Live from South Africa,  Dr. Haidar Eid joins us on Friday, March 21 for the 7th installment of the Archives & Heritage for Palestine series hosted by Dr. Jamila Ghaddar and Tam Rayan that includes a showing of the short film, Return to Zarnouqa. As a leading Palestinian scholar at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza, Dr. Eid has been outspoken in advocating for liberation that is uncompromising on the Palestinian right to self-determination, return, and equality. This session draws from Dr. Eid’s recent book, Decolonizing the Palestinian Mind (2025), an urgent and uncompromising call for Palestinian liberation from the river to the sea, grounded in a fiery rejection of Orientalism and normalization, and a profound engagement with the South African experience. In the words of Ronnie Kasrils, South African anti-apartheid icon and former liberation fighter, “This book is an impassioned call for breaking down the constraints of the Oslo surrender—a strategy imposed from above that has led to a dead end and worse. It is said that dynamite comes in small packages. This book offers ideas that will make the earth shift within historic Palestine, the Middle East, and beyond.” In offering an insurgent counter-narrative, Dr. Eid speaks back to the empire in the grand tradition of deconstructing the oppressor’s narrative vis-a-vis Frantz Fanon and Edward Said. This seminar engages Dr. Eid in what this counter-narrative approach means for how we archive for liberation and return.

The Archives & Heritage for Palestine series is a joint initiative of the Middle East Librarians Association, Publishers for Palestine, Archives & Digital Media Lab, and Fighting Erasure: Digitizing Gaza’s Genocide and the War on Lebanon project; and sponsored by the Lebanese Library Association, CUNY’s Archival Technologies Lab, Library Freedom, we here, Interference Archive, and up//root. 

Donate to the Fighting Erasure project here, which funds the Archives & Heritage for Palestine series. Your donations are crucial for us to be able to host these events. Tax receipts available through the American University of Beirut.

About the speakers:

Dr. Haidar Eid is an associate professor of postcolonial and postmodern literature at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza, Palestine and a research associate at the Centre for Asian Studies at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. He is a policy advisor with Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network, on the advisory board of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), and a member of the Board of Directors of BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights. He is the author of Worlding Postmodernism: Interpretive Possibilities of Critical Theory, Countering the Palestinian Nakba: One State for All, and Decolonizing the Palestinian Mind.

Dr. Jamila Ghaddar is a Lebanese feminist, archivist, historian, and educator. She is Assistant Professor in Archival & Information Studies at the Media Studies Department at the University of Amsterdam, and Founding Director of the Archives & Digital Media Lab (ADML). She is Chair of the Middle East Librarians Association’s Archives & Records Management Training & Advocacy Group; a member of the Association of Canadian Archivists’ Indigenous Matters Committee; co-convenor of Documentary Nakba: A Reading Group for Archival Liberation in & beyond Palestine; and co-host of Archives & Heritage in Palestine. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow working with Raymond Frogner at the National Center for Truth & Reconciliation and Dr. Greg Bak at the History Dept. at the University of Manitoba. Her publications appear in Archival Science; Library Quarterly; Archivaria; Displaced Archival Heritage (2023, Routledge); Research Methods: Diversifying and Decolonizing Research (2024, SAGE); Briarpatch; Al-Akhbar. Ghaddar has led and collaborated on archival initiatives and information projects in sites around the world, including at AUB’s Jafet Library archiving the personal papers of the Arab intellectual who coined the term “Nakba”, Dr. Constantine Zurayk; and at the Centre of Memory in Johannesburg preserving the papers of the anti apartheid hero, Nelson Mandela. @jjghaddar 

Tam Rayan is a PhD candidate in the School of Information at the University of Michigan, specializing in Archives and Digital Curation. They received their MI in Information Studies and MA in Ethnomusicology from the University of Toronto. Their research is focused on deconstructing how colonialism operates through archival infrastructures as well as how to build transformative archival representations of those in diaspora. Specifically, they are interested in how to better serve and represent the recordkeeping needs of Palestinians with unique intergenerational traumas, impacted by forced migration, displacement, and exile. They are an Anti-Racist Digital Research Fellow at the University of Michigan, a former steering committee member of the SAA Archivists and Archives of Color section, and a former ARL/SAA Mosaic Fellow. Their research has been published in Across the Disciplines and Archival Science. https://www.tamrayan.com/