Form of the Narrative

When: Friday, June 10, 2022, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Where: Scape 1.02, 450 Mile End Road, London, E1 4GG

Workshop 2

A part of Memory in the Middle East and North Africa series

How do we narrate and represent the past in autobiographical short stories and oral folktales? And how do we translate that past into the present and across languages? This workshop will take the translation of Une enfance juive en Méditerranée musulmane [A Jewish Childhood in the Muslim Mediterranean]* as its starting point to discuss multilingual memories, contextualisation, and translating autobiography. It will go on to discuss the transmission of Palestinian folktales from oral to written Arabic, and from Arabic to English, paying particular attention to the role of women in preserving this tradition. The workshop will bring together academics, writers, and translators to examine oral and narrative representations of trauma, exile, and nostalgia, alongside their translation, interrogating the potential for dialogue between different though entangled pasts and perspectives. The Other Grape will be hosting a wine reception after the workshop.

Please contact Dr Rebekah Vince via email to register your interest.

About the workshop series

This three-part workshop series focuses on three archetypal modern sites of memory production – archives, museums, and narratives – to examine how memory is mobilised and contested across the Middle East and North Africa today. The workshops will bring together academics in history and modern languages alongside archivists, curators, writers, and translators to explore questions of preservation, curation, and representation.

Co-organised by the colleagues from Queen Mary University of London Dr Afef Mbarek (History), Dr Hannah Scott Deuchar (Languages, Linguistics and Film) and Dr Rebekah Vince (Languages, Linguistics and Film).