Bookstall at ‘Critical Life Lecture: ‘Narrating Gaza after the Severing’ by Dr Rita Sakr

About the event

Bookstall at 'Critical Life Lecture: 'Narrating Gaza after the Severing', by Dr Rita Sakr
 

This talk will explore a re-oriented hauntology of the future with respect to death-worlds in Gaza by addressing the Palestinian writer Atef Abu Saif’s recent diaristic work, Don’t Look Left: Diary of a Genocide (2024) alongside his earlier transmedial work The Drone Eats With Me: A Gaza Diary (2015). Abu Saif’s connective experimental representations of the severed limb in Gaza both represent and resist the continued assaults on indigenous Palestinian narrativity across the time-spaces of the ongoing Nakba and siege. Abu Saif shows that while the Israeli attacks on Gaza violated many human and environmental rights, the necropolitical dehumanisation of Palestinians paradoxically triggers forms of radical reciprocity between the harmed humans and the sea, the animals and the trees.

Bio: Rita Sakr is Associate Professor of Postcolonial and Global Literatures in the Department of English at Maynooth University, Ireland. She has published widely on contemporary Arab(ic) and Kurdish literatures and forced displacement. She is co-editor of two critical collections, co-director and co-producer of a documentary film on Beirut, and author of three monographs: Monumental Space in the Post-Imperial Novel: An Interdisciplinary Study (Continuum, 2011; Bloomsbury Academic, 2012), ‘Anticipating’ the 2011 Arab Uprisings: Revolutionary Literatures and Political Geographies (Palgrave, 2013), and the forthcoming Arab Displacements: Experimental Literature, Necropolitics and Decolonial Hauntology (Edinburgh University Press, 2026).

Organised by Dr Sam Durrant, School of English, Leeds University