Els paisatges de la postmodernitat - coac.net · Els paisatges de la postmodernitat II Seminari...

Els paisatges de la postmodernitat II Seminari Internacional sobre Paisatge

21, 22 i 23 d’octubre de 2004

Landscape as metaphor: culture and identity in the ‘postmodern’ nation

Mireia Folch-Serra

Professora de Geografia Cultural University of Western Ontario (Canadà)

The current relevance in the social sciences of the analysis of images gives a new meaning to the landscape’s visual impact on national and cultural identity. The idea that through observation a sort of knowledge can be acquired marks the advent of modernity in contrast to pre-modern societies’ lack of interest on visual descriptions. This tendency underlines the current emphasis on the ocular,1 where seeing as knowledge is also related to interactions greatly dependent on socially constructed visual experiences.2 Television, billboards, the Internet, advertisements, etc., all send off images whose authenticity is difficult to ascertain, as is the authenticity of fabricated political identities and claims to national membership. The fusion of images and identities, of the visual and the political, provides an opportunity to explore the possibility of landscape as metaphor of the postmodern nation.

But what is a ‘postmodern’ nation? Is it not incongruous to regard as

postmodern an entity whose ancestral attributes and origins antedate the creation of the nation-state?3 How can this pre-modern product of the longue duree be labelled postmodern? A ‘postmodern nation’ is nothing but a paradox, an oxymoron that needs to be discerned in the context of a specific landscape; only there the resilience of this ancient form of association can be compared to the modern state’s expediency. Looking at the nation and the state in the light of resilience and expediency prevents us from making sweeping statements. It also makes evident

1 Rose, G. 2001 Visual Methodologies. London: Sage Publications, and Daniels, S. 1993 Fields of Vision. Princeton: Princeton University Press 2 Rose, 2001 p.8 3 LLobera, J.R. 1994 The God of Modernity. Oxford, UK/Providence, USA: Berg

http://www.catpaisatge.net - [email protected] 1

that each nation is unique and thus must be evaluated within the space and time that configures it.

Identity

Culture

LANDSCAPE LANDSCAPE

Fig. 1 Dialectics of landscape As a product of time where culture and identity are embedded, a landscape

is a palimpsest whose cultural layers, not to mention its geological ones, are overlaid one on top of each other. By virtue of this configuration the landscape becomes the nation’s visual metaphor. Gradually, the landscape is transformed into a pastiche of multiple juxtaposed periods whose visual impact is a reminder of a nation’s historical swirl. Within the landscape, individuals and societies establish links with the past. Through time, the landscape accumulates a series of public contributions that materialize in political projects and social processes. Successive generations continue these projects and processes and transform them into the cultural and geographical heritage of the nation. Moreover, it is through the poetics and politics of geography and the cultural appreciation and conservation of the landscape, that national identity is defined. Hence a nation’s art, politics and history are revealed and manifested in the landscape while its cartographic representation becomes the abstract rationalization of its limits. Most nations’ collective memory is embedded in the exemplary power of landscape.

Fig. 2 The power of Landscape


To illustrate the supposition that each nation is the product of its chronotope

i.e. of the complete and inseparable entity created by the confluence of time and space, I need to reflect on theories of landscape, the outlook of modernity and the idea of nation. Then, I will ponder the relation of the Palestinian nation and the Israeli state.

Landscape, nation and modernity When landscape is interpreted as a manifestation of the built environment,

the aesthetic of form and other spatial elements, it is also recognized as a product of social decisions legitimated by political authority. But a landscape is more than a scenario where social and political life unfolds; in reality it is a repository of meanings that allow people to establish affective and imaginative responses to their surroundings and the social collective. The landscape is loved, painted, and remembered; it is bemoaned and made into poetry. Yi-fu Tuan equates these sentiments to topophilia, “the affective bond between people and place.”4 For Benedict Anderson, however, the national sentiment inspired by landscape is nothing but an illusory case of imagined communities.5 Yet if nations produce landscapes and landscapes make nations, these so-called ‘imagined communities’ might be more real than fictional. As the outcome of the observation and modification of nature, landscapes create places to establish links with temporal and geographical vectors. These vectors, or chronotopes, as Mikhail Bakhtin reminds us, resist the Hegelian trap of separating time and space, and, as a time-space aggregate become a complete and inseparable entity.6 They include as well spatial forms, aesthetic creations such as buildings, pyramids, churches, and roads, and imagined cartographies.7

National landscapes have been considered from several angles, especially

from the perspective of the nation-state, vicariously conflated with the nation itself. John Agnew has criticized the correlation of nature, nation and territory that the United Kingdom, Finland and Switzerland utilize to naturalize the ‘national landscape’ and to reinforce the nationalist narrative.8 In these cases, the national culture (usually consisting of several cultures within a single state) is equated to the natural environment as the most important element of national identity. The nation-state is then conflated with the nations contained within the state, regardless of their

4 Tuan,Yi-fu 1974 Topophilia: a study of environmental perception, attitudes and values. Englewood Cliff, NJ: Prentice Hall, p.4 5 Anderson, Benedict 1991 Imagined Communities. London: Verso 6 Bakhtin, M.1986 Dialogical Imagination. Editor M. Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. 7 Nations without a state such as the Palestinians, the Kurds, the Catalans, the Basques, etc. envision the possibility of a state with its own spatial and aesthetic conditions and its own cartographical limits. 8 Agnew, J. 2004 “Nationalism” in A Companion to Cultural Geography, Eds. J.S. Duncan, N.C. Jonson & R.H. Schein. Malden, MA, USA: Blackwell, p.233


On the contrary, Joseph Llobera presupposes that national identity is constantly re-created.13 In other words, national identity cannot be universalized because it is anchored in the chronotope, in the meeting of time and space that brings about a particular evolution. National identity evolves from period to period, from generation to generation and yet dwells in the same landscape that accrues social and cultural transformations. But elites or colonizers who simultaneously legitimate and/or deny meaning to the act of rememorizing the past can certainly manipulate the social, historical and collective memory of nations.14 However, a nation’s image is not always engineered by the elites. The landscape contains elements and contributions from all of the society. There are many in-determined aspects of a nation’s identity and culture that permit multiple possibilities of understanding. To generalize the power of the elites is to determine the image of the nation. On the contrary, national cultures have multiple forms and possibilities.

What is a ‘postmodern nation’? What is or what the nation is not is a question that permeates debates on the

meaning of national identity and nationalism. Except for Llobera, most of the quoted authors ignore or diminish the importance of the chronotope that constantly re-creates the cultural/historical landscape. However, the creation and modification of nature through culture is underlined by the idea of place. Place conveys that a nation’s landscape is the consequence of a continual, dialectical and evolving


13 Llobera, 1994, p. 206 14 Jonson, N.C. 2004, p.318

process. The single postmodern rupture of this process consists on the artificiality of publicly remembering an altered past that suits the elites’ aims and thus becomes a fabrication devoid of its authenticity and rotundity. But the nation has indeed a real, intrinsic past that can be evoked and understood through interpretation.

However, the uncertainty of the past and the un-know-ability of its absolute

reality confer a postmodern condition to the nation. This condition is even more apparent when we consider that the goal of modernity was to eliminate from civil life the burden of the past, to eradicate all association with tradition and technological backwardness, and to sever ‘irrational’ notions of belonging to a particular collective. In the political program of modernity the nation lost its importance, it was diluted, associated to folklore and converted into a sentimental and superficial representation. The state, meanwhile, was given the task of modernizing all the archaic and irrational aspects implicit in the love for a nation whose past could be mythologized. In this view the nation became nothing more that an ancestral and archaic afterthought superseded by modernity.

National sentiment, nonetheless, has been recognized as a reaction to the

cosmopolitan pretensions of the Enlightenment.15 As a consequence, after the 18th century the idea of nation and the ideology of nationalism have been associated either with bloodline or plebiscite. Nation as race, bloodline, or nation as a contract constantly renovated, plebiscite, are two opposite concepts. It is an antinomy that can be overcome when the nation is conceived as culture.16 Belonging to a culture is unavoidable and inevitable. Culture is part of the landscape and can be seen on the ground, whereas the plebiscite or the race, do not. National cultures are literally seen in their architectonic, artistic, agricultural, urban and archaeological forms. The meaning of these forms may change with the passing of time, but their presence endures. Some become relics and some continue to function. National cultures are thus indeterminate, visual, disperse, concrete, and in constant fluctuation while the state is modern, abstract, enlightened, centred, hierarchical, and precise. Paradoxically, that confers both an archaic and a postmodern scope to the nation.

The archaic element is a sign of endurance and the link to a remote past

while the postmodern condition situates the nation beyond the reach of modernity represented by the nation-state. The recognition of this paradox has encouraged the debate on so-called multinational states conceived as asymmetrically federated states, flexible and compatible with the current nature of geopolitics. Apparently, it makes no sense to continue with a system, --the nation-state system-- that has caused havoc in the Europe of the 19th and 20th centuries and still does so in other parts of the world. Catalan historian Joseph Fontana believes that the nation-state’s underlying political strata has caused many wars in the quest for homogenization,

15 Bernstein, R.J. 1992 The New Constellation: the Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press 16 Todorov, T. 1994 On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, p. 386


from languages to traditions. In his essay ‘La construccio historica de la identitat nacional’ Fontana upholds the multinational state as the sole viable model for contemporary societies.17

The illusion of total autonomy and segregation Is it possible to conceive and conceptualize a multinational landscape? Given

that the traditional state is usually associated with a unitary and singular nation it is difficult but not impossible to imagine it. The debate on multi-nationality can be illustrated from different positions and with contrasting models. For instance, from a state that refuses to incorporate within it a different nation, as is the case of Israel with respect to Palestinians; to the systematic denial of the Kurds’ cultural and linguistic particularity in Turkey; to the refusal by the Spanish state to grant constitutional status of nation to Catalonia.18

The above examples represent different aspects of the state’s attachment to

the norms of modernity such as centralization, hierarchy, precision, exactitude, homogenization, universality, generalization, etc. These norms are challenged by the theory of situated knowledge (situated ness) that describes knowledge as a product of a particular place and period and postulates that there are many different ways of knowing. The theory also refutes a neutral perspective to observe the world that serves to universalize knowledge, a ‘view from nowhere.’ Instead, it recognizes the importance of situated knowledge as the outcome of embodied objectivity.19

Fig. 4 Embodied objectivity

17 La Vanguardia Digital, July 14, 2004 18 Since medieval times, the Catalan cultural landscape has been constituted by a specific language, an architectural style, a distinct land-planning and the delimitation of the “marca hispanica.’ 19 Haraway, D. 1988 “Situated Knowledge: the Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” in Feminist Studies 14, 575-99


As a consequence, all knowledge originates in a specific place and period and thus multiple standpoints and partial perspectives offer situated versions of reality. In this outlook, it is precisely the partial and not the universal that allows us to invoke reason, because the principal perspective to obtain knowledge depends on our position.20 Our way of knowing is marked by our geographical, political, existential, and gender positions; otherwise, to float in the world, to not have a position, is impossible. This explains why ideas about norms that appear perpetual and universal in a given period and place, are in fact the specific and peculiar product of a cultural system.21 Reasoning like this makes feasible the idea of multinational landscapes, because the political/territorial status quo as a cultural system is neither eternal nor universal. It can evolve, change and adapt to circumstances. The danger of onthologizing what is merely a particular event within structural and temporal parameters is thus avoided by the postulates of embodied objectivity. Situatedness (embodied objectivity) and dialogism (the chronotope) share in this way a similar viewpoint. Basically, what both theories do is to inoculate the subject (us) against the illusion of complete autonomy, isolation and absolute certainty.

The critique of postmodernism Robert Sack has equated situated knowledge to relativism and absolutism.22

He argues that postmodernism cannot articulate a moral theory necessary to understand the creation of place. In his book, written and published after the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York, Sack establishes that evil is located beyond the confines of time and space. The Bakhtinian chronotope, therefore, is renounced.

Evil manifests itself in such places as the GULAG, the North American

antebellum slave plantations, and the Nazi concentration camps. Yet there are degrees of evil; slave owners are part of a paternalistic system where slaves are considered inferior and in need of a guide;23 ordinary citizens of Nazi Germany fall into Hitler’s trap. In both instances evil is the responsibility of the higher authority. Accordingly a malign dictator can makes us happy if we accept his rules, usually based on an aseptic language such as “the final solution,” “evacuation,” “special treatment” or “deportation.”24

The self-deception of Nazis and slave owners is justified by the need to reach

a higher “good” for all, regardless of a segment of the population’s suffering. The end justifies the means. This exposition gives Sack the opportunity to demonstrate 20 This is a very geographical theory in that includes concepts such as local, position and situation, in a very cartographic sense of their meaning. 21 See Bakhtin 1986 22 Sack, R. 2003 A Geographical Guide to the Real and the Good. New York and London: Routledge 23 In order to keep the myth of slave inferiority, slaves were not allowed to read and write. 24 Sack, R. 2003, p. 169


how geography can be instrumental for the implementation of evil. And also allows him to carry out a dire critique of postmodernism/relativism by defining geography as an instrument employed to diminish the world’s variety and complexity through tyranny, chaos and isolation. Sack explains the Holocaust as an instance of expulsion and spatial concentration. This malevolent geography involves isolation, autarchy, homogenization and uniformity, and according to Sack also applies to Stalin’s Soviet Union and North Korea. On the other hand, Sack leaves out instances such as South Africa’s apartheid, the enclosure of Palestinian vital space or the conspicuous Latin American repressive military dictatorships, where geography is very much a part and parcel of repression.

For Sack, a geographer esteemed for his analysis of territoriality, the notions of

good and evil are definite.25 To him postmodernism and situated knowledge lack the capacity for altruism; a judgement that he also applies to ‘radical democracy’ whilst liberal democracy is equated to altruism. The latter Sack wishes to extend to the whole world, making his critique less of a speculative discussion than a political one. 26 But the overall purpose of the book is not only the critique of postmodernism; the geographical basis of political and ideological projects guided by ideas of tyranny and extermination are also examined. Sacks’ explanation of how the fragmentation and division of place is utilized by the state to dominate and oppress a nation or cultural group is particularly useful to understand the links between the spatial and the political. Thus I connect a part of his analysis to the insights of embodied objectivity, hoping that these contrarian ‘bed-fellows’ make available to me a useful approach to delineate the Palestinian cultural landscape.

The Palestinian cultural landscape is difficult to ascertain as the colonial

powers that set up Mandate Palestine ignored many of its features to advance their own purposes.27 The colonizers engaged in a game of sorts to manipulate the social, historical and collective memory of Palestinians in order to do away with their existence. The existence of a group or nation can be negated in a number of ways. The more radical consists in denying its territorial base. When someone decides that a group does not belong here and never says where it should be, but persists saying that does not belong here, what happens in effect is the erasure of the group’s existence, for the fact of existing is manifested in the connection between being and place. A group or nation cannot exist out of space; it needs a place, where even nomadic tribes can exist.28

But not even elite colonial powers can erase forever the recollections of a

population. It is well known that cultural landscapes have been preserved for future generations through memory and commemoration. Historical maps, archives,

25 He includes abortion as an evil act, demonstrating his affinity with the North American evangelical majority ( see page 35) 26 Sack, R. 2003, p.242 27 See Gregory, Derek 2004 The Colonial Present. Blackwell Publishing, pp 76-102 28 This is an adaptation of Sack’s reflections on page 74.


storytelling, memorabilia and artefacts that have endured beyond physical and emotional demolition, bear witness to the existence of Palestinian ‘lieux de memoire;’ their meaning is not lost in spite of military occupation and ideological repression. Bakhtin reminds us that “nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will someday have its homecoming festival.”29

Palestine, the portrait of a nation For hundreds of years an indigenous Arab population was distributed in towns

and cities over the territory known as Mandate Palestine. However, at the turn of the 20th century Jews of Middle Eastern and European descent formed 10 percent of the Mandate’s population, and sought to establish a country of their own inspired by Zionist ideas. After the state of Israel was founded in 1948 the indigenous population lost their right to the land. Those living under Israeli occupation became stateless while others sought refuge in neighbouring countries and in the world at large.30

After 1948 entire Arab towns were bulldozed and effectively removed from

physical existence in the name of the historical imperative to found a state over already inhabited space. Paradoxically, while Israeli politicians kept on saying that the Palestinians sought the annihilation of Israel the Palestinian landscape’s defacement continued apace. Thus in 1948, 1949 and again in 1967, thousands of Palestinians were expelled from their homes and towns originating an exodus has lasted for decades amidst unbearable conflict and decimation and reflects the quest for a Jewish landscape devoid of Arabs.31

The Arab-Israeli wars not only maimed Palestinian civilian population but also

destroyed their cultural landscapes. A landscape that reflected hundreds of years of continual occupation was eradicated in a few decades.32 Their collective memory was also threatened. Arabic place-names were replaced with Hebrew or biblical ones, and images of the Israeli transformation of the land were disseminated to discourage the refugees from returning. Between 1948 and 1950 alone Israel destroyed over 400 Palestinian villages and built 160 Jewish settlements on land that had been confiscated from its former occupants.33 However, as Derek Gregory explains, they have retained their memories in a “profoundly spatialized… way…not

29 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 1986 Speech Genres and Other Late Essays edited by M. Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, p170 30 Israel took 78 percent of Palestine in 1948 and the remaining 22 percent in 1967. It is only that 22 percent that is in question now. Agnew, J. 2002 Making Political Geography. London: Arnold, p.32 This 22 percent is called “The Occupied Territories”, “The disputed land” or “Judea and Samaria” by the advocates of Eretz Israel. 31 Falah, Gazi 1996 The Israeli-Palestinian War and its Aftermath: the Transformation and De-Signification of Palestine’s Cultural Landscape in Annals of the Association of American Geographers 86(2), pp. 256-285 32 Falah, G. 1996 33 Gregory, D. 2004, p.88


only in the sense of the space of Palestine itself but also in the intimate micro topographies of homes, fields and cemeteries.”34

Fig. 5 Partition and depopulation Once Israel was established many of its laws discriminated against non-Jewish

citizens. Full rights were determined by differentiated levels of civil status based on faith. Citizens were subdivided into groups according to religious affiliation rather than nationality. Israeli-Arabs, identified as “non-Jews,” have ever since been perceived as a racial and religious threat to Israel’s security. 35 A indication of this

34 Gregory, D. 2004, p. 88 35 Palestinians who remained in Israel (so-called Israeli Arabs), account for less than 20% of the population, roughly numbering more than one million in 2002. Up to 220,000 of these people are displaced within Israel and not allowed to return to their homes, while 43 villages where 70,000 Palestinians live are not recognized by Israel.


attitude is a ban imposed in May of 2002, preventing Palestinians from joining their relatives in Israel that has kept thousands from uniting with spouses who are Arab citizens of Israel.36

Likewise, under Israeli law the political status of the West Bank, officially

renamed ‘Judea and Samaria,’ is neither occupied nor administered, but ‘liberated’ after 1967; although in Gregory’s estimation “it was the land itself” not the Palestinian inhabitants who were liberated by the Israeli occupation.37 This kind of rhetorical warp has resulted in many more Israeli settlements being established in the West Bank, which already makes it impossible to build a putative contiguous Palestinian state. Of late the “territories” (Gaza, West Bank and East Jerusalem) are said to be ‘disputed’ which renders Israel claim formally equivalent to that of the Palestinians. The irony of this, according to Gregory, is not lost to the intrinsic violence of colonial modernity, where this particular form of oppression has been determined, like in the American antebellum mentioned by Sack, by race, land and nature. At present close to 50% of the West Bank territory has been set aside by Israel for the mobility, protection and fulfillment of Israeli colonists, thus revealing through the urgency to acquire more land, a drive to dominate nature in the name of nationalism. Meanwhile, the peace for land rhetoric and the establishment of two states is nothing but an anachronism that disregards the shared geography of Israelis and Palestinians, the nature of international relations, and the fraud of border demarcation.38

Expulsion and concentration

Certain forms of hatred, oppression and violence may seem inevitable to those who act upon it. By concentrating the Palestinian population in areas constantly shrunken and limiting their vital geography in the name of preserving security, the state of Israel is implementing geographical separation through isolation and expulsion. There are at present 98 check points of the Israeli army (IDF) and 99 barricades to control the movement of Palestinians in the West Bank, while Israeli colonists are spared the travails of identifying themselves and their movements. The rules of spatial segmentation reinforce stereotypes and produce behaviors such as terrorist suicide attacks that confirm the image of Arabs as violent and inhuman. A cycle of hatred

36 “Israel’s birthday sparks protests” in The Globe & Mail, May 16, 2005, p. A11 37 Gregory, D. 2004, p. 92 38 John Agnew (2002, pp. 30-32) states that the ‘peace’ rhetoric established by border demarcation in the treaties of Oslo (1993), Cairo (1994), Taba (1995), Wye (1998), and Sharmael-Sheirk (1999) are essentially a gigantic scam.


and intolerance is entrenched when Israeli troops close roads, demolish homes, kill political leaders and fill up jails with political prisoners; but above all, when the civilian population is collectively punished for the crimes of extremists.

Spatial concentration and expulsion have culminated in the construction of a wall began by the Israeli government in 2002. At some points it reaches 8 meters, twice the height of the Berlin Wall and it is equipped with a sophisticated system of in-vigilance and, in some tracts, an electrified snare. But this concrete barrier is not a new idea, it had circulated since 1973. It became controversial at the beginning of its construction near the town of Salim, West of Jenin, where the line that demarcates the 1967 armistice has been ignored, thus dislodging people from their homes and fields.

For decades millions of Arab

Palestinians dispersed in the “occupied territories,” in Israel, in refugee camps and exiled throughout the world,39 have become invisible for the international community, except when committing atrocious terrorist acts. Lost from the annals of history are their disappeared homes, land-tenure deeds, towns, cemeteries, birth certificates and other documents as well as their legal territorial status. According to Ghazi Falah, the current build up of Israeli settlements in Palestinian land is nothing more than the continuation of the policy that since 1948 has promoted the destruction of 400 Palestinian towns.40 The concerted effort to eradicate Palestinian historical memory correlates with the demolition of the cultural landscape. One is the consequence of the other.41

Fig. 6 Sep ration Wall a

39 About 700,000 Palestinians lost their homes when the state of Israel was founded. They have not ceased their demand to return with their descendants, that number a total of four million people by United Nations estimates. 40 Falah, Ghazi, opus cita 41 One could see the inverse of Fig. 1 Dialectics of landscape. If landscape is made of culture and identity, defacing it has the effect of erasing culture and identity.


All this happens under the scrutiny of the world even as it creates the sensation that nothing can be done, that these events are naturally inalterable. In reality they are instances of absolutism operating geographically.42 Naturalizing the defacement of the Palestinian landscape produces a condition of self-deception, in which fundamental questions about the existence of the Palestinian ‘lieux de memoire,’ its palimpsest, are disregarded as futile. Nevertheless the visual metaphor of nationhood is there to be seen, appreciated and remembered. This map illustrates the cartography of Palestinian historical memory.43

Fig. 7 Ghazi Falah’s cartography of memory

Multinational state and ‘postmodern’ nation

otwithstanding their ancient culture and identity, their longue duree as an establ

N

ished people, the Palestinians have never had a state of their own, a situation also shared by the Jews before the foundation of Israel. But while the latter got their


42 Sack, R. 2003, pp.102 and 202. 43 Falah, G. 1996.

state almost six decades ago, the Palestinians in addition of not having a state also lack an international juridical status, similar to other nations. What's more, a Palestinian declaration of independence seems utterly improbable in the near future. At present the space of the occupied territories resembles a colander perforated by about 200 Israeli settlements. The implementation of Palestinian sovereignty cannot hold in this ‘colander.’ According to Naseer Aruri, “the demographic and geographic character of the numerous Jewish settlements in the West Bank would make it nearly impossible for any Israeli government to find a satisfactory arrangement accommodating settler colonialism and Palestinian independence.”44 Furthermore, in Gregory’s estimate even Palestinian airspace would be brought beneath Israeli airspace, so that it would continue to command the skies above Palestinians buildings and low-flying helicopters, and Israel also demands ‘subterranean sovereignty’ over the mountain aquifer beneath the West Bank.45 The maps below show the putative contiguous Palestinian state on the left and, on the right, the reality of a series of dispersed and disconnected spaces whose fragile existence depends solely on Palestinian cultural resistance and will to survive. But the question remains about the indispensability in this day and age of becoming a state to survive as a nation.

Fig 8 Discontinuous Palestinian territory

44 Aruri, Naseer H. 2003 Dishonest Broker. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, p.241 45 Gregory, D. 2004, p.103


Aents from the occupied territories andccording to Ilan Pappe, the belief that the state of Israel will withdraw all

settlem restore the Green line border of 1967 to create Palestinian state is nonsense.46 The same was thought by Edward Said who becam

s

he traditional state, born from the idea that it should be organized in centre reflection of the age of Reason’s proposition that only the state is

qualifie to provide categorical answers to the nation’s dilemmas. This Jacobin outloo

use its unique cultural landscape cannot be generalized. Also universal explanations and good versus

ae an advocate of a multinational state shared by Arabs and Jews. Other

thinkers agree that the two-state solution has run its course, having been dealt a severe blow by a colossal imbalance of power between Israel and the Palestinians.47 In spite of having a comparable population size, the economic and military power of Israelis and Palestinians pale in comparison.48 Furthermore, the presence of thousands of Palestinians inside Israel, and thousands of Israeli colonists in what i supposedly the future Palestinian state discredits the idea of the two states, a position, ironically, now accepted by a new generation of Palestinians, aware of the fact that in the Palestine/Israel overall territory there are at present almost the same numbers of Arabs and Jews.49 This confirms Bishara’s assertion that any further delay in resolving the outstanding issues of polarization and discrimination will deepen the antagonism of the Apartheid system already in place.50

Wither the state? T

and periphery is ad

k, paired with the belief in a single national culture encompassed by the state, disregards tradition and regionalism. Rationalism’s certitude, however, could not anticipate the nation’s different and contradictory elements that pertain neither to the centre nor the periphery. So-called ‘irrational’ petitions and antagonist postures against the state are thus the product of the state’s false impressions of the nation’s qualities. Likewise, conflicts supposedly provoked by the nation’s unexpected reactions and inexplicable attitudes, are usually analyzed within the nation-state system thus perpetuating the antagonism between nation and state.

As postmodern theory would have it, separating theories and concepts from

their context tends to obfuscate the portrait of the nation, beca

evil dichotomies are incapable of defining a nation’s identity, for each national palimpsest is circumstantial, partial and unfinished and cannot be encased forever in a determined historical moment. The exclusivity of the landscape and its

46 Pappe, I. 2004 A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples. Cambridge University Press, p. 267 47 Aruri, Naseer H. 2003 Dishonest Broker. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, p.217 48 Israel’s population, 81% Jews and others (5,160,000 Jews and 290,000 non Jewish immigrants) plus 19% Israeli-Arabs (close to one million). Occupied Territorys’ population, 220,000 Jewish settlers and 3,500,000 Palestinians; Economy: Israel’s GDP, 110.2 billion; Palestinians’ GDP (West Bank and Gaza): $4.36 billion; Military: Israel, Active 163,500, Reserves 425,000; Palestinian Authority: Paramilitary 35,000; Unemployment rate: Israel 9.0%; Gaza Strip 48.5%, West Bank 30.3% 49 According to the U.S. State Department’s Country Reports On Human Rights Practices, 2004, of the 10,827,185 total population of Israel/Palestine, 48% are Jewish, 49.3% are Palestinian and 2.7% Other Minorities. 50 Bishara, p. 166.


condition of visual metaphor are thus beyond the reach of grand theories’ explanatory power.51 Ditto for the computer-age’s homogenizing power that so far has not been able to eradicate the singularity of national societies. On the contrary, the multiple meanings, memories, interpretations and inexplicable aspects of a nation’s diversity and difference, can only be fathomed from the partial perspectives of situated knowledge.

Paradoxically, even if the state imposes its power over the nation, the conflict

between nation and state can never be surmounted through the erasure of memory, the landscape’s decimation or the cancellation of national autonomy. Intertw

power of the landscape’s visual metaphor, the grip of a historical and linguist cultural context embedded in a particular space. Even though the majority of hom

Khulda and Al-Kunayyisa villages

ined into the nation-state system, instituted by the Treaty of Westphalia three hundred years ago, is the intolerance that continues to uphold the status quo. As the tragic examples, to mention only a few, of Chechnya, Tibet and Palestine reveal, the state’s inflexibility has only reinforced these unhappy nations’ determination to survive.

The determination of the Palestinian claim to the land demonstrates once

more the ices and infrastructure have disappeared from historical Palestine alongside its

original inhabitants, the landscape persists to reside in people’s memories. As evidence of historical presence and continuity these photos of demolished homes in the Khulda and al-Kunayyisa villages taken in June 1990, and published in Ghazi Falah’s essay,52 demonstrate the testimonial power of the cultural landscape.

51 Marxism, positivism, structuralism, realism, rationalism, etc. 52 Falah, opus cita


Palestinian geography of memory and commemoration

Palestinian museum of memory would be the culmination of a trend that n guaranteeing the rights

of na to their knowledge of the past, a series of museums have been inaugu

A A

has coalesced in several projects around the world. Intent otionsrated in South American, European and North American countries to preserve

the memory of victims and contemporary humanitarian disasters.


The goal of these museums is to safeguard the relations between history, memory and politics. France, for example, counts at the moment with twenty eight museums and public centers in whose title appear the words ‘resistance’ and ‘depor

diator between the society t produces it and the historical past. An outstanding one is the Memorial de la

rights. Dirty wars, torture, and forced disappearances, have been rescued from oblivion and neglect by civil and national associ

tation.’ It is interesting to note, however, that the Museum of Lyon and the Musee de la Resistance et de la Deportation at Grenoble, were inaugurated in 1992 and 1994, respectively. That is almost half a century after the end of the Second World War in contrast to private institutions that since the beginning of the 1950s accumulated objects and documents about the antifascist resistance. But the most interesting development consists on the creation of eco-museums in which the theme of resistance is incorporated to the landscape, directly into the original sites of memory (lieux de memoire) where the resistance took place, thus conveying not only the collective memory of facts, but the memory of places.

A historical museum is essentially the voice of the community in which it is

entrenched and represents for this community the role of me thaResistance du Vercors, because it integrates a vision of the region, work,

landscape and ideas that constitute the collective memory of the fight against fascism. Likewise in Germany, the government has established the Jewish museum and the Holocaust monument, to remember the millions of lost lives in the fight against fascism. In Italy, one emblematic museum, the Museo Storico della Liberazione di Roma, is made of donated objects and statements on the prison walls, from drawings, to messages, poems and slogans. These graffiti have been conserved as the most meaningful relics. In Spain, many civil associations have disseminated the resistance to fascism, but have not organized a petition to the government to establish a museum of memory,53 except for the Basque Museo por la Paz de Guernica. Many other museums of memory have sprung all over Europe, from Lithuania, to Poland, Estonia, Hungary and Russia, in which the theme is not only the fight against fascism but also against communist totalitarianism best exemplified by Perm 36, the Russian museum of the Gulag.

In South America, especially Chile and Argentina, the major theme of the

memory museums is the breach of human

ations (Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, Open Memory, CONADEP, etc.)54 In Chile one of the first acts of the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, instituted in 1991, was to build a monument in the Santiago General Cemetery with the names of all the dictatorship’s victims. As a consequence, those who up to that day had been considered terrorists, delinquents, criminals and fugitives by the Pinochet regime, were recognized as victims of the state. However, it is not until very recently, on March 24, 2004 that a Museum of Memory has been inaugurated in Argentina. To

53 The ‘Foro por la Memoria,’ ‘Asociacion para la Recuperacion de la Memoria Historica,’ and ‘Asociacion Guerra y Exilio,’ are among the better known Spanish associations. 54 This National Commission of Disappeared Persons was created in Argentina in 1983 and documented nine thousand cases.


establish these memorials in South America has been an up-hill battle due perhaps to the painful reflection on the crimes committed against the population by the military regimes. Nonetheless, the catalogue of Memoria Abierta includes twenty two thousand written documents, four thousand photographs, a collection of three hundred and forty affiches, and the maps of clandestine detention centers of the military regimes; plus an oral archive with three hundred recollections of the victims’ relatives, ex prisoners, and exiles.

It is important to underline the structure of these museums that usually count

with a documentation center, juridical information such as records, processes, denunciations, etc.; a center for the reproduction of documents, and archive of human

out the recollection of its ancestral cultural landscape.

rights abuses, deaths and disappearances and a bibliographical collection and press files. All of these is naturally connected to the collection of visual and material objects. But the most important feature is not only the commemoration of that that has been lost but the constitution of a reflective and active memory to understand the present and to grasp the causes that have altered the nation’s cultural landscape. In Europe and elsewhere these museums serve as venues of cultural, educational and participatory projects for the benefit of younger generations. Memory and analysis, linked to regional development, explains their success and their impact on the civil society.

In this day and age the Palestinian nation may not necessarily require a state

to thrive, but it certainly cannot survive with

Fig. 9 The object of memory55

55 Published in The Globe and Mail, May 16, 2005, p. A11


Ackno

his paper is the outcome of a presentation at the Seminari International del Paisatg

wledgements: Te, in October 2004 at Olot in Catalunya, Spain. I wish to express my thanks to

the fine comments of Joan Nogue-Font and Angel Quintana. I am also grateful to all my Catalan friends and colleagues who encouraged me with their presence.


Els paisatges de la postmodernitat - coac.net · Els paisatges de la postmodernitat II Seminari...

Documents

Transcript of Els paisatges de la postmodernitat - coac.net · Els paisatges de la postmodernitat II Seminari...