Enclosure Landscapes: Historical Reflections on Palestinian Geography

In a series of engaging observations on colonialism and territorial conquest, Edward Said crafted the notion of “imaginative geography” to describe the ideological impulses of dominant groups seeking control of places and people.1 According to Said, imagined geography is a process initiated by groups with territorial ambitions who reinvent meanings about the landscapes they covet, and frame discourses justifying why they are entitled to take control of the places being reinvented. Influenced by the spatially oriented concept of power in Foucault, the ideologically oriented notion of hegemony in Gramsci, as well as Raymond Williams’s view of landscape as a site where different groups contest rights to land and property, Said developed his idea to explain the formation of knowledge systems—ways of thinking—used by groups coveting territory to justify the seizure of territorial landscapes and the imposition of new systems of sovereignty over people living there.2 Although conceding the incentives for territorial expansion to be material, Said argued that the inspiration for controlling other places and people derived from culturally shaped attitudes and ideologies. Re-imagining landscapes, he insists—making new meanings about places—is but a prelude to remaking them. In developing his argument, Said emerged as a protagonist in debates about landscape itself. Initially anticipating and later refining the insights of theorists in this debate such as Meinig (1979) and Cosgrove (1984), Said wrote how landscapes resemble texts imbued with meanings about the societies anchored to them. Just as books communicate through words, landscapes communicate through morphological and architectural elements that convey meanings about the life processes occurring on them. Yet, just as texts are open to interpretation from the reader, landscapes are open to interpretation from the viewer. In contrast to landscapes as reflections of society, however, the idea of landscape mediated by interpretation opens territory to a very different proposition—to invention and RESEARCH ARTICLES