Jaffa's contested heritage trails: Using city walking tours to study, affirm, and protest the politics of space and memory

Abstract

The article concerns the role of heritage sites and performances in fuelling as well as resisting colonial domination over space and memory in the city of Jaffa. Using this case study, it maps the ways urban planning, preservation practices, and a spectrum of official and grassroots walking tours can enhance or challenge cities’ official memory lanes and paths of erasure. The article draws on a study conducted between 2017 and 2020 on the politics of heritage tours in landscapes of forced displacement, utilizing an expanded multilingual walk-along qualitative methodology. It contributes to the expanding scholarship on performances and tourism as relevant fields for the study of political geography. Based on a series of inventories of interactions between bodies and contested heritage sites in Jaffa, the article argues for the theoretical need to extend research on the politics of memory and/or architecture to include how different actors and subaltern groups animate those elements through their bodies, movements, memories, and stories.