In a moment defined by escalating political violence, this panel offers a timely exploration of how contemporary literature engages with human tragedy. Since April 1, 2025, both global and domestic crises have sharply intensified. Armed conflict has erupted in the Middle East, most notably between Iran and Israel, while civilians across parts of Africa and Asia have come under attack. The United States, too, has become a site of confrontation, with Los Angeles witnessing mass protests in response to aggressive immigration raids. These events highlight the ongoing entanglement of state and retaliatory violence, forced displacement, and the marginalization of vulnerable communities. They also demonstrate why literary tragedy, as a form that foregrounds human suffering while probing questions of justice, agency, and survival, provides a uniquely apt framework for understanding the cultural and ethical stakes of our contemporary moment.

The rationale for convening this session is twofold. First, while the tragic mode has long been central to Western literary history, recent scholarship (e.g., George Steiner, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton) has debated its persistence, transformation, or decline in modernity. By turning to contemporary American and Anglophone literatures, this panel suggests that tragedy has not disappeared but rather undergone significant formal and thematic reconfiguration in response to political violence. Second, by situating tragedy within postcolonial, transnational, and medical humanistic contexts, the papers gathered here highlight how tragedy is not only a European inheritance but also a flexible mode for articulating the lived experiences of war, securitization, and displacement across the globe.

The session will begin with Swatie’s paper, Contouring Political Violence: Tragic Character in the South Asian Novel after 9/11, which examines how the securitized state of the 21st century reshapes the tragic figure in postcolonial fiction. Reading novels such as Anil’s Ghost, Riot, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Home Fire, the paper argues that Butler’s notion of “ungrievable lives” becomes a defining contour for character formation. This presentation establishes how South Asian literature reimagines tragedy within the post-9/11 landscape of suspicion, surveillance, and communal fracture.

The second paper, Fahimeh Bozorgian’s “Justice or Vengeance? Violence, Memory, and Exile in Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier,” turns to the Americas to explore tragedy as an ethical confrontation with vengeance and justice. Set against the Guatemalan Civil War and the Rodney King riots, the novel portrays violence both as a tool of state repression and as an eruptive force of retaliatory rage. By tracing how Antonio, the protagonist, moves from victimhood to vengeance, the paper highlights the tragic paradox of a hero whose pursuit of justice culminates in moral compromise and unresolved grief.

Junaid Shah Shabir’s contribution, Body as a Site of Collective Violence and Trauma in Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, approaches tragedy through the lens of psychoanalysis and medical humanities. Shibli’s novel links the 1948 Nakba to present-day Palestine by depicting how sexual violence marks the female body as a site of both occupation and trauma. Shabir demonstrates how the novel registers inherited trauma across generations, framing the body as a repository for unprocessed violence. This reading broadens the panel’s scope by underscoring how literary tragedy intersects with clinical and psychosomatic understandings of collective suffering.

The final paper by Maeva O’Brien, Tragic Foreclosure and Minor Ways Out in Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows, examines how tragedy both endures and fractures under the weight of global empire. Following characters across Nagasaki, Partition, Afghanistan, and post-9/11 New York, the paper argues that Shamsie’s novel exemplifies the foreclosure of tragic form while simultaneously opening “minor ways out” through alternative kinship and associative life. This presentation concludes the panel by situating tragedy as a global form that registers both devastation and fragile spaces of resistance.

Taken together, these papers demonstrate how tragedy is continually refashioned across cultural contexts and historical crises. They challenge narratives of tragedy’s “death” by showing its persistence as a mode uniquely suited to articulating the intersections of violence, displacement, justice, and survival in the 21st century.

The session will follow a traditional format: four papers of 15 minutes each, with 8-10 minutes for the presentation and 5 minutes for commenting on each panel, leaving at least 15 minutes for a final open discussion.

Finally, the selection of panelists reflects a diversity of scholarly voices. The contributors represent institutions across South Asia and North America, and their work spans postcolonial studies, diaspora and immigration studies, trauma theory, and medical humanities. The panel thereby brings together a range of methodological approaches and cultural contexts to illuminate how tragedy continues to provide a vital lens for understanding political violence today.