How does poetry resist erasure? How do oral traditions protect collective memory across generations, especially in times of political rupture and displacement?

Join us for From Verse to Vinyl: Tracing Libyan Resistance through Poetry and Sound with Libyan-American scholar and UC Berkeley professor Adam Benkato. This event explores the power of storytelling as a form of resistance in Libya through poetry, oral literature, and music that document anti-colonial struggle, post-independence identity, and political dissent. Through selected readings and musical excerpts, Professor Benkato will guide us in examining how language, memory, and creative expression sustain Libyan cultural narratives and challenge efforts of erasure.

We invite you to reflect on the role of storytelling in preserving history through remembrance, resistance, and revival.

The event will be moderated by the Abbasi-Markaz 25-26 Fellow Ameera Ramadan Eshtewi.

Adam Benkato is a Libyan-American academic and archivist. He teaches in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at UC Berkeley, where his research investigates a wide variety of textual and audio sources through the lenses of material philology, sociolinguistics, archive studies. Among his main research focuses are the philology of Old and Middle Iranic languages and the sociolinguistics and dialectology of Arabic and other languages in North Africa. He also curates LibyanVinyl on Instagram, an archive of sounds and objects from Libya's short-lived vinyl music industry, and co-edits Lamma: A Journal of Libyan Studies.