In a recent episode of the podcast published by Divan – The Arabic Cultural House in Berlin, Cluster member Hanan Natour (Research Area 3: "Future Perfect") talks about her research on narratives of liberation, emancipation and decoloniality in contemporary Tunisian prose, Palestinian literature, and about her vision of linking more closely the disciplines of Arabic studies and comparative literature. What role does literature play in preserving and reinterpreting one's own history? What is the relationship between Arabic and francophone literature in postcolonial North Africa? Which new forms of expression have emerged in times of political upheaval – from the attainment of independent nationhood in the 1950s to the events of the so-called "Arab Spring" in 2011? And what dialogue takes place between such new phenomena and the classical genres of Arabic literature?

The video podcast is available on YouTube in German with Arabic subtitles and optional automatic English captions. A complete script of the interview is available in Arabic. It can also be listened to on Spotify and any other podcast platform.

  

Hanan Natour studied Arabic and German in Berlin, Oxford, Paris and Göttingen, completing her doctorate with a dissertation entitled Narratives of Liberation, Emancipation, and Decoloniality in Tunisian Arabic Prose (1987–2017) at Freie Universität Berlin. In October 2024, she joined EXC 2020 as a postdoctoral researcher in Research Area 3 "Future Perfect". Together with Mohamed-Salah Omri (University of Oxford), she co-edits the first English-language volume and the first trilingual anthology of modern Tunisian literatures.