Sarah El Bulbeisi: Trauma and Taboo

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.