Mapping the Occupation

Performativity and the Precarious Israeli Identity

Bibliographic Data

ID3948852
AuthorsMichal Hu (0000-0002-0386-9815, Goldsmiths University of London, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume24
Issue3
Pages756-770
Publication date2019-05-27
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueGeopolitics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1465-0045 • E-ISSN: 1557-3028
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14650045.2017.1393800
OpenAlexW2767279987
LanguageEN
Citations received8
References cited14

The ‘mapping procedure’ is a routine military operation of the Israeli Army in which soldiers map the houses of civilians, collect personal details of family members or take a photograph of the family. The ‘Information’ collected in the ‘mapping procedure’ is not archived or passed to the intelligence services following the operation. As the documentation produced is not collected, the central question of this paper concerns how the ‘mapping procedure’ functions as a practice of governing and how this relates to Israeli colonial identity. The paper contributes to the understanding of the implications of maps within colonialism, and it examines mapping as a de-territorialized performance that contributes to the production of identity. This paper suggests three readings of the ‘mapping procedure’. Firstly, as a performative governing tool that implements the hierarchical categorization of people into occupiers and occupied; colonized and colonizers. Secondly, the soldiers that produce the maps are considered as policing forces of a colonial ideology that repeats and mimics British colonialism. Finally, the ‘mapping procedure’ is framed as a tool to refine and redraw the ethnic Jewish-Arabic binary that is needed to maintain the precarious Israeli colonial identity

Aesthetics · Art · Categorization · Colonialism · Ethnic group · Identity (music) · Ideology · Performative utterance · Performativity · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Anthropology · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Gender Studies · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Migration, Refugees, and Integration