An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Farah Aboubakr (Nominated Fellow, 2025)
The Living Memory of Palestinian Music: I am Here, There and Everywhere
As part of a project I have been working on recently, namely Palestinian Transgressive Voices: Cultural Memory and Performative Arts in the Diaspora and Palestine, my research has been focusing on analysing collective and national memory development, or metamorphosis, within the Palestinian artistic scene in Palestine and the diaspora. Through a series of interviews and empirical research, I trace the agency and works of a number of prominent Palestinian singers, such as Reem Kelani, Rasha Nahas, 47Souls, Sabreen, Bashar Murad among others, in an aim to examine the complex relations between orality and musical performance, collective national memory and intergenerational and transgenerational memory, notions of statehood, resistance as opposed to coexistence. While works on post-memory (Hirsch, 2008) and prosthetic memory (Landsberg, 2004) helped in creating a framework for understanding memory transformation within the Holocaust narrative and post-colonial European contexts, they fell short at addressing present ongoing trauma and colonialism in the Global South, in particular in the Palestinian case. To address this gap, the project examines transgenerational trauma in Palestinian music and proposes new approaches to the understanding of spaces and sites of memory (Nora, 1989) in the making of the Palestinian artistic platform, creating, I argue, a transgressive, multi-fold and multi-situated discourse of time and territory. By reinventing particular modes of pre-Nakba or pre-1948, Palestinian artists under study have created new contested practices of memorial platforms, which question personal and national parameters for understanding Palestinian trauma, struggle, nationhood and survival. This new activated form of memory is analysed in terms of artistic recreative and agentive choices, highlighting a fluid intergenerational space of resilience and historicization. I hence propose alternative frameworks for analysing the artistic production of Palestinian music by adopting notions of “the archival multitude”, “activated memory”, and “Sumud (steadfastness)”.
Please join in-person, or click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81113670095
Passcode: 38bakW8E