There Is No Map: Virtual Walks in a Vanishing Landscape (original) (raw)
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COLLABORATIVE CARTOGRAPHIES: COUNTER-CARTOGRAPHY AND MAPPING JUSTICE IN PALESTINE
Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 2018
Maps do not only represent space, but also produce it. This article is an attempt to approach cartographies from a performative perspective in order to argue that maps actually do things. The article is divided into three main parts that develop a reflection on the role of maps as devices, a comparison between different maps representing the Old City of Jerusalem, and an analysis of the ability of different actors (collectives, artists, and so on) to develop counter-cartographies with the aim of transforming the field, the community, the surrounding landscape, and, consequently, the material and socio-political conditions in Palestine.
View from the Hilltop: Settler-Colonial Visuality in Palestine
Visual Anthropology Review, 2021
This article examines settler-colonial visuality in West Bank Jewish-Israeli settlements. It argues that settler visuality is attuned to a bourgeois ideal of domestic life, made possible by practices of unseeing. Reading Israeli encounters with the Wall and other artifacts of the occupation, I show that these visual encounters help settlers position themselves politically within Israel-and settlements, as Israel itself. Unseeing is a perceptual practice that makes and remakes space, one required to build the kind of settlements most Israeli settlers desire. This vision is oriented to the domestication of space, cohering with the demands of an extended military occupation.
Palestinian State Maps and Imperial Technologies of Staying Put
Maps are considered to be an ultimate expression of modernity. Empirical cartography plays a central role in daily governance, and it also has a long history of furthering displacement and erasure. In this article I argue that the landscapes of historic British colonialism and the ongoing Israeli occupation influence the digital maps made by the Palestinian Authority. Through an investigation into the borders, roads, and urban areas of one such map and its related scientific practices, I analyze how knowledge of the occupation is shaped by the occupation. Drawing upon widespread Palestinian efforts to strengthen sumud (steadfastness), I develop the concept of stasis as the ability to remain in place. Researchers have rightly pointed to restrictions on Palestinians’ movements, but greater attention should be paid to attempts to limit stasis, both within and beyond the West Bank. The detailed study of mobility and stasis, as well as other material asymmetries of research, can enable more imaginative maps and more heterogeneous passages for the production of knowledge.
Mobile Cartographies and Mobilized Ideologies: The Visual Management of Jerusalem
Antipode, 47(4), 2015
This article analyses a recent ideological shift in the visual management of Jerusalem. Through two case studies in the real estate and tourism industries we show how mobile technologies are shaping both actual settings in, and visual consumption of, Jerusalem. The analysis points at the creation of a “tunnel vision” for consumers and visitors, which promotes Jewish hegemony in the city and simultaneous detachment from Palestinian spaces and histories. This tunnel vision situates the viewers in physical and simulated enclaves within the city, creating a relationship of distance and elevation to promote their embodied identification with Israel’s Judaizing mission for the area, primarily the Holy Basin. This mode of viewing Jerusalem is evocative of Israel’s post-second intifada policies and the concurrent rise of right-wing ideologies, which relegate to the margins alternative readings of the contested urban landscape.
This paper investigates the translation of raw terrain and territory–rocks, streams, canyons, packs of wild dog and clusters of cyclamen–into two parallel, contrapuntal, and mutually referential forms of textualized landscapes: Israeli nature, landscape, and travel in Grossman's To the End of the Land and Palestinian landscape as figured in Raja Shehadeh's renderings in Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape. By examining Shehadeh's and Grossman's translations of the same topoi—olive groves, paths in woods, wildlife, wildflowers, wild dogs and their behaviors, streams, footpaths, memorials, walls, and checkpoints—this paper investigates how topographical facts on the map and on the ground— geomorphological, biological, and cultural features of terrain—are differentially translated, transformed and moved into distinctive national natures—the multiple ways in which natural landscapes and national identities are conflated. The paper argues that the cultural and psychological scars of Israeli and Palestinian historical relations over land, boundaries, and political control saturate these landscape descriptions and narratives of "walking the land." A second question animates this analysis: How are Shehadeh's and Grossman's personal histories of "the situation" carried over and translated into these landscapes and travel narratives? Slavoj Zizek asserts "already inscribed into the perceived object itself, in the guise of its [the subject's] 'blind spot,' …is the point from which the object itself returns the gaze. Sure the picture is in my eye, but I am also in the picture." Might Zizek's claim assist us in understanding how the poetics and politics of the Israeli landscape and the occupied Palestinian territories are translated into topography and moved, from one place to another, as we see and walk these lands in tropes painted by Grossman's and Shehadeh's hands?
Along the Lines of the Occupation Playing at Diminished Reality in East Jerusalem
Augmented reality enables video game experiences that are increasingly immersive. For its focus on walking and exploration, Niantic's location-based video game Pokémon Go (PG) has been praised for allowing players to foster their understanding and relationship to surrounding spaces. However, in contexts where space and movement are objects of confl icting narratives and restrictive policies on mobility, playing relies on the creation of partial imaginaries and limits to the exploratory experience. Departing from avant-garde conceptualizations of walking, this article explores the imaginary that PG creates in occupied East Jerusalem. Based on observations collected in various gaming sessions along the Green Line, it analyzes how PG's virtual representation of Jerusalem legitimizes a status quo of separation and segregation. In so doing, this article argues that, instead of enabling an experience of augmented reality for its users, playing PG in East Jerusalem produces a diminished one. Th e application of augmented reality (AR) technologies to gaming purports to create playable experiences at the intersection of real and virtual worlds. Adding a virtual layer onto the actual world enables experiences that exceed the boundaries of both worlds through the creation of hyperrealities. Besides being of interest to ontological debates pertaining to the real-virtual divide and its simulations, integrating features of diff erent worlds results in the creation of scenarios in which actual spaces, politics, and narratives are assembled and reproduced in rarifi ed ways, oft en in contrast to the complexities on the ground. Particularly in the context of disputed areas, overlaying a virtual world over a disputed space remains a problematic endeavor: as augmented realities consist of hybrids created through embedment, they depend primarily on how actual layers of space are transposed into virtual settings. Th is transposition occurs by seizing complexities and making them fi t into the fi nite world of a game. In this sense, some characteristics of the actual world need to be singled out before the addition of a virtual layer in the construction (Milgram and Kishino 1994). At the same time, this reduction necessarily builds on specifi c and selective understandings of reality, where spaces—and imaginaries surrounding these spaces—are diluted into an assembled outcome. Spaces are, however, not neutral (Lefebvre 1991), and a transposition of an actual space into a virtual setting conveys meaning on the particular imaginary underlying that construction. In the context of Palestine-Israel, space remains an object of concern and the medium through which military, civil, and judicial powers operate. Specifi cally, Sari Hanafi (2006, 2012)
Trapped in mirror-images: The rhetoric of maps in Israel/Palestine
Political Geography, 2011
The map of Israel/Palestine has long been used by both Israelis and Palestinians, from their unequal power positions, as a celebrated national symbol. It is virtually the same map, depicting a sliver-shaped land between River Jordan and the Mediterranean, two overlapping homelands in one territory. Thus, a single geo-body appears to contain two antagonistic and asymmetrical nations, locked in a bitter struggle. The article interprets the uncanny mirror-maps of Israel/Palestine by drawing on recent work in critical cartography. One approach has read maps as rhetorical claims for power and over territory; indeed, the mirror-maps of Israel/Palestine are often read as indications of maximalist territorial ambitions and hidden wishes to "wipe the other off the map". However, this article suggests an alternative, de-territorialised reading of political maps as "empty signifiers" of multiple meanings. Following analysis of maps as objects of performance, whose meaning depends on users and contexts, the article emphasises the ritualistic sacralisation of the Israel/Palestine map. Embedded within discourses of memory and history, maps are tools of narrating the nation, often in diasporic contexts, carrying with them vast emotional significance to both peoples. These issues were largely left unaddressed by the territorial paradigm which has dominated scholarship and political negotiations. Moving the discussion of geography beyond narrow territorial claims towards an appreciation of the richness and heterogeneity of space is crucial, yet faces formidable challenges both politically and conceptually.
Continuum, 2021
At the centre of this article is iNakba, a digital navigational application created by a Tel Aviv-based NGO in 2014. The app superimposes a layer of ruined Palestinian localities destroyed following the 1948 war, on top of the established and hegemonic Israeli geographical representation. At the end of this war and with the formation of the State of Israel, the presence of these localities was eradicated from both the territory and Israeli maps. The iNakba app uses Google maps and Waze as platforms for allowing users to find these localities and navigate towards them in order to increase knowledge about the repressed geographical past of the territory and bring about a political change. By examining iNakba from a media practice perspective, and by comparing it to a printed map published almost seven decades earlier and in very different circumstances, we highlight the unique role of layers in constructing and deconstructing cartographical knowledge. Layers, we argue, allow new potentialities for the representation and imagination of space, specifically, problematizing the eradication of Palestinian localities from the map and suggesting to re-imagine the territory as comprising the two histories and the two peoples. More broadly, the article suggests to understand layers as both a technical and political device.
Palestine's virtual borders 2.0: From a non-place to a user-generated space
In 2003 the Palestinian state received official recognition on the Web before it was established on the ground. The delegation of the .ps Country code Top level domain (CcTld) to the Palestinian Authority and its inclusion in the UN list of recognized countries and territories created an official Web-space in which a Palestinian state operated side-by-side with other sovereign states. Yet with the rise of Web 2.0 applications, the official representation of the Palestinian state partially disappeared. This study focuses on the shift in the spatial representation of the Palestinian state on the Web, from an officially acknowledged national Web space, followed by its partial disappearance in Web 2.0 spaces, to its reconstruction as a user-generated space. It examines Palestine’s virtual borders on various Web 2.0 mapping platforms, along with the listing (and non-listing) of Palestine as a country in the registration procedure of popular Web 2.0 applications. It shows that on most mapping platforms the Palestinian Territory is underrepresented, and that the country's official representation on the UN list of recognized countries and territories is often omitted or modified on social media sites’ registration forms. After analyzing the geo-politics of social media's drop-down country lists, this study argues that Web 2.0 spaces are unofficial Web-spaces, in which official representations of countries are not determined by diplomacy or approved by international institutions, but rather by interaction between commercial platforms and their users. Faced with the partial disappearance of their homeland, Palestinian users both in the Palestinian Territory and in the Diaspora thus become placeless participants of Web 2.0 spaces. They attempt to reclaim the virtual representation of their home country as a sovereign Palestinian state by protesting, uploading, tagging and generating content on Web 2.0 platforms. On platforms such as Facebook, Blogger and Google Maps, user activism and user-generated content has led to a spatial transformation from the country's non-listing and non-placement, to its official inclusion. Finally, this article makes a contribution to the theorization of political Web spaces by arguing that the Palestinian case complicates current views on relationships between the Web and the ground. Unlike the common perception that the virtual is grounded in the real, the over-representation of a Palestinian state in official Web spaces, in parallel with its underrepresentation in unofficial Web spaces, and users' treatment of virtual spaces as real spaces, indicate that these realms actually tend to merge, at least in the case of contested Web terrains and unsettled struggles for self-determination.