Rupture and Reconstruction: Palestinian Culture after Annihilation A public seminar by Dr Hana Morgenstern (University of Cambridge) with a response by Dr Farah Aboubakr (University of Edinburgh).OverviewOne of the disastrous yet overlooked outcomes of the 1948 Palestinian Nakba was the wholesale liquidation of the Palestinian cultural establishment. In the span of a few years, Palestinians witnessed the murder or exile of a generation of writers and critics, the destruction of their cultural institutions, the dismantling of the press, and the loss of the major Palestinian cities as hubs of cultural production. Following the queries of the Archives of the Disappeared project, this paper asks, what would happen if we centered the question of cultural annihilation in our study of Palestine and other sites of occupation and colonization?In this seminar, I will look at the cultural gap of the early 1950s and the attempts to rebuild the literary and intellectual cultural establishment in the aftermath of the Nakba. I argue that cultural annihilation fundamentally shaped the form, style, and material conditions of 1950s-60s Palestinian literature, and brought about sweeping formal innovations necessary to make work under colonialism and occupation. In this, I draw on several thinkers of the period, including Constantine Zurayq (1948), who claimed that the Nakba fundamentally ruptured Arabic culture and intellectual thought and Ghassan Kanafani (1967), who identified a new set of Palestinian literary forms and cultural practices designed to galvanize the project of reconstruction and resistance after 1948. I will end my presentation by sharing some notes on how the history of the 40s and 50s can shed light on the destruction of the Palestinian cultural archive as part of today’s genocidal assault on Gaza, and how we as scholars can respond. Overall, I ask how makers seek to retrieve or replace a lost cultural archive; how destruction and erasure fundamentally shift the ground and the material conditions of writing and publishing; and how loss, death and absence are accounted for in the literary form.About Our SpeakerDr Hana Morgenstern is Associate Professor in Postcolonial and Middle Eastern Literature at Cambridge University and a Fellow at Newnham College. Dr Morgenstern is a scholar of Middle Eastern literature and cultural histories of the Left, with a specialization in Palestine and Israel, including Jewish, Hebrew, Palestinian and Arabic literatures and literary cultures. Her upcoming book 'Cultural Co-Resistance in Palestine/Israel: Anticolonial Literature, Translation and Magazines' (EUP 2025), reconstructs a history of anticolonial Palestinian and Jewish literary and cultural collaborations, from the 1950s to the present day. Morgenstern is co-founder of Revolutionary Papers: a transnational research collaboration exploring 20th century periodicals of anticolonial and anti-imperial production. She is also co-founder Archives of the Disappeared, an interdisciplinary research initiative for the study of communities, social movements, spaces, literatures and cultures that have been destroyed through acts of political repression and mass violence. https://www.hanamorgenstern.org/About our RespondentDr Farah Aboubakr is a Lecturer in Arabic at the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She joined the university in 2013 and since then has been involved in teaching (language and discursive modules), developing materials and course organising across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in the fields of Arabic Language and Literature, Middle Eastern and Translation Studies. Dr Aboubakr specialises in memory studies and Palestinian popular culture and is the author of 'The Folktales of Palestine: Cultural Identity, Memory and the Politics of Storytelling' (I.B Tauris & Bloomsbury). Funded by the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL) and the Palestinian American Research Centre (PARC), Dr Aboubakr is currently working on a new project entitled 'Palestinian Transgressive Voices: Cultural Memory and Performative Arts in the Diaspora and Palestine'.Chaired by Dr Mira Al HusseinDr Al Hussein is the Alwaleed Early Career Fellow in Authority in the Globalised Muslim World with a PhD in the Sociology of Education from the University of Cambridge, UK. Dr Al Hussein researches and writes extensively on topics related to state-society relations, citizenship, women and migrants in the Arab states of the Gulf. She is currently researching the migratory patterns and experiences of Arab Gulf citizens, and the formation of diasporic political agency in host countries. Apr 03 2025 17.30 - 19.00 Rupture and Reconstruction: Palestinian Culture after Annihilation A public seminar by Dr Hana Morgenstern (University of Cambridge) with a response by Dr Farah Aboubakr (University of Edinburgh). Room LG.11 40 George Square Edinburgh EH8 9JU Find Venue Register for free
Rupture and Reconstruction: Palestinian Culture after Annihilation A public seminar by Dr Hana Morgenstern (University of Cambridge) with a response by Dr Farah Aboubakr (University of Edinburgh).OverviewOne of the disastrous yet overlooked outcomes of the 1948 Palestinian Nakba was the wholesale liquidation of the Palestinian cultural establishment. In the span of a few years, Palestinians witnessed the murder or exile of a generation of writers and critics, the destruction of their cultural institutions, the dismantling of the press, and the loss of the major Palestinian cities as hubs of cultural production. Following the queries of the Archives of the Disappeared project, this paper asks, what would happen if we centered the question of cultural annihilation in our study of Palestine and other sites of occupation and colonization?In this seminar, I will look at the cultural gap of the early 1950s and the attempts to rebuild the literary and intellectual cultural establishment in the aftermath of the Nakba. I argue that cultural annihilation fundamentally shaped the form, style, and material conditions of 1950s-60s Palestinian literature, and brought about sweeping formal innovations necessary to make work under colonialism and occupation. In this, I draw on several thinkers of the period, including Constantine Zurayq (1948), who claimed that the Nakba fundamentally ruptured Arabic culture and intellectual thought and Ghassan Kanafani (1967), who identified a new set of Palestinian literary forms and cultural practices designed to galvanize the project of reconstruction and resistance after 1948. I will end my presentation by sharing some notes on how the history of the 40s and 50s can shed light on the destruction of the Palestinian cultural archive as part of today’s genocidal assault on Gaza, and how we as scholars can respond. Overall, I ask how makers seek to retrieve or replace a lost cultural archive; how destruction and erasure fundamentally shift the ground and the material conditions of writing and publishing; and how loss, death and absence are accounted for in the literary form.About Our SpeakerDr Hana Morgenstern is Associate Professor in Postcolonial and Middle Eastern Literature at Cambridge University and a Fellow at Newnham College. Dr Morgenstern is a scholar of Middle Eastern literature and cultural histories of the Left, with a specialization in Palestine and Israel, including Jewish, Hebrew, Palestinian and Arabic literatures and literary cultures. Her upcoming book 'Cultural Co-Resistance in Palestine/Israel: Anticolonial Literature, Translation and Magazines' (EUP 2025), reconstructs a history of anticolonial Palestinian and Jewish literary and cultural collaborations, from the 1950s to the present day. Morgenstern is co-founder of Revolutionary Papers: a transnational research collaboration exploring 20th century periodicals of anticolonial and anti-imperial production. She is also co-founder Archives of the Disappeared, an interdisciplinary research initiative for the study of communities, social movements, spaces, literatures and cultures that have been destroyed through acts of political repression and mass violence. https://www.hanamorgenstern.org/About our RespondentDr Farah Aboubakr is a Lecturer in Arabic at the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She joined the university in 2013 and since then has been involved in teaching (language and discursive modules), developing materials and course organising across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in the fields of Arabic Language and Literature, Middle Eastern and Translation Studies. Dr Aboubakr specialises in memory studies and Palestinian popular culture and is the author of 'The Folktales of Palestine: Cultural Identity, Memory and the Politics of Storytelling' (I.B Tauris & Bloomsbury). Funded by the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL) and the Palestinian American Research Centre (PARC), Dr Aboubakr is currently working on a new project entitled 'Palestinian Transgressive Voices: Cultural Memory and Performative Arts in the Diaspora and Palestine'.Chaired by Dr Mira Al HusseinDr Al Hussein is the Alwaleed Early Career Fellow in Authority in the Globalised Muslim World with a PhD in the Sociology of Education from the University of Cambridge, UK. Dr Al Hussein researches and writes extensively on topics related to state-society relations, citizenship, women and migrants in the Arab states of the Gulf. She is currently researching the migratory patterns and experiences of Arab Gulf citizens, and the formation of diasporic political agency in host countries. Apr 03 2025 17.30 - 19.00 Rupture and Reconstruction: Palestinian Culture after Annihilation A public seminar by Dr Hana Morgenstern (University of Cambridge) with a response by Dr Farah Aboubakr (University of Edinburgh). Room LG.11 40 George Square Edinburgh EH8 9JU Find Venue Register for free
Apr 03 2025 17.30 - 19.00 Rupture and Reconstruction: Palestinian Culture after Annihilation A public seminar by Dr Hana Morgenstern (University of Cambridge) with a response by Dr Farah Aboubakr (University of Edinburgh).
