Jasmine Khelil earned an MA from New York University in Near Eastern Studies & Global Journalism as a Fulbright Scholar and a BA in History from the University of Edinburgh. Throughout her undergraduate degree, she examined Mahdi Amel’s Colonial Mode of Production in the historical context of Lebanon’s Civil War. During her master’s degree, she focused on archival studies, particularly the trajectory of Palestinian archives in conditions of displacement, exile, and destruction.

Project description

After the 1982 Israeli siege of Beirut, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was expelled from the city, bringing an end to two decades in which the organization had not only waged a political struggle but built an intellectual and cultural infrastructure. Central to this project was the PLO Research Centre (PRC) in Beirut, a hybrid space of politics, scholarship, and art that collected documents, oral histories, and publications in an effort to develop a decolonial history of Palestine. When Israeli forces bombed and looted the PRC in 1982, the PLO relocated its holdings to Tunisia and Algeria, and the archive itself entered a state of exile. This research project asks what happens to revolutionary thought when its archive is displaced and explores how the archive sustained its knowledge production in exile. This project revolves around the evolution of archival practice in conditions of destruction, exile, and displacement. It explores how the PLO’s displaced archive operated as a historical actor, shaping the trajectories of intellectual figures whose lives were bound to it. The study explores this process through the intertwined yet divergent experiences of Mahdi Amel (1936–87), the Lebanese Marxist who remained in Beirut, and Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008), the Palestinian poet who left with the PLO and its displaced archive into exile. Amel’s commitment to theorizing liberation movements in the face of catastrophe turned the absent archive into a site of theoretical struggle. Darwish, by contrast, transformed exile itself into an archival practice: his poetry turned his experience with exile into an imaginative archive of memory. By exploring the archive’s trajectory from Beirut to Algeria alongside Amel and Darwish’s works, this project situates the Palestinian revolution as both a political event and an ongoing process of archival creation and reimagination. The project aims to redefine the relationship between revolutionary knowledge and institutional displacement, offering a new framework for understanding how archives sustain political thought in exile.