to engage with the literary representations of domestic, gender, criminal forms of violence, and of forms of modern-day slavery. Similarly, instances where literature is used to instigate or justify violence deserve to be explored and contextualised further. 

Suggested topics

EURAMAL welcomes contributions exploring how modern Arabic literature engages with the traumatic experiences of violence in modern and contemporary times, from the struggle for independence to Gaza and beyond. Papers may draw their critical and theoretical approaches from disciplines such as trauma studies, minority studies, cultural memory studies, feminism, postcolonial studies, affect studies and gender studies. 

Sub-topics might include but are not limited to: 

• Literature as a form of mourning and grieving
• Violence acted upon minorities and marginalised groups 
• Modern-day slavery 
• Genocide/Omnicide: the attempts to cancel and erase the identity of a minority or an entire people 
• Ecocide and slow environmental violence: violence enacted on space and the environment 
• Violence in exilic, refugee and migrant experiences 
• Literature justifying and/or instigating violence 
• Domestic, gender and criminal violence 
• Forms of epistemic violence from colonialism to neo-colonialism 
• Symbolic violence in the literary field 
• Problems of audience and readership: how is literature on violence received inside and outside the Arab world? 
• Literary intertextual engagements with Turāth to comprehend violence 
• Rithāʾ al-mudun 
• Literature as fostering rifq as a way of countering ʿunf 
• Literature as therapy to overcome trauma, as a form of resilience against loss and violence, as a force for reconstruction 

Suggested Readings

• ʿAbbūd, Salām (2002), Thaqāfat al-ʿunf fī al-ʿIrāq, Cologne: Manshūrāt al-jamal. 
• Adorno, Theodor W. (1983), ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, in Prisms, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 17–34. 
• Antoon, Sinan (2024), ‘Sargūn Būluṣ: Writing Iraq baʿd al-qiyāmah’, Journal of Arabic Literature 56, 1–19. 
• Arendt, Hannah (1970), On Violence, Orlando: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. 
• Benjamin, Walter (1968), ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schoken Books, 253–65. 
• Benjamin, Walter (1996), Critique of Violence. Selected Writings. Volume 1, 1913–1926. London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 
• Butler, Judith (2009), Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?, New York: Verso. 
• Butler, Judith (2012), ‘“What Shall We Do Without Exile?”: Said and Darwish Address the Future’, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 32, 30–54. 
• cooke, miriam (2016), Dancing in Damascus: Creativity, Resilience, and the Syrian Revolution. New York: Routledge. 
• El-Ariss, Tarek (2013), Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political, New York: Fordham University Press. 
• El-Ariss, Tarek (2018), Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 
• Fanon, Frantz (1961), Les damnés de la terre, Paris: F. Maspero, translated by Richard Philcox as The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press (2004). 
• Lawrence, Bruce B., and Aisha Kasim, eds (2007), On Violence: A Reader, Durham: Duke University Press. 
• Mehrez, Samia (2008), Egypt’s Culture Wars: Politics and Practice, London: Routledge. 
• Milich, Stephan, and Lamia Moghnieh (2018), ‘Trauma: Social Realities and Cultural Texts.’ Middle East – Topics & Arguments 11, https://doi.org/10.17192/meta.2018.11.7941. 
• Mohaghegh, Jason Bahbak (2013), The Writing of Violence in the Middle East: Inflictions, London: Bloomsbury Academic Publishing. 
• Montgomery, James E. (2020), ‘Scenes of Violence in Arabic Literature’, in The Cambridge World History of Violence, 601–22. 
• Nixon, Rob (2011), Slow Violence and Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 
• Nosthoff, Anna-Verena (2014), ‘Barbarism: Notes on the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno’, https://criticallegalthinking.com/2014/10/15/barbarism-notes-thought-theodor-w-adorno/ 
• Sachs, Jeffrey (2015), Iterations of Loss: Mutilation and Aesthetic Form, al-Shidyaq to Darwish, New York: Fordham University Press. 
• Said, Edward (1979), Orientalism, New York: Vintage. 
• Said, Edward (2004), Humanism and Democratic Criticism, New York: Columbia University Press. 
• Saloul, Ihab (2012), Catastrophe and Exile in the Modern Palestinian Imagination: Telling Memories, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 
• Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1988), ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 

Guests of Honour

EURAMAL members are invited to suggest the names of critics or authors relevant to the theme of the conference. Please provide their CV and full contact details for consideration by the Executive Board.

Submission Guidelines

The languages of the conference are English, Arabic and French. Please send a max. 200-word abstract (Times New Roman, Font size 12, double spaced) including your name, email address, institutional affiliation and other contact details to Fabio Caiani ([email protected]) and Lovisa Berg ([email protected]).

• Deadline for submission of abstract: 1 September 2025
• Decision about acceptance: 31 October 2025