On a cold Berlin night, at a time of increasing restrictions on Palestinian expression in the city, a Moroccan DJ played “Rajawi Filistini,” a song that emerged among football supporters in Casablanca and later circulated across stadiums, social media, and protests. A few months into the genocide in Gaza, its use that night was a gesture of solidarity and a political statement, carrying collective mourning, anger, and care. Starting from moments like this, the talk traces how Palestinian songs travel across places and contexts, from stadiums and online platforms to protests and underground clubs. As they move, they reach different audiences and enter everyday listening practices, where people hear them, repeat them, and give them new meanings. They also carry forms of expression that are not always possible elsewhere. It argues that music can be understood as a living archive, carrying past struggles into the present while shaping forms of collective experience in the city. Through these movements, songs create shared references across places and communities and take part in a lived and shifting geography of solidarity. At the same time, they reveal the tensions shaping Berlin’s cultural scene today, from restrictions on Palestinian expression to ongoing debates over who can be visible, speak, and perform in the city.
Diana Abbani is a cultural historian of the modern Middle East. Her research focuses on popular culture, sound, and the history of music and entertainment industries in the Eastern Mediterranean, with attention to how cultural production reflects and shapes social and political change. She is particularly interested in the limits of official archives and in reconstructing histories through fragmented sources, oral accounts, and everyday practices. She holds a PhD in Arabic Studies from Sorbonne University and was a EUME and Fritz Thyssen Fellow (2018-2023) at the Forum Transregionale Studien. Her work moves between academic and public writing, with publications in the International Journal of Middle East Studies and contributions to public platforms. She has published widely on Beirut’s cultural history and is currently completing a book on alternative histories of recorded sound, foregrounding marginalized voices and transregional circulation. She is the Science Communication Coordinator at the Merian Centre for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (MECAM) at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin, and co-founder and editor of UntoldMag.org.
Loaay Wattad is currently a EUME Fellow and a Minerva Postdoctoral Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin. His research focuses on the sociology and politics of Palestinian children’s literature, with particular attention to themes of folklore, imagination, and spatial politics under conditions of colonial constraint.
Pleaser 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.