The Evolution of Palestinian Critical Geography in Palestine and Beyond

Abstract

This article provides an overview of the writing of Palestinian academics and writers on their homeland and society from the late 19th century to the present, arguing that by the time Palestinian critical geographers came into their own in the 1980s, they had already been preceded in their thinking and approaches by a range of Palestinian critical thinkers who themselves wrote on spatial and geographic issues. Modern Palestinian geography, the authors contend, was informed and boosted by the work of Edward W. Said and many other thinkers who shared a common fundamental perspective: to counter the de-Arabization of Palestine and provide an independent geographic viewpoint of the homeland they belong to, in the aftermath of the dispossession and denationalization of the Palestinian people that peaked in the 1948 an-Nakba and continues in myriad contours of de-development into the present—in other words, an independent Palestinian discourse. The article outlines the continuum of anti-colonial and historicall...