Dr. Sanabel Abdelrahman

( 2023- 2024: Europe in the Middle East, Middle East in Europe (EUME) at the Forum Transregionale Studien/ Germany )

Sanabel Abdelrahman holds a Ph.D. in Arabic Studies, focusing on magical realism in Palestinian literature, from Philipps-Universität Marburg. She completed her BA and MA at the University of Toronto’s Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at EUME at the Forum Transregionale Studien in 2023/2024 in Berlin, where she worked on her research under the title ‘Beyond Magical Realism: Situating Palestinian Liberation within Indigenous Futurisms’. In addition to lecturing at Philipps-Universität Marburg and Freie Universität Berlin, Sanabel is a bilingual writer of fiction and essays whose focus extends to visual arts and film.

Sanabel AR. Low Res. Inst. - Copy

Project IRF I : Aesthetics & Cultural Practices

The Futures of Postcolonial Hauntologies: A Case for the Maghreb

This research project attempts to trace the phenomenon of the Maghreb’s postcolonial haunting of French spaces in a selection of films, songs, and visual arts. It will explore potential continuums of possible future revolutions emerging from protracted postcolonial traces. It delves into how postcolonial traces, such as Algerian ‘ghosts’, perform a decolonial resistance in the form of hauntology that is understood within indigenous contexts.

In parallel, it will investigate the persistence of martyrdom as a (post)colonial condition within the Algerian context specifically and the Maghreb generally.

These topics invite questions regarding the post-revolution/independence poetics of space in film and exhibition spaces as well as conceptualizations of ‘home.’ How is the sense of space altered in the post-independence vacuum in which the ‘utopias’ of post-revolution have not (yet) materialized? Additionally, is it possible to incorporate these questions within the framework of Afrofuturism- especially regarding agency, alternative presents-futures, and powerful, collective imaginations at work?

 

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