Guest Lecture by Sarah El Bulbeisi: Trauma and Taboo
Palestinians
and the politics of remembrance in post-Holocaust states
Art x Science School for Transformation
There are about 100.000 Palestinians living in the European Union at present. Their ability to grieve the relentless
killing and aggression against the people of Gaza and the Westbank has long been curtailed by the undue equation of any critique
of Israel’s politics with antisemitism, or with the implicit approval of militant attacks from groups such as Hamas. This
gross misrecognition and de-legitimation of Palestinian voices has only intensified after the horrific murder and kidnapping
of Israeli and foreign nationals on October 7th, 2023.
The work of Swiss-Palestinian
Sarah El Bulbeisi offers a rare opportunity to put the marginalization of Palestinian suffering in context with the long standing
silence and tabu surrounding the national catastrophe of the Nakbah (1948). It has left the forced displacement and dispossession
of Palestinians, following the foundation of the Israeli state, on the margins of historical discourse in Switzerland, Austria
and Germany. Drawing on auto-ethnography and psychoanalysis, El Bulbeisi describes how the constitutive absence of the Palestinian
national trauma continues to shape senses of self, subjectivity and belonging across generations of exileds. Their marginalization
in the in the political memory of Europe, both historically and at present, has created a situation in which the routine justification
of mass-killing of Palestinian lives is experienced as re-living the national trauma in a never-ending series of repetitions,
with no end in sight.
Biography:
Sarah El Bulbeisi is a scholar in Near and
Middle East Studies, and currently associate researcher at the Orient-Institut Beirut (OIB). Before joining the OIB, she coordinated
the DAAD project “Violence, Forced Migration and Exile: Trauma in the Arab World and in Germany”, a Higher Education Dialogue
between Palestinian and Lebanese Universities and LMU Munich. In 2020 she published the much acclaimed volume “Tabu, Trauma
und Identität: Subjektkonstruktionen von PalästinenserInnen in Deutschland und der Schweiz, 1960-2015“, at Transkript Verlag.
