ABSTRACT
In normal cases one would consider the creation of mental landscapes a natural human activity—except where the process involves a forced turning of the imaginary into “real” maps whose consequences affect masses of people in drastic ways. This has been particularly the case in several colonizing projects worldwide that employ models of land entitlement, usually and most conveniently, as in the colonization of America, the model of “Promised Land” derived from the biblical narrative—a model that used to be mimicked complete in the impressions and impositions of the colonizers. Alternatively, a useful model was the construct of Western civilization, a model with potential imperialistic assumptions, “an appropriative complex in an amalgam constructed of select ancient Greek, Roman, and Judeo-Christian elements … [which] delivers history as a monolithic, sanitized chain of civilized descent to provide cultural depth, civil precedents, and serviceable truth” (Ra'Ad 90; see Federici). Regardless of advances in the analysis of knowledge production and the deconstruction of power in the latter part of the twentieth century, which should have made it less credible to use these models, such models continue to be employed in less naked primary forms sometimes under the cover of current globalizing trends and other camouflages. Yet the stories remain old and new, a mixture of religion and politics, of faith and justification, of attachment and entitlement, of invention and history, of blindness and deceit, of ignorance and power, of fabulations that—unquestioned—take on the appearance of truths because people’s investment in them as truth-values hardens them and makes them resilient to change.
