Countermapping Urban Palestine : Literature, Myth, Memorography, Mnemohistory

AlAmmouri, Bayan and Hamdan, Mohammed and Moore, Lindsey and Naseem, Sam and Kalousian, Madonna (2025) Countermapping Urban Palestine : Literature, Myth, Memorography, Mnemohistory. In: BRISMES Annual Conference, 2025-07-01 - 2025-07-03, Newcastle University. (Unpublished)

Abstract

This panel introduces ‘Countermapping Urban Palestine’, funded by the British Academy and previously Council for British Research in the Levant. Our pilot project focuses on Nablus, historically a significant trade and manufacturing centre and a hub of anti-colonial resistance to this day, but we aspire to ‘countermap’ cities across 1948 Palestine. History and geography rarely capitalise on how creative narratives represent place/space in Palestine/Israel. Conversely, there has been scant analysis in literary studies, in English, of Palestinian cities as sites of memory, belonging, orientation, identity, and modernity. We foreground fiction, autobiography, oral narratives, myths, and other narrative commemorative practices. In the context of a continuous catastrophe, we invoke Edward Said’s call for ‘countermemory, with its own counterdiscourse that will not allow conscience to look away’ (Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 2003, 142). The project contributes to extensive archival practice in which ‘Palestinians [...] assert their own history and presence in the land of Palestine: against Zionist mapping, a shadow cartography' (Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt, 2003, 71). As is well established in place/space theory, geography itself comprises ‘practised’, ‘read’, ‘recoded’, storied spaces (inter alia De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 1980; Blunt and Rose, Writing Women and Space, 1994). Drawing on literary cartographic, oral historical, and memory studies, we see maps as interpretative templates that ‘presuppose narratives, which in turn may function as maps’ (Tally Jr, Literary Cartographies, 2014, 1). The panel explores different ways of creative countermapping, including counter-indexing literary and memory maps, in the context of a besieged reality.