Imagine Palestine - Magical Realism and Palestinian Times
Public seminar at Humanisten with the research network Imagine Palestine that provides a platform for discussions on Palestinian poetry, literature, culture, and politics. The seminar is attended by Sanabel Abdelrahman, Palestinian-Canadian researcher and writer.
Presentation
Sanabel Abdel Rahman is a researcher and writer with a PhD in Arabic Studies from Philipps-Universit盲t Marburg and is currently working on a forthcoming book on magical realism in Arabic literature. In May, she is a visiting researcher at the Department of Literature and Languages, University 91探花, She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at MECAM, Merian Centre for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb, Tunis, 2024/2025, where she worked on her project 鈥淭he Futures of Postcolonial Hauntologies: A Case for the Maghreb鈥, and EUME, the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin, 2023/2024. In addition, Sanabel is a bilingual writer of fiction and essays whose focus extends to visual arts and film.
Description
This talk will center around magical realism in Palestinian literature, proposing a reading of how this literary mode opens space for liberatory thinking and imagining alternative futures. It will reference works by Emile Habiby, Ghassan Kanafani, Ilyas Khoury, and Ibtisam Azem to trace how magical realism enables us to transgress specific settings and think through space-time liminality while imagining divergent ways to belong to occupied spaces. The talk will invite discussion around the tools for imagining collective healing, return, and possibilities of materializing liberated Palestinian spaces.
