Black and Palestinian Solidarities in Context
Maps
- Palestine Open MapsPalestine Open Maps (POM) is a platform that allows users to explore, search and download historical maps and spatial data on Palestine. Features of POM include: Detailed historical base map layers from the 1870s up to the 1950s; Population data on over 2,000 places, past and present; The ability to download hundreds of individual historical map sheets; A split-screen mode to view past and present maps side-by-side;
A 3D mode, showing the dramatic topography of Palestine; The ability to overlay historical map features on present day maps.
Map of Israel, the Palestinian territories (West Bank and Gaza Strip), the Golan Heights, and portions of neighbouring countries. Also former United Nations deployment areas in countries adjoining Israel or Israeli-held territory, as of February 2018. (Source: http://www.un.org/Depts/Cartographic/map/profile/israel.pdf)
Evaluating Maps
DECOLONIZING MAPPING
As you view these and other maps of Palestine and other parts of the Middle East and Africa, be reminded that mapping is not neutral. In fact, cartography, or the practice of creating maps, is one that stems from settler colonial and imperial projects. As you view representations of and places, consider if the map makers are looking to decolonize in their mapping practices and ask yourself some of the questions below:
- Who created the map and why?
- How is the map titled or framed? Does it have vague or misleading labels or features?
- When was the map created? Is it outdated?
- Is the map drawn to scale?
- Does the map draw our attention toward or away from any particular places or peoples?
- What information is missing? What maps might a given story or report rely on and why?
- Are parts of the map blurred or pixelated? (A common practice in satellite maps for military bases, refugee camps, power plants and other secret infrastructure)?
- What dimensions and details might be missing in a flat, birds-eye-view map?
- How can we map or represent struggles over air space or sea space?
see more in Yung Au's, "Thinking Critically About Maps: Researching, Resisting and Re-imagining the World" The Kit: Thinking Critically About Maps.
BLACK FEMINIST GEOGRAPHERS TO CONSIDER
Abolition Geography by ISBN: 1839761709Publication Date: 2022-05-10The first collection of writings from one of the foremost contemporary critical thinkers on racism, geography and incarceration Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore's work from over three decades, Abolition Geography presents her singular contribution to the politics of abolition as theorist, researcher, and organizer, offering scholars and activists ways of seeing and doing to help navigate our turbulent present. Abolition Geography moves us away from explanations of mass incarceration and racist violence focused on uninterrupted histories of prejudice or the dull compulsion of neoliberal economics. Instead, Gilmore offers a geographical grasp of how contemporary racial capitalism operates through an "anti-state state" that answers crises with the organized abandonment of people and environments deemed surplus to requirement. Gilmore escapes one-dimensional conceptions of what liberation demands, who demands liberation, or what indeed is to be abolished. Drawing on the lessons of grassroots organizing and internationalist imaginaries, Abolition Geography undoes the identification of abolition with mere decarceration, and reminds us that freedom is not a mere principle but a place. Edited with an introduction by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano.
Demonic Grounds by ISBN: 0816697949Publication Date: 2006-01-01Demonic Grounds moves between past and present, archives and fiction, theory and everyday, to focus on places negotiated by black women during and after the transatlantic slave trade. Specifically, Katherine McKittrick addresses the geographic implications of slave auction blocks, Harriet Jacobs's attic, black Canada and New France, as well as the conceptual spaces of feminism and Sylvia Wynter's philosophies.
