Linda Quiquivix

Linda is a post-doctoral fellow in Critical Global Humanities at Brown University. Her research traces the map’s ubiquitous role in the Israel-Palestinian conflict to examine the way that conceptions of space determine politics. She received her doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Department of Geography.

Lecture: “Mapping Modern Palestine: The ‘Colonial Template’ in Palestinian Politics” By Linda Quiquivix
Monday July 9, 2012 from 14:00 to 16:00 – Campus in Camps Al Feneiq Center, Deheishe Refugee Camp

This discussion will critically examine the role maps and map-making have had in the colonization of Palestine from the nineteenth century to the contemporary moment. We begin in the nineteenth century for it was during this time when the modern map-making of Palestine was first introduced.

Here we highlight how Western religion and empire came together to cartographically lay claims to the ‘Holy Land,’ rendering the Palestinians invisible or secondary in the process.

In our focus on the Survey of Western Palestine, a collaborative project between London’s Palestine Exploration Fund and the British War Office in the 1870s, we will see how the Bible was used as a field guide to give Palestine its modern shape, producing the ‘colonial template’ for maps of the land that both Israelis and Palestinians use today.

We then move on to critically examine the Palestinian adoption of the template after the Nakba, looking first at the various ways Palestinian refugees appropriated the map as a popular logo to rally a liberation movement around, and next at how the Oslo ‘peace process’ sparked the Palestinian cartographic spirit to grow in force and causing the map to evolve from a popular icon toward a scientific, state-building tool. We trace how, as such cartography grows in importance, the refugee question becomes increasingly sidelined from the ‘peace process.’

Reading Materials:

Mapping Modern Palestine: Mythical conquest and scientific dispossession [ENG]

Palestine’s first modern map was the product of a colonial errand. In the spring of 1798, with only Britain left standing in the way…

[Mapping Modern Palestine PDF Presentation [ENG

Background: The Palestine Question, Geography & Empire, The Colonial Template, Palestinian Counter-Cartography…