Guest Lecture „Palestinian Magical Realism as Resistance Literature“
On Monday, 17 June 2024, Dr. Sanabel Abdelrahman gave a guest lecture at the Institute for Arabic and Islamic studies entitled “Palestinian Magical Realism as Resistance Literature”.
Her talk provided an overview of magical realism within Palestinian literature, approaching magical realism as a literary mode used to resist colonial plunders, such as that of Palestinians’ physical spaces, memory, culture, and collective identity. Magical realism with its strands of surrealism, political Gothicism, science (and speculative) fiction, fantasy, and absurdism, resists the ongoing ramifications of the Nakba manifested in the distortion of physical structures (including Palestinian bodies) as well as metaphysical ones, such as identity, memory, empirical senses, temporality, and hope.
In her presentation, Sanabel Abdelrahman referenced some recurring figures and tropes from Palestinian folktales and contemporary literary works, such as ghosts, mythical creatures, dreams, and nightmares, as well as processes, such as concretization (tamaddī), metamorphosis, resurrection, animism, and the manipulation of time to expound the magical-realistic impetus. Drawing on Palestinian literary texts such as Emile Habiby’s Sarāya Bint al-Ghūl ("Saraya, the Ogre's Daughter", 1991), Elias Khoury’s Bāb al-Shams ("Gate of the Sun", 1998), and Sheikha Hlewa’s Ṭalabiyya C345 (2018) as well as the folktales in Qūl yā Ṭayr (2001), she showed, for example, that Palestinian ghosts emerging from the bodies of martyrs or water bodies are actors instilled with agency, actively reminding Palestinians collectively of the Nakba while disseminating ideas of future liberation.
Sanabel Abdelrahman holds a PhD 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 bilingual writer and publishes essays critiquing art and literature on platforms including Fus7a, al-Akhbar, 7iber, Jadaliyya, and NO NIIN. In the academic year 2023/24, she is a EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien.
The lecture was organized by Dr. Barbara Winkler.