Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

Verschlagwortet: palestine

When Writing Stutters: Adania Shibli and Zeina Halabi in Conversation

Listening to Adania Shibli, one feels herself in the presence of a storyteller like no other. The writer begins by diving into an idea and supplements it with a story in which she summons thinkers and turns them into fictional characters, then casts a light on marginal figures that places them at the core of the historical event. Shibli effortlessly moves between the written and the aural, between abstraction and narration, and she does it ever so playfully, ultimately distilling narrative into theory. A Conversation with Zeina G. Halabi.

Friendship in Dark Times: Fragments on Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim Literatures

By Zahiye Kundos. “Now, as a group of people who are obsessed with the idea that history matters, we can agree that in the last few months, the aforementioned big hopes have been receiving a series of electric shocks. Thereafter, the word ‘return’ and the question mark disappeared, leaving ‘exile’ standing alone, naked on an empty stage. By then, and while becoming perplexed about the title’s orientation and the exact concepts to tackle, our hosts first suggested talking about “Rethinking Jewish Politics: Between Exile and Sovereignty” and then changed it to “Between State and Exile: Rethinking Jewish Politics.”

An Impossible Friendship – Conversation with Sonja Mejcher-Atassi

Sonja Mejcher-Atassi is a professor of Arabic and comparative literature at the American University of Beirut. She is the author of “An Impossible Friendship: Group Portrait, Jerusalem Before and After 1948” (Columbia University Press 2024). In it, she retraces the story of five friends, or a “small ecumenical circle”, who came together in Jerusalem before 1948 and parted ways after a historical caesura. A Conversation with Jacqueline Wagner.

That Was Tomorrow: A Conversation About Arab Imaginaries in Berlin

Syrian writer Rasha Abbas and Palestinian artist Muhammad Jabali, in conversation with Diana Abbani, discuss the evolving dynamics and narratives shaping Berlin, a city once envisioned as an Arab cultural hub. By exploring how Berlin’s cultural landscape has been influenced by migration, identity politics, and recent political changes, emphazizing the need for both imagination and realistic approaches to create more livable cities.

Gaza through a Mother’s Lens

By Zahyie Kundos. Since Gaza was set on fire, once again, I am asking myself: When will I manage to bring myself to language, to carry the duty of recording the apocalyptic scenes of death, and to imagine a way for rebirth thereof? The least of interventions from my safe place in the diaspora: bringing self to letters. Imagine. But I haven’t been able to, and I am troubled to understand why not. Why is the distance between myself and the act of translating feelings into letters so big this time?

Ethics of Listening to the Silence: Voices, Archives, and the Unspoken Past

By Himmat Zoubi. In recent decades, critical intellectual trends have achieved significant breakthroughs in analyzing the relationship between power and knowledge, as well as in analyzing the dynamics between dominant and marginalized groups. These trends have led to profound debates about the production of history, emphasizing the need to consider the identity of the producers of history, the perspectives of those recording history, methods of reconstructing the past, ways of framing the present, the selection and availability of sources, and techniques of historical revision.

The No-State Solution

In this article, the Palistinian sociologist Mohammed A. Bamyeh, outlines a “No-State Solution” to the area between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea. This “No-State Solution” was discussed at an event on January 28, 2024, hosted by a number of local institutions in Victoria, Canada by the author and Israeli political scientist Uri Gordon. The idea of no-state was understood to foreground the virtues of free association, multiple loyalties, and uncoerced order — all as counterweights to centralized control, militarized states, fanatic loyalties, and permanent mobilization of populations.

“The Deafening Silence from Academic Institutions (…) Serves as a Disheartening Deterrent” – 5in10 with Loaay Wattad

Loaay Wattad is a Lecturer at the Department of Sociology and the School of Cultural Studies at Tel Aviv University, focusing on the sociology of Palestinian children’s literature in Palestine. He has conducted extensive research in this field and built a unique database covering the past century. In addition to his academic pursuits, Loaay is a translator and an active member of the Maktoob translators’ circle, dedicated to translating various literary works from Arabic to Hebrew. In the academic year 2023/24, he is a EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien.

“The urgency to tell the Palestinian story to the world and to keep reminding Palestinians of their own story is crystallizing at this moment” – 5in10 with Sanabel Abdelrahman

Sanabel Abdelrahman holds a Ph.D. in Arabic Studies, focusing on magical realism in Palestinian literature, from Philipps-Universität Marburg. She completed her BA and MA at the University of Toronto’s Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow at EUME at the Forum Transregionale Studien 2023/2024 in Berlin. Sanabel co-founded the Berlin-based Nidalat initiative for teaching about Palestine and is co-editor of the FUNNY POLITICS publication. She is a bilingual writer of essays critiquing art and literature as well as fiction. She is interested in contemporary art and film.

Resisting the Hobbesian Narrative: Hope and Morality in ‘The Hunger Games’

In this article, Loaay Wattad focuses on the evolution of hope and morality in dystopian narratives. Through the case study of ‘The Hunger Games’ trilogy, he explores how dystopian literature manifests and reverberates in our daily lives and emphasizes its development into a tangible political statement—one that challenges Hobbesian philosophy and its expression in contemporary politics. This analysis takes on added poignancy in light of current events, such as the ongoing war on Gaza, highlighting the timeliness and relevance of dystopian reflections in the face of contemporary conflicts and wars.