Revisiting the Orientalist Archive: Jumana Manna's Re-Mapped Musical Archive of Palestine

When Palestinian filmmaker, Jumana Manna, wished to recuperate, as it were, a cultural moment preceding the Nakba, the Palestinian Catastrophe—preceding that is the displacement and forced exile of Palestinians and the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine in 1948—for perhaps something more whole, more lively, more natural, less tragic, less arrested, and less destroyed, she is led into a small archive of a German-Jewish ethnomusicologist by the name of Robert Lachmann, who preserved the past through an Orientalist lens. Using this archival material as a starting point, Manna’s film A Magical Substance Flows through Me does not do away with the documentary format, but rejects the ethnographic demands often associated with the genre, instead offering a narrative format in which “what was,” “what could have been,” and “what may still become” are brought together and remain open, possible, inconclusive, and, above all, seductive.