The Colonizing Self: Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine

Colonizers continuously transform spaces of violence into spaces of home. Israeli Jews settle in the West Bank and in depopulated Palestinian houses in Haifa or Jaffa. White missionaries build their lives in Africa. The descendants of European settlers in the Americas and Australia dwell and thrive on expropriated indigenous lands. In The Colonizing Self Hagar Kotef traces the cultural, political, and spatial apparatuses that enable people and nations to settle on the ruins of other people's homes. Kotef demonstrates how the mass and structural modes of violence that are necessary for the establishment and sustainment of the colony dwell within settler-colonial homemaking, and through it shape collective and individual identities. She thus powerfully shows how the possibility to live amid the destruction one generates is not merely the possibility to turn one's gaze away from violence but also the possibility to develop an attachment to violence itself. Kotef thereby offers a theoretical framework for understanding how settler-colonial violence becomes inseparable from one's sense of self.

Author: Hagar Kotef
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 12/18/2020
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.95lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.67d
ISBN13: 9781478011330
ISBN10: 1478011335
BISAC Categories:
- History | Middle East | Israel & Palestine
- Social Science | Human Geography
- Political Science | Colonialism & Post-Colonialism

About the Author
Hagar Kotef is Associate Professor in Political Theory and Comparative Political Thought at SOAS University of London and author of Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility, also published by Duke University Press.