A Brown Bag with Rana Sharif

Rana Sharif's research take as her point of departure the impossibility of narration presented by Edward Said in his essay, “Permission to Narrate” (1984). In it, Said outlines the impossibilities of narrating the Palestinian experience due to the pejorative powers of Israel and the West’s “disciplinary communication apparatus” whereby Palestinian legibility is denied enunciative powers. While the violences of settler colonial logics are punitive for marginal communities, what she invites is a decolonial approach to reading that does not rely on seeking validation or permission. In her work on what she call digital poetics on Palestine, she meditates on methods of expression that do not center the settler colonial state. Rather, what she invites is an enunciative collective power that centers Palestinian sociality, restorative memory-work, and a decolonial practice in reading and writing Palestine.