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This article sets the development of urban cultural scenes in Palestine within a global frame of uneven development. It draws on field work in Haifa (in the 1948 Palestinian territories) and Ramallah (in central West Bank) to argue that the shift toward neoliberalism in 1985 and its sedimentation through the Oslo Accords in 1993 amount to a "transformed settler colonialism," one more intimately tied to flows of global capital. I use articulation as evoked by Stuart Hall and Gillian Hart to critically assess how historically embedded cultural practices conjoin and splinter around the political economic shifts toward neoliberalism in the post-Oslo conjuncture. The article foregrounds the urban cultural scenes as vantage points into a "relational comparison" that crosses the "Green Line" and remains attuned to the specific dynamics of urban spatial and cultural production in relation to settler colonialism and global capitalism. I situate the artists' responses as practices of articulation that elaborate conjunctural possibilities within the confines of capitalist and colonial structural limits. The article argues that despite their critique of the key processes of neoliberalization and colonialism, Palestinian artists remain subsumed by the processes' structuring logics. Thus, the article makes three contributions: (1) a centering of articulation and relational comparison as a method of understanding the constitutive relationship between colonial and global capitalist modes of accumulation; (2) an analysis of settler colonialism as a historically differentiated structure that changes and transforms in a given spatiohistorical conjuncture; and (3) a foregrounding of the role of Palestinian artists through a focus on conjunctural possibilities and practices of articulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In their claim to distance from reality, maps seek power from representation. Maps are constituted by a particular set of practices that are enmeshed within wider social relations. Maps, then, are a powerful vantage point for understanding the geometries of power. Under settler colonialism, geography is constantly reshaped and reconfigured by expansionist and eliminatory logics. Such is the case in Palestine, where Israeli settler colonialism has fragmented the map of historic Palestine into messily separated archipelagos. As Palestinian geographies are constantly being reconfigured under Israeli settler colonialism, can maps catch up? How do we locate Palestine on the map? I take up these questions by focusing on the 1948 and 1967 Palestinian territories as two spatio‐temporally differentiated locations of settler colonial spatial reconfiguration. Using a counter‐map designed by Palestinian artist Haya Zaatry, I highlight the importance of counter‐mapping in bringing into sharp relief the conjunctural layering of dispossession in Palestine. If dominant colonial maps are about the neat packaging of lived realities into dominant spatio‐temporal demarcations, counter‐maps are about highlighting the ghostly stories and embodied spatial practices and processes of living within and beyond such demarcations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the complexities of settler colonialism in historic Palestine and its impact on Palestinian geographies. Topics include the transformation of physical spaces through infrastructural developments, the interplay between capitalism and colonialism in shaping Palestinian experiences, and the theoretical frameworks provided by Stuart Hall for understanding the dynamics of domination and resistance within these geographies.

This short intervention starts by discussing Giorgio Agamben's theoretical formulation of 'bare life,' popular in refugee studies. Thinking with the case study of Palestinian refugee camps, particularly in the West Bank, it argues that there are clear limitations to the discourse of biopolitics and bare life. I argue that 'bare life' neither accounts for the multilayered relations of power, particularly colonialism, slavery, and indigenous genocide, that systemically make certain populations more susceptible to its power than others. Nor does it account for the modes of sociality of those who are systemically relegated to its sphere. I conclude by working through some of the theoretical formulations around body politics from the field of Black studies, particularly Alexander Weheliye's 2014 concept of the flesh, in order to explore new directions they may point us towards in refugee studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]