Friday, December 6 · 10am - 12pm EST - in person 111 Cummington Mall suite 149, Boston, MA
"Partition": Documenting histories of Palestinian Displacement in Lebanon
Film screening and discussion with Dr. Diana Allan, McGill University
By Center on Forced Displacement
Partition brings together found footage from the British occupation of Palestine with audio recorded with Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. The silent films gathered in imperial collections hold histories that have barely been told. Bringing forms of sensory and synesthetic attention to bear on these colonial images and narratives, Partition stages an encounter between ways of knowing and telling and employs dialectical montage and asynchronous sound to deconstruct and reconstruct colonial seeing. Recentering Palestinian presence through story, voice and song, it considers how colonial pasts might be unraveled through the soundscapes of a radically unstable refugee present, how listening disrupts an overdetermined politics of looking, and the lines of continuity that might be drawn between then and now.
Diana Allan is a filmmaker and professor of anthropology at McGill University. She is the co-director of the Nakba Archive and holds a Canada Research Chair in the anthropology of living archives. Her publications include Voices of the Nakba: A living history of Palestine (2021), and Refugees of the Revolution: Experiences of Palestinian Exile (2014). Her films include, Still Life (2007), Terrace of the Sea (2010), and So Dear, So Lovely (2018). She is currently at member at the Institute for Advanced Studies.