A map without guarantees: Stuart Hall and Palestinian geographies
Soundings - ISSN 1362-6620
Volume 2024 Number 87
A map without guarantees: Stuart Hall and Palestinian geographies
Hashem Abushama pages 18-37
DOI: 10.3898/SOUN:87.01.2024
Abstract
Thinking about space as an entry point, this article traverses multiple spaces within historic Palestine to explore how Israeli settler colonialism unfolds as a set of contingent and differentiated relations, practices and processes. It uses a theoretical diary, photographs, and countermaps to bring into sharp relief both the sedimented nature of settler colonial domination and its vulnerability to Palestinian practices of resistance. Moving from the refugee camp in the West Bank to the village and the city in the territories Israel occupied in 1948, the article draws on Stuart Hall’s approach to ‘conjunctural analysis’ to demonstrate how there exist multiple Palestinian geographies; how such geographies stand in relations of domination and subordination vis-à-vis one another and the Israeli state; and how such geographies remain prone to rupture and transformation. The article insists on a conjunctural reading that refutes teleological understandings of settler colonialism: there are no guarantees that its dominant modes of dispossession and elimination will succeed.
To cite this article
Hashem Abushama (2024) A map without guarantees: Stuart Hall and Palestinian geographies, Soundings, 2024(87), 18-37. https://doi.org/10.3898/SOUN:87.01.2024