The queer Muslim-Jewish love story between two Sarajevan men, Pinto and Osman, that drives Aleksandar Hemon’s novel The World and All that It Holds (2023) emerges as both inevitable and impossible, as does the insistent life-from-death of their daughter and chronicler Rahela. The novel begins dreamily in an apothecary’s shop on the dawn of WWI and quickly drags the two and sometimes three characters on a heartbroken, stateless journey throughout the material and immaterial realms of Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Along the way, the narratorial voice and formal experimentation articulate a rich archive of cultural knowledge and private experience that animates the novel’s anti-imperialism, anti-nationalism, and related politics of resistance to oppressive regimes of power. The text’s linguistic, generic, geographic, and otherwise expansive narrative practices thereby come to constitute prime sites at which to theorize the text’s aesthetic and political valence in relation to the question of what constitutes life in a world marked by seemingly insurmountable violence. 

Papers might address (for instance):

• Queer desire, embodiment, kinship, and sexual practice in transcultural, transborder, and interfaith contexts;


• Queer intimacies as critique of Central European/Southeast European (and other) imperialist and ethno-nationalist formations and discursive practices;


• Queer reproduction and kin-making with a focus on language politics, cultural practice, faith practice, and migration;


• Haunting/ghosts/ancestors in queer and post-imperial lineages;


• Intertextual practice putting into conversation various Jewish, Muslim, and Christian literary conventions, religious scriptures (Hebrew Bible, Qur’an), and Balkan folk traditions (songs) as archive of the ordinary; 


• Theories of comparative literary studies emanating from text’s multilingualism, multi-genre practice, intertextuality, and transborder cultural contact; 


• Sephardic diaspora, Ottoman Islamic cultural and relational practice, and the critique of monolingualism and ethnonationalism;


• Voicing the wars, displacements, and genocides of 2024 (e.g. in Ukraine and Palestine) through the crises of 1914-21;


• 1914-21 and memory studies (multidirectional memory, postmemory, screen memory, nostalgia cultures, etc.); 


• Translating the multilingual novel in and outside of Europe and theories of translation emanating from the novel’s own practices of narration and cultural transfer; 


• Bodies in pain, trauma, and addiction on the move and at rest. 

The seminar will meet for two sessions each dedicated to a discussion of pre-circulated papers related to the seminar theme. The organizers plan a journal cluster based on the seminar.