Sign Up Now for SIEF Talk: Meet the Authors “The Folktales of Palestine”

Folktales are instrumental in ensuring the survival of oral traditions and strengthening communal bonds. Both the stories and the process of storytelling itself help to define social, cultural and political identity. For Palestinians, the threat of losing their heritage has engendered a sense of urgency among storytellers and Palestinian folklorists. Yet there has been remarkably little academic scholarship dedicated to the tradition.

Farah Aboubakr here analyses a selection of folktales edited, compiled and translated by Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana in “Speak, Bird, Speak Again” (1989). In addition to the folktales themselves, Muhawi and Kanaana’s collection is renowned for providing readers with extensive folkloric, historical and anthropological annotations. Here, for the first time, the folktales and the compilers’ work on them, are the subject of scholarly analysis. Synthesising various disciplines including memory studies, gender studies and social movement studies, Aboubakr uses the collection to understand the politics of storytelling and its impact on Palestinian identity. In particular, the book draws attention to the female storytellers who play an essential role in transmitting and preserving collective memory and culture. The book is an important step towards analysing a significant genre of Palestinian literature and will be relevant to scholars of Palestinian politics and popular culture, gender studies and memory studies, and those interested in folklore and oral literature.

Guided by its mission to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion among scholars in ethnology and folklore, SIEF facilitates scholarly exchanges, respecting the richness of diverse academic traditions, promoting dialogue and encouraging change. It strives to create a welcoming space for underrepresented and racialized communities and scholars from all corners of Europe and the world.

Building upon the success of its previous online seminars, SIEF is initiating the “Meet the Authors” online forum. Bringing together diverse researchers, teachers, students, archivists, as well as museum and heritage professionals to discuss selected books with their authors, SIEF invites its members to reflect together on the role of ethnological and folkloristic knowledge in the changing world.