Ex-Communicated: Historical Reflections on Enclosure Landscapes in Palestine

Abstract

“Ex-Communicated” tells a story about enclosure on the Palestinian landscape through photographic images that reference themes from the enclosures in early modern England and highlight the historically long-standing interplay of power and space. Using Michel Foucault's spatial notion of power as a theoretical anchor, and the enclosures in England as a historical foundation, the article shows how dominant groups with territorial ambitions enclose and remake landscapes by means of legal changes in property relations and by material changes in landscape architecture. These two instruments enable dominant groups to recast systems of land ownership, occupancy, and use and reconfigure routes of circulation and trespass on the landscape with the aim of forcing subaltern populations into ever smaller territorial spaces and of taking control of the landscape. The Palestinian landscape is part of this historically recurrent pattern of power and enclosure on the land.