Although sometimes called “a forgotten war” by pundits, the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) was the longest conventional war fought between two states in the twentieth century. It marked a period that began just after a revolutionary government in Iran became an Islamic Republic and Saddam Hussein consolidated power in Iraq. It ended with both wartime governments entrenched, borders unchanged, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians dead. Since 1980, for a variety of reasons, writers, filmmakers, and visual artists from both countries have taken it up in their works. Based on my recently published book, Dust That Never Settles: Literary Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War, this talk explains why, three and half decades after its conclusion, this war remains a major topic for writers of Persian and Arabic fiction, and how Iranian and Iraqi writers have transformed the literatures of this war from authoritarian propaganda into literatures of mourning and resistance, with connections to some of the biggest social and political challenges the two countries face today.
Amir Moosavi is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University-Newark. He researches and teaches about modern Persian and Arabic literatures and the cultural histories of the modern Middle East, with an focus on Iran, Iraq and the Levant. His recently finished book Dust That Never Settles: Literary Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War, was published by Stanford University Press in June 2025. The book considers how Iraqi and Iranian writers have wrestled with representing the Iran-Iraq War and its legacy, from wartime to the present. In the academic year 2016/17, he has been a EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien.
Anne-Marie McManus is a comparative literary scholar of Arabic, English, and French literatures in the 20th and 21st century. She heads the ERC-funded Starting Grant SYRASP (“The Prison Narratives of Assad's Syria,” Grant no. 851393) at Berlin’s Forum Transregionale Studien. She is the author of Arab Nationalism, Decolonization, and the Making of a Transregional Literature (forthcoming Cambridge UP, 2025); co-author and editor of Design of Necessity: Resilience and Survival in Syria’s Sieges (forthcoming, coculture); and a member of the Lab for the Study of Violence. Her research has been supported by the ERC, the Mellon Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and NYU Abu Dhabi, among others.
Pleaser register in advance via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de. Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud.
