About
Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance, founded by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi in 2020, is a research collective, conversation series, and digital archive dedicated to contemporary literature shaped by exile, transnational migration, and gross human rights violations. The series brings Southwest and Southeast Asian and North African writers and artists into sustained dialogue with American writers and scholars to imagine new modes of literary production across borders. Developed as a global public humanities project in partnership with institutes and initiatives both within and beyond the University of Notre Dame, it has hosted writers such as Ammiel Alcalay, Elias Khoury, Isabella Hammad, Karan Mahajan, Aatish Taseer, Nadia Owusu, Sinan Antoon, Brandon Hobson, Noor Naga, Kaveh Akbar, Solmaz Sharif, Roger Reeves, Moustafa Bayoumi, Hannah Lillith Assadi, Aria Aber, Jan Jamil Kochai, and Deborah Taffa among others.
The series, which will conclude in 2026, is sponsored by the College of Arts & Letters at the University of Notre Dame. Our cosponsors include the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, the Creative Writing Program, the Department of English, the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, the Institute for Social Concerns, the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good and The Brookline Booksmith Transnational Literature Series in Boston among others.
Mission
Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance focuses on contemporary literature, film, and visual art that has been shaped by revolutionary movements, migration, and human rights violations.
The series brings together Middle Eastern/Southwest Asian and North African writers and artists, both migrants and those situated in the region, together with those based in the U.S., with an emphasis on writers and artists of color. The larger aim of the series is to examine how writers and artists innovate the technology of the novel and the poem as well as other expressive mediums in the process of responding to systemic violence. In doing so, we aim to theorize new modes of contemporary literary and artistic resistance across national borders and to amplify the voices of scholars, artists, and writers whose lived experience is instrumental in forging new alliances across formal, linguistic and national boundaries.
Guiding Questions
- What is a responsible aesthetic of documentation, counter-mapping, and commemoration in the face of atrocity?
- How do literary, visual, and sound artists navigate the myriad restrictions placed on expression in order to translate the pain of violence into art and language?
- What narrative strategies do literatures of annihilation, exile, and resistance engage?
- How are memory, temporality, and spatiality reimagined in narratives of testimony?
- Are literary and visual arts a form of “archive,” and if so what is the archival work of the writer or the artist in the context of social movements?
- How do literary and artistic practices confront the challenge of displacement by creating new sites of memory, knowledge production, and visions of reconstruction?
- What does a responsible pedagogy of such expressive forms of art look like?
- What are productive modes of collaboration among writers and artists responding to human rights violations and scholars of peace studies?
Land Acknowledgement
We acknowledge our presence on the traditional homelands of Native peoples including the Haudenosauneega, Miami, Peoria, and particularly the Pokagon Potawatomi who have been using this land for thousands of years and continue to do so. We recognize our own place in the history and practices of colonialism and understand that our responsibilities extend beyond this gesture of land acknowledgment. We must also reflect on the University of Notre Dame’s past, present, and future relationship with the original stewards of this land and actively pursue ways to amend this troubled relationship.