Raja Shehadeh’s “Cartography of Refusal”

The Enduring Land Narrative Practice of Palestinian Walks

Bibliographic Data

ID13015485
AuthorsAmanda Batarseh (0000-0002-9189-4139, University of California San Diego, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume8
Issue2
Pages232-252
Publication date2021-04-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2052-2614 • E-ISSN: 2052-2622
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/pli.2020.38
OpenAlexW3171730777
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited25

In the 1920s, the Palestinian ethnographer Tawfiq Kan‘an examined the physical and narrative construction of Palestinian space by cataloguing the living archive of Palestinian sanctuaries. His collection of narratives, imbued in the sacred space of the “shrine, tomb, tree, shrub, cave, spring, well, rock [or] stone” is suggestive of cultural anthropologist Keith Basso’s elaboration of “place-making” as learned from the Western Apache. Articulating two modes of disruption, place-making narratives preserve indigenous culture in the face of colonial conquest and unsettle colonial paradigms of spatial belonging and exclusion. Despite the efforts of settler colonial erasure, this interpolative practice has been carried through Palestinian narrative traditions into the present. Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (2007) illustrates an indigenous mode of seeing, creating, and contesting spatial narratives, disclosing the role of place-making in contemporary Palestinian literature

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Ethnography · Face (sociological concept · Geography · Humanities · Identity (music · Indigenous · Literature · Narrative · Raja · Social science · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies

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