2023 Workshop

Abdalla N. Bayyari

Academic and Cultural Consultant, Darat al-Funun

The Power of Dissensus: An Interdisciplinary, Comparative Approach for Undoing the Archival Erasure in/of Palestine

The Idea of using Dissensus through interdisciplinarity as a tool for undoing the archival violence is not aiming to anti or de-archive but at least provide openings for different readings of the historical documents and the interrelations between them which eventually builds the bricks of the archival-historical-state embodied representational discourse, and that is what we might call: counter archive from within.The researcher represents archiving protocols and strategies in a comparative context to provide evidence through analysis that Palestinian archiving projects emerging from the state and or political parties like metaphor are there to annex the modernity discourse regarding Palestinian rights as a colonized group in their own history and existence instead of disrupting it.

Abdalla N. Bayyari is an academic and cultural consultant at Darat al Funun-The Khalid Shoman Foundation. A researcher, writer, and curator, his work focuses on human, cultural, and critical geography, drawing on cultural studies and critical theory. His current research project offers a decolonial and anticolonial analysis of archival narrations in Palestine. He has lectured in several Arab universities and he is currently conducting interdisciplinary workshops at the American University in Madaba (Jordan). Previously, he was a senior researcher at The Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies's Palestine Memory Project (2017 - 2022). Abdalla is also an independent translator who is engaged in The Arab Council for Social Sciences project “Decolonizing Translation Politics in Arabic Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences” (2023). His research has appeared in a variety of scholarly venues including Majallat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyya.