POSTPONED: ‘Living’ Stones and Talking Trees. Agency and Worldbuilding in Palestinian Stories

Public lecture by Sanabel Abdel Rahman.

Unfortunately, the lecture has been postponed until further notice. 

Palestinian magical realism holds entire worlds in which imagining other futures trespasses the stiff parameters of the ‘real’, which grows more brutal every day. This session will explore the agential powers of Palestinian ‘objects’ and their capacity for magical and affective acts via sentience and animism. ‘Living’ objects that respond to Palestinian will and critical times recur in Palestinian folktales. They also appear in everyday Palestinian life, such as the ‘key of return’, which holds revolutionary and magical powers.

Sanabel Abdel Rahman will delve into how looking at forms of agency outside ‘living’ spheres creates alternative realities/materialities/futures, especially as Palestinian life continues to be relegated to death spaces or is rendered non-human. How do ‘living’ objects and more-than-human creatures in Palestinian landscapes provide a non-positivist approach to recounting and archiving Palestinian histories? How does this approach offer a refreshing and dynamical engagement with Palestinian history and its unfolding realities? How do these instances communicate a refusal to engage with colonial tools of ‘informing’ history while partaking in critical and innovative practices of worldbuilding?

The lecture will be followed by a reception.

No registration is necessary.

Bio

Sanabel Abdel Rahman is a researcher and a literary critic. She holds a Ph.D. in Arabic literature with a focus on Palestinian magical realism. She is interested in folktales, magical-realist modes, indigenous spaciotemporalities, and speculative approaches. Making literary tools accessible within academic and public spaces is a driving force in her work. In addition to her academic work, she designs and leads workshops around Arabic magical realism in film and literature, folktales, and speculative writing. Sanabel is interested in practices of liberatory and collective imagination(s), (re)connecting to the land, decolonial writing, and activating alternative realities. Her texts have appeared in e-magazines, zines, and art exhibitions.

This lecture is supported by HUM:Global Seed Money and is part of the open lecture series New Histories of Ideas.