Reflections on a National Cartography: The Freedom to Roam and the Right to Imagine in Raja Shehadeh’s Travel Writing

Abstract

This article considers Palestinian human rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh’s recent travel texts Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (2007) and A Rift in Time: Travels with My Ottoman Uncle (2010) as national narratives. In contrast to how these works have hitherto been received, as political and ecocritical interventions, this study contends that they can also be read in the light of postcolonial literary theory. While Shehadeh uses human rights narratives, the testimonio and the Bildungsroman to bear witness to a disappearing landscape and to map an alternative, universally inclusive, geography, his cartography is eventually haunted by an ethnically imagined territory and his apparently factual mode by more fictional tropes. The article concludes that the emerging ethnoscapes in Palestinian Walks and A Rift in Time point to the national resonances present in not just Shehadeh’s representation of landscape, but human rights discourse per se.