"Spectral Solidarities: the Afterlives of Syrian and German Histories in Contemporary Fiction" examines how contemporary Syrian fiction written in Germany enables new forms of historical encounter and solidarity. This fiction places Syrian wartime trauma in dialogue with German histories of destruction, fascism, and reconstruction, producing a cosmopolitan orientation that sustains commitment to Syria while forging solidarities that exceed it. Focusing on Rūzā Yāsīn Ḥasan’s Baḥthanʿan Kurrat al-Ṣūf (2022; Searching for the Wool Ball) and ʿAbd Allāh al-Qaṣīr’s Kawābīs Mustaʿmala (2019; Used Nightmares), this paper argues that these texts conceptualize exile as a liminal space haunted by traumatic histories from both hostland and homeland. The Syrian refugee’s home, doubly haunted by Syrian wartime trauma and the afterlives of Nazism, emerges as a spectral alternative home(land) where the two traumas productively interact. Together, the two novels raise the possibility of a spectral alternative Germany where the Syrian migrant is not a threat to the nation but the ethical inheritor of its unresolved traumas. The two novels produce a relational framework in which recognition of German trauma coexists with an ongoing commitment to Syria’s reconstruction.

"A Syrian Diaspora in Cold War China: Hanna Mina’s China Trilogy" explores the China trilogy by the Syrian communist novelist Hanna Mina (1924-2018). Loosely based on Mina’s own experience as a foreign expert in China during the 1960s, the novel recounts the misadventures of Zubayda al-Shajari, a young Arab leftist intellectual who works at Peking University. This trilogy serves as an example of the phenomenon of Arab communists living in China during the Cold War to escape political repression in their home countries and documenting the political moment through their eyewitness reflections on the Soviet-China split, the moment immediately preceding the Cultural Revolution, and other significant events. Minna’s novels, like other work by his peers, offers us a precious insight into cultural and political circumstances, but unlike writers like Ghassan Kanafani who spent less time in China, Minna’s three years of residence in Beijing strip the romanticism from his perspective - but not the romance. The portrayal of Chinese women as interests of the womanizer Zubayda exemplifies a particularly Arab male gaze directed at a particularly Chinese femininity, complicating arguments about a straightforward construction of solidarity on the part of these Arab writers.

"National Romance's Ottoman Alternative" addresses Labība Ṣawāyā Ṣidqa’s historical romance Ḥasnāʾ Sālūnīk [The Young Maiden of Salonica, 1909], the first historical novel to approach the Young Turks’ revolution against Sultan Abdulhamid II. Despite its historical and literary significance, Ḥasnāʾ Sālūnīk effectively disappeared for over seventy years. Relying on a newfound original copy, this paper chronicles how Ḥasnāʾ Sālūnīk was misinterpreted by 20^th-century literary critics. This paper clarifies how Ṣawāyā Ṣidqa’s pioneering approach to national romance diverges from the forms of national romance that would become prominent in the mid-20^th century. Ṣawāyā Ṣidqa’s use of national romance is critically gendered and speculative; it is committed to ethnic and religious pluralism, constitutional citizenship, and progressive civic change. Finally, this paper will situate the loss and rediscovery of Ḥasnāʾ Sālūnīk (and its distinct aesthetics and politics) into scholarly discussions of literary archives, literary history, and the critical potential of gender.

This panel incorporates geographic, ethnic, and gender diversity of presenters and texts.