On Wednesday, July 17, 2024, acclaimed author and organizer susan abulhawa, author of the globally beloved novel Mornings in Jenin, founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, and director of the Palestine Writes Literature Festival, will speak at the second installment of Archives & Heritage for Palestine, a series hosted by Dr. Jamila Ghaddar and Tam Rayan, in defense of Palestinian life, land, liberation, and return.
9am GMT-7 San Francisco (Ohlone); 12pm EST Toronto (Tkaronto); 7pm GMT+3 Jerusalem/Beirut.
The event will be livestreamed on Facebook, Youtube and Instagram
This session will draw upon articles, books, and quotations from abulhawa’s extensive writing on Palestine to ground a discussion about the role of cultural and memory workers in preserving Palestinian history and identity, in resisting censorship and settler colonial erasure, and advocating against the destruction of cultural heritage materials as a form of genocide and memoricide. Around the world libraries are removing and banning books by Palestinian authors while literary festivals and prizes are rescinding awards and canceling speaking opportunities. Against this censorship, abulhawa’s fearless storytelling is a call for memory institutions to resist the structural silencing of Palestinian voices. This conversation will discuss writing as a means of historical preservation, preserving memory by writing victory into Palestinian future, present and past.
The Archives & Heritage for Palestine series is a joint initiative of the Middle East Librarians Association (Archives & Heritage for Palestine Advocacy Sub-Group), the American University of Beirut’s Palestine Land Studies Center, Publishers for Palestine, and the Archives & Digital Media Lab; and is sponsored by the Lebanese Library Association, CUNY’s Archival Technologies Lab, Library Freedom, We Here and up//root. The series responds to the urgent need to act in solidarity with Palestinian colleagues and institutions in Palestine and the Shetat (Diaspora) to safeguard the heritage, history, and memory of the Palestinian people under settler colonialism and genocide. Through education and advocacy, the series works to surface, connect, amplify, and promote the efforts already underway by Palestinians and supporters in Palestine and around the world in the archives and heritage sectors.
About the Speakers & Hosts:
susan abulhawa is a Palestinian novelist, poet, activist, founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, director of the Palestine Writes Literature Festival. Her debut novel, Mornings in Jenin, was an international bestseller, translated into 32 languages. The reach and sales of this novel made abulhawa the most widely read Palestinian author in the world. Her subsequent novels, The Blue Between Sky, Water and Against the Loveless World were likewise bestsellers and received critical literary acclaim. Since the start of the genocide, susan was able to make two trips to Gaza, first for two weeks in February—March, then April-May. She has written extensively about the horrors she witnessed there.
Dr. Jamila Ghaddar is a Lebanese writer, archivist, historian and educator. She is Assistant Professor at Dalhousie University’s Department of Information Science in Kjipuktuk, Mi’kma’ki (homeland of the Mi’kmaq) also known as Halifax, Canada. She is founding director of the Archives & Digital Media Lab and a Research Affiliate at AUB’s Palestine Land Studies Center. She recently completed a SSHRC-funded Postdoctoral Fellowship working with Raymond Frogner (National Centre for Truth & Reconciliation) and Dr. Greg Bak (History Dept.) at the University of Manitoba. Ghaddar has worked in archives and libraries around the world, including at the American University of Beirut’s Jafet Library where she archived the personal papers of Dr. Constantine Zurayk who coined the term ‘Nakba’; and at the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s Centre of Memory in Johannesburg where she helped preserve the papers of the anti-apartheid figure, Nelson Mandela. Her publications appear in Disputed archival heritage (2023, Routledge), In the Field, Archival Science, Library Quarterly, and Archivaria, among others. Ghaddar holds a PhD and Master of Information from the University of Toronto.
Tam Rayan is pursuing their PhD in Information at the University of Michigan, specializing in Archives and Digital Curation, and is advised by Ricky Punzalan and Patricia Garcia. They received their MI in Information Studies (2020) and MA in Ethnomusicology (2016) from the University of Toronto. Their research is focused on how to build transformative archival representations of those in diaspora. Specifically, they are interested in how to better serve and represent the recordkeeping needs of ethnic groups impacted by forced migration, political conflict, and/or exile. Their work has been previously published in Across the Disciplines and they have a forthcoming publication in Archival Science. They are currently a core member of the ACA BIPOC Special Interest Section, a former steering committee member of the SAA Archivists and Archives of Color section, and a former ARL/SAA Mosaic Fellow.
Publishers for Palestine 