Over the past two decades, scholarship on the archive has undergone a significant reorientation, shifting away from models that privilege institutional stability toward an understanding of the archive as a site structured by power, absence, and contestation. This shift has been particularly generative in postcolonial and memory studies, where attention to fragmentation, erasure, and noncanonical materials has expanded the boundaries of what constitutes an archive and how it functions. Yet within Arabic literary studies, the archive has often remained tethered to state institutions or philological recovery, leaving underexamined the ways in which literary and cultural forms themselves operate as archival practices. This session builds on recent theoretical interventions to argue that, across Arabic and Islamicate contexts, the archive emerges as a set of strategies forged under conditions of surveillance, dispossession, and historical violence—conditions in which preservation is inseparable from transformation.

The session examines how archival forms take shape when visibility itself becomes a risk and when knowledge must be transmitted without fully appearing. In such contexts, linguistic hybridity, material inscription, and ephemeral expression constitute not the limits of the archive but its enabling conditions. Rather than treating opacity and illegibility as failures of preservation, the panel foregrounds them as generative practices through which marginalized communities sustain knowledge. What survives does so through alteration and rearticulation, often in forms that evade incorporation into dominant archival structures. By centering these practices, the session contributes to ongoing debates in archival theory, memory studies, and postcolonial scholarship, while grounding them in specific literary and historical formations.

The panel is organized around three presentations that trace a continuum of archival practices across time and media. One examines Aljamiado texts produced under forced conversion in post-1492 Iberia, theorizing them as a counter-archive structured by concealment and linguistic adaptation. Written in Arabic script yet embedded in Romance vernaculars, these texts complicate distinctions between language, script, and identity, revealing how knowledge was rendered both legible and concealed. By tracing how juridical and devotional materials were transmitted across dispersed households, the paper demonstrates how illegibility functions as a deliberate strategy of survival. Another paper turns to Palestinian literature, focusing on Ghassan Kanafani’s “A Hand in the Grave” to conceptualize the graveyard as a necropolitical archive. Here, the material presence of the dead becomes central to struggles over historical erasure, as exhumation exposes both the violence of colonial domination and the persistence of embodied memory. The graveyard emerges as a contested archive in which histories are inscribed, dislocated, and reclaimed, grounding archival practice in the material and affective dimensions of loss. A third paper examines the 2019 Iraqi uprising as a moment in which the archive shifts from institutional record to collective, embodied practice. Through an analysis of chants, graffiti, and digital media, it argues that protest culture generates mobile, fragmentary archives sustained through repetition, circulation, and improvisation. These forms resist stabilization and instead produce an archive that exists in motion, continually rewritten in response to ongoing political violence.

The session is designed to foster sustained dialogue across these perspectives. Each speaker will present for approximately 15 minutes, followed by a moderated discussion of at least 15 minutes to ensure substantive engagement among panelists and with the audience. The selection of panelists reflects a deliberate commitment to a range of perspectives across institution type, disciplinary training, geographic location, and scholarly approach. The panel brings together scholars at different career stages and institutional contexts, working across comparative literature, Arabic literary studies, linguistics, and cultural analysis. Their research engages early modern Iberian, Palestinian, and Iraqi contexts, offering historically and geographically distinct yet methodologically aligned approaches to the archive. The panel also reflects gender diversity and centers scholarship attentive to communities shaped by colonialism, displacement, and political violence. This range of perspectives is integral to the session’s intellectual aims, ensuring that the archive is examined as a situated practice embedded in specific histories, languages, and lived conditions.

By foregrounding concealment, materiality, and ephemerality, this session offers a focused and comparative inquiry into how archives are constituted across Arabic literary contexts and how these practices reshape our understanding of memory, history, and survival.