PRRN: Research Resources PRRN McGill ICAS Mahmoud Issa Decoding the silencing process in modern Palestinian historiography A paper presented at the conference: In this paper, my concern will be mainly concentrated about the local historiography of a small Palestinian village, Lubieh, from the end of the Ottoman Empire, through the British Mandate period 1917-1948, and the fate of its inhabitants in exile after its total demolishment in 1948. Lubya - a small village in Galilee with a population of 2730 people in 1945, the largest village in the Tiberias district in Mandate Palestine - was totally demolished, and its inhabitants uprooted and dispersed to as many as 23 countries: Within, nearby, and far from Palestine. Yet before its demolition, this village once had its own historical, cultural and social narrative. Fifty years' displacement did not succeed in abolishing its history in the minds of its inhabitants, nor in the minds of those who uprooted them. The stream of past memories is still fresh in the mind of its older generation. Men and women in their sixties, seventies and eighties are still talking and recollecting their past, for their own sake and for the children's; and the latter were transforming, more or less accurately, the same histories and traditions to their sons and daughters. The recounting of historical and social facts are changing from one generation to another; but the main stream of collective memories, of remembered images, still dominate their subconscious as well as their present life, older and younger generation alike. The images are not crystal clear as they were before while living in Lubya. The image of the past, the "common sense", to use Gramsci's words, is "ambiguous, contradictory...multiform and strangely composite" | |
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