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Driving while Palestinian in Israel and the West Bank: The politics of disorientation and the routes of a subaltern knowledge
Author(s) -
BISHARA AMAHL
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1111/amet.12114
Subject(s) - subaltern , politics , state (computer science) , power (physics) , sociology , closure (psychology) , west bank , face (sociological concept) , space (punctuation) , political economy , gender studies , political science , law , social science , history , palestine , computer science , ancient history , physics , algorithm , quantum mechanics , operating system
Israel's system of closure divides Palestinian citizens of Israel from Palestinians of the West Bank. For members of both categories, road journeys spur political analysis, explicitly stated or implicitly packed into jokes or offhand comments. If, in liberal traditions, political knowledge is idealized as disembodied, abstract, and dispassionate, Palestinian knowledge gained while driving is none of these things. Yet it can provide important insights into the operations of Israeli power less easily represented in more formal outlets. Because the road system is an everyday site at which its users come into contact with the work of the state, driving is an important practice through which to examine popular conceptions of politics. Still, these two communities of Palestinians face obstacles in communicating about shared understandings of space and politics. In examining everyday political knowledge of subaltern people, we must attend to varieties of subalterneity to examine how these differences can perpetuate marginalization. [ mobility, infrastructure, Palestinians, subalterneity, the state, Israel, place ]