Rights statement: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Interventions on 10/03/2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/1369801X.2017.1293554
Accepted author manuscript, 162 KB, PDF document
Available under license: CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Raja Shehadeh's Palestinian Walks and the Concrete Ecology of Settlement
AU - Dickinson, Philip
N1 - This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Interventions on 10/03/2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/1369801X.2017.1293554
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - This essay examines the significance of the practice of walking in Palestine through a reading of Raja Shehadeh's 2007 [Shehadeh, R. 2007. Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape. London: Profile] memoir, Palestinian Walks, alongside the built architecture of Israeli settlement. It develops a theory of the “concrete ecology”, a phrase that captures the deep human and extra-human entanglements that Shehadeh foregrounds in his decolonizing conception of a “grown together” and historically persistent land, and that registers the increasingly radical aspirations of the material architecture and infrastructure of Israeli settlement. Israeli settlement seeks not only to extend a territorial network but also to build an ecology that materializes the ethno-racial abstractions of colonial ideology, and it does so through the affordance of different possibilities of spatial practice and different senses of the world for Palestinians and Israelis. In this context, Shehadeh’s book elaborates the sarha (walk or roam) as a historically localized activity that emerges from, and reconnects to, land’s depth, its saturation with living, historical and communal presence.
AB - This essay examines the significance of the practice of walking in Palestine through a reading of Raja Shehadeh's 2007 [Shehadeh, R. 2007. Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape. London: Profile] memoir, Palestinian Walks, alongside the built architecture of Israeli settlement. It develops a theory of the “concrete ecology”, a phrase that captures the deep human and extra-human entanglements that Shehadeh foregrounds in his decolonizing conception of a “grown together” and historically persistent land, and that registers the increasingly radical aspirations of the material architecture and infrastructure of Israeli settlement. Israeli settlement seeks not only to extend a territorial network but also to build an ecology that materializes the ethno-racial abstractions of colonial ideology, and it does so through the affordance of different possibilities of spatial practice and different senses of the world for Palestinians and Israelis. In this context, Shehadeh’s book elaborates the sarha (walk or roam) as a historically localized activity that emerges from, and reconnects to, land’s depth, its saturation with living, historical and communal presence.
KW - architecture
KW - ecology
KW - infrastructure
KW - Israel–Palestine
KW - settlement
KW - walking
U2 - 10.1080/1369801X.2017.1293554
DO - 10.1080/1369801X.2017.1293554
M3 - Journal article
VL - 20
SP - 294
EP - 307
JO - Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies
JF - Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies
SN - 1369-801X
IS - 2
ER -