The Desert Threshold - The Los Angeles Review of Books
▻https://lareviewofbooks.org/interview/the-desert-threshold
When the Second Intifada began I read a piece by #Edward_Said that elaborated his idea of counter-#cartographies. He was lamenting the absence of Palestinian cartography — deploring the way that the Palestinians and their friends had abandoned the field of geographical representation to the Israelis. I saw something very intriguing in this. On the one hand, Said was someone who wrote very critically about mapping as an imperial practice of #domination and governance and now he was calling for the inversion of the cartographic gaze, the de-colonizing of cartography. Working with #B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, we responded to this by drawing the first map of the West Bank that depicted the precise contours of the settlements. We were trying to show that crimes can be undertaken on the drawing boards, committed not by military people but by architects and planners. It took a year to complete, but we learned that maps can also be tools of #resistance.
