Tuesday 24th July 2018, 8:00pm
Session 197: Enclosure by Gary Fields & “This Land Is Your Land” by Raja Shehadeh – Josefwiese
For this summer session, Daniel Morgenthaler selected excerpts from the book Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror by Gary Fields (University of California Press, 2017). Along with the excerpts, Morgenthaler also selected the 2018 book review of Enclosure entitled “This Land Is Your Land” by Raja Shehadeh from The New York Review of Books.
Gary Fields finds similar tactics of enclosure – basically defining previously communally used land as your own by putting a fence around it – in three very different geographic and historic contexts: in England from the 13th century onwards, of Amerindian land starting in the 1600s – and of Palestinian property by Israelis after the founding of the state of Israel. By comparing these three types of annexations, Fields frames a sensitivity towards the topic and starts to establish modes of resistance against this historically driven “lawfare”.
Participants: 5