Johanna Sellman is Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University. A scholar of Arabic and Comparative Literature, her research interests include modern and contemporary Arabic, francophone, and Scandinavian literatures, migration and postmigration studies, translation, gender and sexuality studies, and ecocriticism. Her book Arabic Exile Literature in Europe: Defamiliarizing Forced Migration (2022) traces the emergence of post-1990s Arabic literature on forced migration in Europe and its sustained yet multifaceted engagement with questions of borders, and exile writing. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Journal of Arabic Literature, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Karavan, Banipal, and Theatre Research International. Johanna is currently co-editor of Comicalités, special issue on Comics and Ecopolitics, and a member of the 2024-25 cohort of GAHDT faculty fellows working on writing linked to her project, “Narratives of Care Across Borders in Contemporary Arabic Literature.”

This talk considers major concepts and frameworks in Arabic literary studies from the mid-20^th century to the present day that denote experiences of migration and displacement. It discusses the productive tension between exile literature and other related genres, such as refugee literature or literature of forced migration, and reflects on complementary concepts, such as postmigration. Understandings of exile, or manfa in Arabic, are often tied to modernist literary currents and to conceptualizations of the intellectual that developed in the mid- to late- 20^th century. Exile, which is not a legal term in the vocabulary of international migration, has tended to denote intellectual life, arts, and literature and has often been contrasted with legal and humanitarian terms of migration, such as the refugee or forced migrant. For critics and writers, to emphasize the distinction of exile literature from refugee literature was often to affirm artistic merit and intellectual autonomy in the face of discourses that would deny those qualities to refugee literature, especially in non-European contexts. I have argued that an important trend in post-1990s Arabic literature is the increased focus on experiences of refugees, the forcefully displaced, asylum seekers, and irregular migrants. Exile literature, in turn, has become conceived less in opposition to these categories and more in its literary engagement with them. On the other hand, the concept of postmigration has primarily been applied to literature within European cultural fields and in European languages. Yet its focus on how migration affect societies as a whole and its offering of conceptual approaches for analyzing literature and arts within societies profoundly affected by migration holds potential for situating it in relation to recent Arabic literary narratives of migration, especially those that focus on place, space, and environment.