Description
Book SynopsisExamining the border-enclosure strategy Israel uses to impose Palestinian im/mobilization, Maryam Griffin considers the ways public transportation in the Palestinian West Bank is a constant site of social struggle. Her illuminating book, Vehicles of Decolonization, studies collective movement, resistance, and everyday life in the West Bank to show how Palestinians assert a kind of Indigenous self-determination over mobility that Israeli settler colonialism seeks to undermine.
Having immersed herself in a year of fieldwork, Griffin maps multiple engagements with the flexible bus, shared van, and private taxi services to demonstrate that the politics of mobility are shaped by ongoing settler colonialism and Indigenous struggle. Griffin uses critical border studies to look at the contested nature of mobility at the sites of transit, where Palestinians practice self-determination through routine participation, spectacular political organizing and demonstration, and artistic
Trade Review
"[A] unique and invaluable contribution to scholarship on the Palestinian struggle for self-determination....[T]he publication of Vehicles of Decolonization is notable and worth celebrating.... [I]t succeeds in showing how the shape of public transportation is connected to a set of broader political and economic contradictions.... For scholars eager to think about public transportation outside the strictures of land use debates or environmental sustainability, Vehicles of Decolonization remains important precisely in its ability to place public transportation squarely within debates on political power, identity, and political economy."—City and Community
"Griffin highlights public transportation as a site of collective Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation in the West Bank. She begins by illuminating the Israeli systems of border crossings, surveillance, and permits that seek to impede Palestinians’ movement in the region. The book then investigates the ways Palestinians use routes, human interactions surrounding transportation, and vehicles themselves to subvert these systems. Griffin also presents the history of political protests on West Bank buses and anti-occupation art that depicts public transit as examples of Palestinian social struggle centered around mobility."—Middle East Journal
"[A] rich piece of political geography that celebrates the agency of people whose every movement can be controlled. With no apologies for her activist and sympathetic posture, Griffin describes the quotidian travails of daily life in the West Bank, where a modern highway system and buses for Jewish settlers are largely off limits for Palestinians.... [T]his well-researched monograph presents a positive picture of resilience, imagination, and community often missing in accounts of the West Bank.... Summing Up: Highly recommended."—Choice
"Griffin provides a compelling examination of what she refers to as the 'regime of im/mobility' imposed by Israel on Palestinians inside the West Bank."—Contemporary Sociology
"Griffin's writing contextualises the ramifications of public transportation for Palestinians from within Israel's colonial framework, thus setting the scene for readers to engage with a political reality that is either denied or obfuscated."—Middle East Monitor
“A critical aspect of colonial biopolitics is the control of body and its movement. Maryam Griffin’s highly insightful Vehicles of Decolonization is the first detailed study of not only how Israeli occupation restrains the daily movement of the Palestinians through walls, checkpoints, permits, and road systems, but especially how Palestinians resist this regime of enclosure by reclaiming mobility through mundane yet highly contested venues of public transit and collective interaction. A timely book.”—Asef Bayat, Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and author of Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring
“A lively and accessible read, Griffin’s book is the first in-depth study of im/mobility in the West Bank. In a landscape pockmarked by politically created closures, constrained movements, and forbidden spaces, public transport takes on important and contested meaning. Griffin’s account demonstrates how despite the intricacies of Israeli settler colonialism, Palestinians carve out spaces that provide possibilities for social connections and decolonial power, sometimes through mundane practices such as seatbelt clicks, hand-drawn maps, and a metro network art installation, which, given the political conditions, are rendered spectacular.”—Helga Tawil-Souri, Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University, and coeditor of Gaza as Metaphor
"Vehicles of Decolonization is an original study about the restricted daily life and hardships Palestinians have been experiencing under Israeli occupation since 1967; it is also about the imaginative alternatives they have deployed to assert their rights and agency. This study would be of interest to scholars and students in Middle East history, Palestine and Settler Colonial Studies, and the social sciences."—Arab Studies Quarterly
