Seeing Palestine from China: Markets, Movement, and the Social Life of Occupation

Title: Seeing Palestine from China: Markets, Movement, and the Social Life of Occupation

This talk is an introduction to ongoing research and new writing on contemporary human and economic geographies in, and in-between, the West Bank and China. Beginning with a focus on small commodity exchange between Palestinians in Yiwu and in the West Bank, it attempts to understand changing forms of community and national identification among Palestinians, the impact that mechanisms governing free trade have on them, and what flows of commodity and capital have to do with the occupation. It combines ethnographic fieldwork in Palestine and China with historical accounts of Palestinian state building after the Oslo Accords and labor patterns among port workers under the British Mandate. It ends by scaling up towards an account of general forms of connection and disconnection as matters of culture, politics, production, and possibility.