Millennial Aesthetics and Global Politics

Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance

Available on-demand

This event brings poet Aria Aber and author Jamil Jan Kochai into conversation with Mehak Faizal Khan, Assistant Professor of Global Anglophone Literature at the University of Notre Dame.

Join acclaimed writers Aria Aber and Jamil Jan Kochai for an intimate exploration of the millennial Afghan experience. This evocative discussion, moderated by Mehak Faizal Khan, Assistant Professor of Global Anglophone Literature at the University of Notre Dame, reveals how memory, war, and technology reshape contemporary identity. Witness how these leading voices bridge the chasm between ancestral memory and our digital present.

This event was sponsored by Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Creative Writing Program, Department of English, Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, The Graduate School, Department of American Studies, Institute for Social Concerns, Teaching Beyond the Classroom Grants, The Brookline Booksmith Transnational Literature Series and the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good/Henkels Grant. It was recorded on March 19, 2026.

Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance is a research collective, conversation series, and digital archive dedicated to contemporary literature shaped by exile, transnational migration, and human rights violations. The series brings Southwest and Southeast Asian and North African writers and artists into sustained dialogue with American writers and scholars to imagine new modes of literary production across borders and cultivate intersectional solidarities. The series was developed as a global public humanities project in partnership with institutes and initiatives both within and beyond the University of Notre Dame, and was founded by author and Dorothy G. Griffin College Professor of English at Notre Dame, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi in 2020.

For more information visit the event website.

The “Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance” series, directed by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, serves as a vital nexus for exploring the aesthetic innovations of writers navigating migration and conflict. This specific session, moderated by Mehak F. Khan, features Aria Aber and Jamil Jan Kochai—two preeminent millennial Afghan voices whose work transcends mere reportage. Their voices are essential because they map the internal topography of a generation caught between ancestral homelands and the Western diaspora, using literary form to resist the flattening of their lived experiences.

A central pillar of the discussion is the 9/11 inflection point, which Mehak F. Khan identifies as the definitive chronological boundary for the millennial Afghan generation. For Aria Aber and Jamil Jan Kochai, this event was a seismic “before and after” that permanently altered their relationship with the West. It transformed their cultural identity into a geopolitical abstraction, forcing a confrontation with a world that often reduced their heritage to a “nebulous area” of “desert and Taliban.” Their writing serves as a necessary correction to this flattening, replacing broad geographic abstractions with the granular, human reality of the spirit.

The traditional exilic condition—historically defined by distance and silence—has been fundamentally altered by the digital collapse of space. As Jamil Jan Kochai observes, technology like WhatsApp and social media has removed the physical lag of the diaspora. His mother’s ability to communicate instantly with family in Kabul creates a state of “simultaneity” that Aria Aber identifies as quintessential to the modern exile. This immediacy transports the horrors of war directly onto a smartphone screen, removing the luxury of distance and leaving the individual “splintered and fragmented” across two geographical and temporal spaces at once.

In response to this fragmentation, both writers reject the “spare” or “minimalist” styles often associated with modern efficiency. Instead, they embrace a maximalist aesthetic as a form of intellectual resistance. For Jamil Jan Kochai, this is a refusal to “rationalize” the surreal. He recounts family stories—a gin encountered on a dark road that is offered apples, or a dream where a deceased sister asks for her missing finger, only for the brother to find the physical remain in his vest pocket the next morning. To explain these away as “raccoons” or psychological tricks is to succumb to a Western realism that cannot hold the weight of their experience. Aria Aber echoes this, describing her prose as “bursting at the seams” to capture a consciousness that refuses to be simplified or “rationalized” for a Western audience.

Crucially, this maximalism includes the “tragic comedy” of everyday life. Jamil Jan Kochai highlights the strategic use of humor as a survival mechanism, noting how his cousins in Afghanistan built small walls to shield themselves from bullets while still tending wheat, getting married, and hosting celebrations. By documenting laughter alongside trauma, these writers assert a rich, multifaceted presence in the global canon. They demonstrate that the millennial global south is defined not just by its history of victimhood, but by an active, vibrant aesthetic resistance.

9/11 as a Definitive Generational Boundary: For millennials of the Afghan diaspora, the events of September 11 serve as the primary chronological marker that dictates their political visibility and shapes their creative engagement with a Western world that often views them through a reductive lens.
The Technological Transformation of Exile: The advent of instant communication has replaced the traditional “silence” of exile with a “simultaneity” of experience, where the trauma of the homeland is no longer a distant memory but a perpetual presence on digital screens.
Aesthetic Maximalism as Intellectual Resistance: By choosing dense, world-building narratives over minimalism, these writers resist the Western impulse to “rationalize” or simplify the complex, often surreal reality of life in conflict zones, asserting that their mysteries are not for the West to solve.
The Pervasiveness of Global Militarization: The discussion highlights that modern war is no longer localized; it permeates daily life through the tax dollars funding overseas conflicts and the “digital war crimes” appearing in private bedrooms, making complete detachment an impossibility.
The Strategic Use of Humor: Laughter and “tragic comedy” are presented as vital tools for humanization. Incorporating the joys of weddings and celebrations alongside the reality of war ensures that stories of survival are not reduced solely to their traumatic elements.

“Language is the body of God in that way… you reciting it kind of brings you closer to the divine.” — Aria Aber
“Why do I feel this need to rationalize? Why can’t I accept the story as it’s being told to me?” — Jamil Jan Kochai
“I knew I was a vessel against which his reality far from here became more real.” — Aria Aber
“People find a way to live and they get married and they have celebrations… all of that I feel like needs to be captured. It can’t just be the violence.” — Jamil Jan Kochai
“You live in exile, you’re in two places at the same time even without the phone. But then with the phone… I just feel splintered and fragmented at all times.” — Aria Aber