‘Countermapping Urban Palestine’ began in September 2022, as a collaboration between literary, linguistic, and creative writing scholars at Lancaster University and An-Najah National University, in Nablus. In 2023, it was supported by a Council for British Research in the Levant Networking (CBRL) Grant. From September 2024 to December 2025 it is being supported by a British Academy Small Research Grant. The project has also received funding from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Lancaster University. It is now triangulated between Lancaster University, An-Najah University, and the University of Jordan. We start from an understanding of creative narration as heritage resource, place-making toolkit, and mapping technology. English literary criticism in English has paid insufficient attention to representations of the detail and diversity of Palestinian urban life. Extensive work on Palestinian heritage has not, to date, fully exploited the potential of literary recording and reconstruction of space in ‘1948’ (or what is now Israel-Palestine).
Literary writing provides rich examples of how place and space are imaginatively and performatively, as well as materially, produced. Our maps - starting with our pilot Memory Map of Nablus - show how Palestinian cities are ‘practised’, ‘read’, ‘recoded’, and storied spaces.