In 1943, shortly after completing his tenure as governor of Gaza, the Palestinian historian ʿArif al-ʿArif published a science fiction novella titled Ruʾyay (My Vision). Drawing on passages from my first book, this lecture explores why the Palestinian historian chose, on this singular occasion, to express himself through the genre of science fiction, and how this choice was informed by his tenure in Gaza during the Second World War. Through the story told by the novella and the story of ʿArif al-ʿArif’s life, the lecture opens a window onto a brief period in the early 1940s when Palestine experienced a belle époque, and its writers could look toward a future that, in retrospect, might be described as “postcolonial.” This postcolonial moment is a chapter in Palestine’s intellectual history before 1948, which also tells of what was destroyed and never came to fruition.
Eli Osheroff is a historian of the modern Middle East and has been a EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien since 2025. His first book, Visionaries of Agreement: A Different View of the Origins of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, was recently published in Hebrew by the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.
Liron Mor is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of Critical Theory at the University of California, Irvine. Her book, Conflicts: The Poetics and Politics of Palestine-Israel, was published by Fordham University Press in 2024. Liron’s interdisciplinary research spans the fields of critical and political theory, Hebrew and Arabic literatures, translation and visual studies, and critiques of law, conflict, and colonialism. Her publications have appeared in such venues as Comparative Literature, Arab Studies Journal, Theory & Event, Palestine-Israel Review, Qui Parle, and Diacritics. She is currently working on a second book project that examines intentionality as a rhetorical, political, and legal technology of dispossession and racialization as experienced by both Palestinians and Mizrahi Jews. In the academic year 2026/27, Liron is an associated EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien.
Please register in advance via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de. Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud.
