AMES Public Seminar: Dr cHana Morgenstern – Rupture and Reconstruction: The Palestinian Cultural Magazine after 1948
| Dates: | 20 November 2024 |
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| Times: | 16:30 - 18:00 |
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| What is it: | Lecture |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, Adults, Alumni, Current University students, General public |
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The Department of Arabic & Middle Eastern Studies (AMES), University of Manchester warmly invites you to this event: Part of the AMES Research Seminar Series 2024 – Living, Reconstructing and Re-imagining political and cultural landscapes of the Middle East.
AMES Public Seminar: Dr cHana Morgenstern (University of Cambridge) – Rupture and Reconstruction: The Palestinian Cultural Magazine after 1948
One of the profound yet frequently overlooked outcomes of the 1948 Palestinian Nakba was the devastating obliteration of Palestine’s literary and print culture. Within a few short years, Palestinians faced the murder or forced exile of an entire generation of writers and critics, the dismantling of cultural institutions, the collapse of the press, and the erasure of major Palestinian cities as centers of cultural production. Inspired by the inquiries of the Archives of the Disappeared project, this paper asks: what shifts in understanding emerge when we foreground the question of cultural annihilation in the study of Palestine and other colonized spaces? Focusing on the cultural destruction of the 1940s and 50s, I explore efforts to rebuild a literary and intellectual establishment through the mediums of newspapers and magazines. I argue that Arab socialist periodicals such as al-Ittihad and al-Jadid played a pivotal role in addressing the cultural losses of the Nakba, shaping the style, form, and material conditions of Palestinian literature during the 1950s and 60s. In doing so, I draw on contemporary thinkers, including Constantine Zurayq (1948), who contended that the Nakba represented a fundamental rupture in Arabic culture and intellectual life, and Ghassan Kanafani (1967), who identified emergent Palestinian literary forms and practices dedicated to the work of reconstruction and resistance post-1948.
Today, we witness a process that echoes the 1948 Nakba, in Gaza, where educational and cultural institutions are being wiped out amidst Israeli state genocide. I will end my presentation by inviting the audience to reflect on how the cultural history surrounding 1948 can shed light on the ongoing scholasticide and cultural devastation in Gaza. Overall, I ask how makers seek to preserve, 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.
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