This episode was recorded on July 10th, 2024.

Check out Sonja's reading recommendations for Palestinian literature from the 20th Century 👉https://www.afikra.com/daftarjournal/sonja-mejcher-atassi-book-recommendations

And dive deeper into the history of the King David Hotel 👉https://www.afikra.com/daftarjournal/jerusalems-king-david-hotelnbsp

Sonja Mejcher-Atassi is a professor of Arabic and comparative literature in the Department of English and an associated faculty in the Department of Arabic and Near Eastern Languages at the American University of Beirut. Her research focuses on modern Arabic literature in global perspective, and closely intersects with cultural and intellectual history and memory studies. She is also interested in biography, writers' libraries, collecting practices and literature archives, book culture and art, and aesthetics and politics.

Connect with Sonja 👉 https://x.com/someatassi

About "An Impossible Friendship: Group Portrait Before & After 1948": Sonja Mejcher-Atassi tells the story of this unlikely friendship and in so doing offers an intimate cultural and social history of Palestine in the critical postwar period. She vividly reconstructs the vanished social world of these protagonists, tracing the connections between the specificity of individual lives and the larger contexts in which they are embedded. In exploring this ecumenical friendship and its artistic, literary, and intellectual legacies, Sonja demonstrates how social biography can provide a picture of the past that is at once more inclusive and more personal.

Learn more about the book 👉 https://cup.columbia.edu/book/an-impossible-friendship/9780231214759

Theme music: Peninsular, Tarek Yamani 🔊 https://spoti.fi/47I59ns

Hosted by:

Mikey Muhanna 👉   / mikey_mu

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ABOUT AFIKRA

afikra | عفكرة is a movement to convert passive interest in the Arab world to active intellectual curiosity. We aim to collectively reframe the dominant narrative of the region by exploring the histories and cultures of the region – past, present and future – through conversations driven by curiosity.

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THIS SERIES IS PART OF THE AFIKRA PODCAST NETWORK 
Explore all episodes in this series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfYG40bwRKl40ZRFvo_VVYg6i56flEjSK

ABOUT AFIKRA
afikra | عفكرة is a movement to convert passive interest in the Arab world to active intellectual curiosity. We aim to collectively reframe the dominant narrative of the region by exploring the histories and cultures of the region – past, present and future – through conversations driven by curiosity.
📍 Local events in 40+ locations worldwide http://afikra.com/chapters
🎧 New podcasts + videos weekly http://afikra.com/podcasts
⚡ Become a member: https://www.afikra.com/membership
🔗 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/afikra_
🔗 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/afikra.official
🔗 Twitter: https://twitter.com/afikra