A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature | Refqa Abu-Remaileh
Refqa Abu-Remaileh joins us on This Is Not A Watermelon podcast to discuss the fascinating and crucial work she does through her digital project "Country of Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature". We dive into the very nature of Palestinian literature, discussing how it is without a centralized nation state and the challenges this presents in understanding it, as well as the key role of magazines in its production. Refqa explains the concept of a "diaspora-homeland continuum" and what it means to historicize Palestinian literature. Finally, she shares the names of figures of Palestinian literary production that are often forgotten.
This episode was recorded on March 20th at 4:15pm Palestine time.
Refqa Abu-Remaileh is a professor of Modern Arabic Literature and Film at the Freie Universität Berlin's Arabic department, specializing in Palestinian literature and film. She is the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council project "PalREAD - Country of Words: Reading and Reception of Palestinian Literature from 1948 to the Present".
Country of Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature is a digital-born project that retraces and remaps the global story of Palestinian literature in the 20th century, starting from the Arab world and going through Europe, North America, and Latin America. Sitting at the intersection of literary history, periodical studies, and digital humanities, Country of Words creates a digitally networked and multilocational literary history—a literary atlas enhanced. The virtual realm acts as the meeting place for the data and narrative fragments of this literature-in-motion, bringing together porous, interrupted, disconnected, and discontinuous fragments into an elastic, interconnected, and entangled literary history 👉 https://countryofwords.org/
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This Is Not a Watermelon
This podcast series is a celebration and documentation of Palestinian history and culture. We interview experts from various disciplines to help us better understand the facts about Palestine – the land and the people.