Narrating palimpsestic spaces

Abstract

The term ‘palimpsest’ refers to medieval manuscripts that have been multiply erased and inscribed with the overlapping texts of successive scribes. More recently and amongst academics, the term has become a metaphor for describing the city, including both the physical urban form as well as memories and experiences of everyday urban life. The palimpsest offers a way of thinking not only about urban transformation, where new and repurposed structures exist alongside the old, but also changes in how the city is experienced, or how life stories are written upon and rewrite existing spaces. This paper focuses on the latter. Though the palimpsest metaphor has been used to describe material transformations of the urban, the question that this paper raises is: how can the notion of the palimpsest inform methodological approaches to researching how the city is lived and seen? Collaborative, digital storytelling that combines images, narration, and sound can provide a method that emphasises the polyvocality and multi-temporality that the term palimpsest implies. A palimpsestic approach to digital storytelling, as a visual and narrative method, gestures at places as open to future readings and inscriptions. This is relevant to all cities, but perhaps most obviously in cities where historical narratives, memories of violence, and questions over the future political direction of the country in which the city is located are all highly contested. To illustrate these points, this paper draws upon research conducted with young people in Beirut, Lebanon as part of a wider study about how youth experience citizenship and belonging in divided societies.