Palestine in Geography and Fiction: An Interdisciplinary Perspective

Abstract

Using critical cartography studies as theoretical basis and argumentative entry, this paper examines the role played by mapmaking in essentializing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, expanding the gap between the two peoples and maintaining the current dilemma in the Middle East. The paper also draws on political/historical data and fictional narratives written by the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani particularly his seminal novel Returning to Haifa to demonstrate that mapping and cartography are manipulated to achieve dubious political and military purposes. The argument in the paper emphasizes that imperial cartography leads to the mapping production of Palestine as a territorial space of ownership and control by non-Palestinian invaders. In his response to the colonial mapping of Palestine, which aimed to eliminate the country’s Arabi identity, Kanafani provides in his fiction alternative cartographies of Palestine to subvert the colonial mapping of his homeland. In other words, Kanafani attempted to reclaim his indigenous territory or part of it through literary maps drawn in his novel discussed in the paper1.