Governmentality, Counter-Memory and the Politics of Street Naming in Ramallah, Palestine

ABSTRACT

A growing body of research has shown the geopolitical significance of place naming, yet recent contributions have called for new conceptual and methodological approaches. Drawing on mixed-methods research examining place naming processes, this study analyses Ramallah Municipality’s street naming project in the occupied Palestinian territories. It argues that the naming project was bound up with the municipality’s desire to develop a governable and modernized de facto capital city in the context of quasi-statelessness and occupation. Moreover, the naming project formed an opportunity for the municipality to inscribe Palestinian counter-memory on the landscape in the context of Palestinian cultural and material dispossession. However, residents of Ramallah viewed the new toponymic regime as a project of the perceived Palestinian ‘elite’ that served to erase local memory in a rapidly changing city. This analysis of the construction, reception and negotiation of street naming as a process reveals much about the internally contested process of state formation under occupation and the political geography and geopolitics of Palestine/Israel.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Caroline Bressey for her comments on an earlier version of this paper and Daniel for providing translations of two important documents.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [ES/J500185/1].