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Territoriality and the Technics of Drylands Science in Palestine and North America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2015

Omar Imseeh Tesdell
Omar Imseeh Tesdell*
Affiliation:
Department of Geography, Birzeit University, Birzeit, Palestine; e-mail: otesdell@birzeit.edu
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Extract

At the turn of the 20th century, agricultural experts in several countries assembled a new agro-scientific field: dryland farming. Their agricultural research practices concomitantly fashioned a new agro-ecological zone—the drylands—as the site of agronomic intervention. As part of this effort, American scientists worked in concert with colleagues in the emerging Zionist movement to investigate agricultural practices and crops in Palestine and neighboring regions, where nonirrigated or rainfed agriculture had long been practiced. In my larger manuscript project, I consider how the reorganization of rainfed farming as dryfarming is central to the history of both the Middle East and North America, where it was closely related to modern forms of power, sovereignty, and territoriality. I suggest that American interest in dryfarming science emerged out of a practical need to propel and sustain colonization of the Great Plains, but later became a joint effort of researchers from several emerging settler enterprises, including Australia, Canada, and the Zionist movement. In contrast to a naturally ocurring bioregion, I argue that the drylands spatiality was engineered through, rather than outside, the territorialization of modern power.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , August 2015 , pp. 570 - 573
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

NOTES

1 Nassar worked against the dispossession of villages after land sales, including as early as 1909 in the village of al-Shajara. Khalidi, Rashid, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 115Google Scholar.

2 Hargreaves, Mary W. M, Dry Farming in the Northern Great Plains, 1900–1925 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), 83–84Google Scholar.

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5 As Blackhawk has shown, only thirty years before Widtsoe's arrival in what became the state of Utah, the Great Basin was the scene of a violent encounter between federal authorities, indigenous peoples, New Mexicans, and Mormon settlers, which resulted in Native dispossession. Blackhawk, Ned, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008)Google Scholar. See also Chang, David A., The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832–1929 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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8 Nassar's educational formation is not entirely known. His family had become Protestants, facilitating his access to educational institutions such as the Syrian Protestant College (American University of Beirut), where his brother is known to have graduated in pharmacy. Shehadeh, Raja, A Rift in Time: Travels with My Ottoman Uncle (London: Profile Books, 2010), 173–74Google Scholar.

9 Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 115.

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11 Ibid., 80.

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