Time and space constitute critical sites of indigenous struggle through which settler colonial assertions of Western progress incentivize and ostensibly authorize the elimination of the native from both domains. For Palestinians, a temporal logic, characterized by redundancy, stasis and collapse, has come to dictate their experiences of time in the wake of the unending 1948 Nakba. Palestinian-time expresses then, the continued traumatic reverberations of the past in the present. Re-centering place in Palestinian sites of analysis complicates the imposition of settler colonial time as a tool of progress. By opening Palestinian literary narrative to place-centered analysis, we may rupture that entrapment by liberal colonialist rhetoric which frames indigenous liberation as a zero-sum struggle against progress and the prerogatives of settler statehood. Keith Basso’s analytic of “place-making,” which centers indigenous knowledge, facilitates this shift from time-centered to place-centered analysis. Resonating with Tawfiq Kan‘an’s 1920s studies of human geography in the landscapes of the Palestinian fellah, both scholars suggest the narrative construction of indigenous “place worlds,” whose organizing logics are dictated by space rather than time. Articulating two modes of disruption, place-making narratives preserve indigenous culture while unsettling 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. A place-centered analysis of Laila El-Haddad and Maggie Schmitt’s The Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian Culinary Journey (2012) and Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (2007) discloses the role of place-making in contemporary Palestinian literary forms. Examining Palestinian literature from the perspective of placed-centered narration displaces the premise that time-centered narration constitutes a default organizing logic. This presents the opportunity to re-evaluate common readings of Palestinian narrative, such as its fragmentation, temporal circularity or stasis often attributed to the traumatic rupturing of Palestinian time. Simultaneously, such place-centered analysis illuminates a genre of land narrative widening the terrain of Palestinian literary analysis to encompass a variety of forms, such as El-Haddad’s storytelling cookbook and Shehadeh’s cartographic memoir. This paper briefly addresses its integrality to a larger project dedicated to exploring the multiplicity of forms within a genre of land narrative by authors living both in Palestine and in exile and writing in Arabic and English. Works include fantasy fiction, science-fiction and historical novels, as well as the graphic novel, young adult fiction, photographic memoir and blog.

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.

This paper historicizes encounters and exchanges between Palestinian and American Indian activists, scholars, and writers over the course of the past fifty years. The purpose of this historicization is two-fold. First, by acknowledging the relationships Palestinians and American Indians have forged over the past decades, we are able to truly gauge the labor, longevity, and internationalism of Indigenous resistance. Second, this history adequately reveals how these relationships happened organically and through moments of mutual recognition that asserted shared experiences with colonial violence. As I narrate that history, I rely on the scholarship of Edward Said, LeAnne Howe, Steven Salaita, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Amal Eqeiq, and Nick Estes and conceptualize “traveling indigeneity” (a term that builds on Edward Said’s “traveling theory”) to describe the act of crossing and bridging the theoretical and experiential terrains of Indigenous studies, Middle East Studies, and refugee and diaspora studies. Ultimately, this paper pushes against the erasures that are part and parcel of settler colonialism and centralizes the unwavering force of Indigenous movements across disciplinary and geographical boundaries.

Olive trees are indigenous to Palestine and have been harvested there for over 5,000 years. Palestinian livelihoods are contingent upon the thriving of the olive and its extractions for culinary, bodily, spiritual, and cultural purposes. As Palestinians continue to experience the decimation of their lands, the consumption of Palestinian olive oil has become increasingly popular through transnational fair trade circuits that have allowed Palestinian olive oils, soaps, and tapenades to appear on shelves worldwide through popular brands like Dr. Bronner and Lush cosmetics. In this presentation, I introduce the concept of vanishment as a way to describe the processes of transforming, disappearing, replacing, and depoliticizing of Palestinian cultures and lands through a system of apparent cooptation and inclusion. I offer new ways of understanding the complexities of settler-colonialism, one in which indigenous Palestinian foodways, harvesting practices, and memory can be understood as a site of knowledge production and anticolonial praxis. I argue that Palestine is reclaimed and remembered through everyday olive practices that anchor Palestinians to a land and culture said to be vanished or non-existent. In analyzing the dialectical process of capitalist integration and indigenous survival--or what I conceptualize as Vanishment, I center Palestine within indigenous studies, where it’s often cited only referentially, giving indigenous studies a global dimension--to articulate Palestinian olive harvesters as knowledge producers and agents of decolonization. Based on multi-sited, ethnography, I demonstrate how settler colonialism and the processes of vanishing native peoples and their subjectivities, co-resides with neoliberal, multicultural tropes of contingent humanity. In this way, this presentation illuminates the ways in which settler-colonialism is both material and cultural—in the case of Palestine, racial and gendered formulations functions through a transnational nexus of power within this current moment of empire, bringing postcolonial theory into conversation into conversation with post 9/11 racial formation, militarization and neoliberal capitalism. I also show how indigenous peoples are not dormant or passive recipients of vanishment; in particular, Palestinian women act against Vanishment by imbuing political urgency into daily acts and intimate moments--revealing forms of insurrection in seemingly tame sites--where food is prepared, where stories are told, and where olives are harvest — as agents of life-making and anticolonial praxis.