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Route Maps and Rival Geographies: Collective Palestinian Mobility through Colonized Space
Abstract
This paper brings together the critical concepts of rival geographies, decolonization, and survivance to inform a reading of hand-drawn maps of shared taxi routes by veteran drivers in the Palestinian West Bank. Drawing from indigenous studies and critical geography, I argue that the communally constituted, spatial knowledge represented or symbolized by these maps is a source of decolonial power. This knowledge refuses and undermines settler colonial logics of exclusive familiarity that undergird counterfeit assertions of settler indigeneity. But it also exceeds the settler project by nurturing indigenous claims to space and communality that are designed to outlast colonialism. In the context of expanding Israeli settler colonialism across the territory of the West Bank, Palestinian movement has become a terrain of social struggle where Palestinian communities seek to practice self-determined mobility against and beyond Israeli im/mobilization strategies. Spatial knowledge-power is one important field in this struggle over control of Palestinian mobility. Among its im/mobilization strategies, i.e. the collection of policies that exert control over Palestinian mobility in ways that variously force, forbid, or frustrate it, Israel has developed techniques for claiming exclusive spatial knowledge over the West Bank. Despite these techniques for monopolizing legitimate spatial knowledge, the everyday participants in the Palestinian public transit system refuse this monopoly and activate indigenous conceptions of West Bank space in order to get around. As part of my fieldwork, I asked shared taxi drivers based in the Bethlehem transit center to hand-draw maps of their regular inter-city routes. The drivers obliged my query collectively, reflecting the routinely communal nature of the process of accumulating and circulating this spatial knowledge. In this paper, I read the maps they created as representing everyday practices of charting “rival geographies” through the navigation of collective mobility through colonized space.
Discipline
Sociology
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
None