When catastrophe strikes, what happens to a life understood as something accumulated across time? How do objects anchor temporal identity in later life, and what follows when they are destroyed, dispersed, or altered? In an era increasingly marked by war, climate crisis, displacement, and other forms of structural and intimate violence—forces felt with particular urgency in Los Angeles, where the 2025 wildfires destroyed not only homes but also the photographs, documents, and everyday belongings through which lives are accumulated and remembered—these questions become newly urgent for age studies. If such objects function as archives of duration across a lifetime, their loss does not simply register as material deprivation: it destabilizes the very sense of continuity through which a life becomes legible.

For aging subjects, this destabilization is especially acute. To lose the material forms through which time is carried is to confront not only rupture but the possible collapse of temporal coherence itself. Disaster, in this sense, is a temporal crisis: it interrupts the accumulated structures through which the past remains present and the future remains imaginable. Yet this panel insists on the generative possibilities that emerge in the wake of such loss. What forms of narrative, material practice, and collective relation make it possible to endure across broken time?

These questions lie at the heart of age studies, which has demonstrated that aging is not merely biological but narrative and material: selves take shape through the accumulation of time as it is lived, stored, and mediated. This panel extends that insight by foregrounding disaster and dispossession as conditions that expose the fragility—and persistence—of that accumulated temporal structure. Drawing on age studies alongside postcolonial and Indigenous studies, new materialism, and narrative theory, the papers examine how cultural forms represent aging subjects navigating catastrophic loss and how they imagine recomposition in its wake. Across the panel, objects and texts emerge not as static repositories but as active sites where continuity is reconfigured. The panel engages the conference’s presidential theme by reframing emancipatory narratives as practices of living on through and with material objects.

The four papers move from collective histories of dispossession to intimate experiences of loss, tracing how aging subjects sustain or remake continuity under conditions that threaten to undo it. Each presenter will speak for 12–14 minutes, leaving at least 15 minutes for discussion.

Ashley Etter opens in eighteenth-century North America with a study of Mohegan clergyman Samson Occom. Examining his hymns, sermons, and manuscript journals, Etter argues that Occom responds to colonial displacement and institutional betrayal by constructing portable textual forms that endure across rupture. Rather than narrating a continuous life, Occom assembles fragments of lived time into durable, reproducible forms that preserve collective identity under conditions that threaten its erasure.

Vaishnavi Dube turns to the afterlives of Partition, juxtaposing “witness objects” in the Partition Museum in New Delhi with Aanchal Malhotra’s Remnants of a Separation (2017) and Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day (1980). Drawing on Veena Das and Bill Brown, Dube argues that institutional archives stabilize traumatic pasts into coherent national narratives, while diasporic women’s fiction resists such closure. In these texts, objects expose rather than resolve rupture, producing “interrupted chronotopes” in which aging subjects inhabit disjunctive temporalities that resist linear containment.

Stephanie Xu then examines Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills and Yiyun Li’s Must I Go, both centered on aging mothers grieving daughters lost to suicide. Xu argues that unreliable narration organized around objects enables a strategy of late-life recomposition: fragmentation around material anchors allows for forms of selfhood that accommodate irreparable loss. Continuity here is not restored but reimagined.

Vilma Navarro-Daniels concludes with a reading of Antonella Sudasassi Furniss’s documentary Memories of a Burning Body (Costa Rica, 2024), which follows older women rebuilding lives ruptured by domestic violence. The film foregrounds objects—photographs, mirrors, domestic spaces—not as remnants of a lost past but as tools through which women actively reconstitute bodily and temporal agency, both individually and collectively.

Bringing together work on Native American writing, South Asian literary and archival culture, Japanese and Chinese American fiction, and Central American film with scholars from across professional, institutional, and regional positions, this panel highlights the global scope of age studies while maintaining a clear analytic focus on duration under conditions of rupture. The papers argue that when disaster interrupts the material scaffolding of a life, continuity is not simply lost but becomes the object of ongoing labor—an achievement forged through objects, narratives, and collective practices that allow subjects to endure across broken time.