Exchange Talk: Dr Farah Aboubakr

As part of a project Dr Aboubakr has been working on recently, namely Palestinian Transgressive Voices: Cultural Memory and Performative Arts in the Diaspora and Palestine, this talk will discuss the development, or metamorphosis, of collective and national memory within the Palestinian artistic scene in Palestine and the diaspora.

Dr Aboubakr attempts 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. With ongoing occupation and most recently genocide, she also looks at 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, she argues, 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 newly activated form of memory is analysed in terms of artistic, recreative, and agentive choices, highlighting a fluid intergenerational space of resilience and historicization in which personal stories have become an active tool for historical documentation.

Farah Aboubakr is a Lecturer in Arabic at the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She joined the university in 2013 and, since then, has been involved in teaching across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in Arabic language, culture and literature, Middle Eastern Studies, and Translation Studies. Farah Aboubakr has been actively engaged in research across the fields of Palestine Studies, Arabic Literature and Popular Culture, Post-colonial Studies, Memory Studies, and Cultural Studies. Her research has been funded by The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), Palestinian American Research Centre (PARC) and the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL). Her publications include The Folktales of Palestine: Cultural Identity, Memory and the Politics of Storytelling (2019) and, more recently, “Archivalism and Memory Activism: The Nakba (1948) and the Gaza War (2023)” (2025). She has recently completed her CBRL-funded project, Palestinian Transgressive Voices: Cultural Memory and Performative Arts in the Diaspora and Palestine (2023-25). She is currently the co-editor with Luisa Gandolfo of the edited volume Postmemory and Ongoing Trauma in the Levant (forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press).