The Political Mapping of Palestine

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Creator

Quiquivix, Linda Elizabeth
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Geography

Abstract

Debates on the Israel-Palestinian conflict abound. Insofar as these discussions focus on what peace between Israelis and Palestinians might look like, they often resort to what the map should look like. Motivated by concerns over how cartographic practices have become uncritically adopted by the Palestinian movement since the advent of the peace process, this dissertation critically examines the map's role in producing the conflict, in hindering a liberatory politics, and in maintaining the current impasse. This study is largely structured as a genealogy of Palestine's maps from the nineteenth-century to the present--an array of mappings produced by a multitude of actors: colonial, religious, nationalist, statist, diasporic and revolutionary, both from above and from below. These historical-political excavations are theoretically grounded within the literature on critical cartography, the production of space, and feminist political geography. They are examined empirically through archival research, ethnographic methods, and discourse analysis. This study's theoretical intervention highlights the map's production of Palestine as a space of ownership and control. Its political intervention points to the map's role in producing such a conception. For if the ways that we conceive of space are bound to the politics that we adopt, the map's ubiquity in this century-long conflict requires critical examination.

Date of publication