Darat al Funun Ph.D. Fellowship recipient Adey Almohsen runs two workshops studying and reading excerpts from novels, poems, newspapers and literary journals to examine the Palestinian identity and to make sense of the diversity of its culture by focusing on Palestinian development of their culture in the 1960s and 1970s.

Workshop 1: Between Abstraction and Orientalism (9.1.2017)
What are some tropes used to describe Palestinian identity and culture? In this workshop we will identify these common tropes and locate their sources in Palestinian cultural productions as well as in historical accounts of the period. Beyond deconstructing sources and considering what they leave out, the discussion will contemplate the reificatory and orientalising effects of these tropes on our understanding of Palestinians then and now.

Sources: To be determined – an e-mail with relevant readings will circulate to workshop participants before session.

Workshop 2: What and Who is a “Palestinian”, anyway? (12.1.2017)
How can one then move beyond the tropes and traps surrounding Palestinian identity and culture? Beginning from the proposal of “the political as the stuff of the everyday” and the framing of nationalism as “one aspect of subjectivity formation”, we will attempt to examine the unremarkable manifestations of Palestinian identity in everyday life and analyse the products of independent Palestinian artists and writers away from political slogans and mantras. This is necessary, to furnish a “counterpoint” to hegemonic national discourses and reifying historical narrations, thus widening the vista of Palestinian identity and culture and allowing it to be more indeterminate and more ordinary.

Sources: To be determined – an e-mail with relevant readings will circulate to workshop participants before session.

Image Credit: A class photo from Baghdad University is among Mr. Jabra’s possessions remaining in the ruins. Holly Pickett for The New York Times.