Filmic Fabulation: The Imagining of pre-Nakba Palestinian Women's History Beyond the Archives

This practice-based PhD creates and analyses We Carve Words in the Earth in Five Vignettes, a filmic representation of Palestinian women’s histories in the pre-1948 Nakba period, during British colonisation of Palestine (1920–1948). The research underpinning this work is interdisciplinary, drawing on a range of scholarship spanning creative archival practice, feminist counter-historiography, and decolonial filmmaking. By engaging with the archive as both a site of erasure and potential, this project grapples with its silences, gaps, and violences, in order to imagine new, disruptive, and future-facing narratives of Palestinian return. The film, and the research process that informs it, seeks alternative strategies for engaging the colonial archive – strategies that centre the embodied encounter between researcher and record. Rather than reproducing dominant historical frameworks, the work instead emphasises the speculative, interrelational, and embodied possibilities of archival engagement, foregrounding the act of writing counter-histories in dialogue with the present. This involves a conscious move away from empirical certainty, toward imaginative modes of knowledge production that unsettle the fixity of colonial time. Through the creation of a filmic fabulation, the study interrogates the politics and poetics of representation, particularly as they relate to the lived experiences and mediated memories of Palestinian women. It explores how embodiment, performativity, and sensory aesthetics can contribute to a decolonial cinematic practice. In doing so, the research positions filmmaking as both method and form, capable of animating histories that remain obscured, and contributing to a visual history of Palestinian return grounded in feminist and decolonial praxis.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

PhD

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

De Montfort University

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Nasser-Eddin, Mahasen

Licence

• https://dora.dmu.ac.uk/bitstreams/c3681359-87a3-4028-bd58-04da281ae7d5/download