The Colonizing Self: Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine
by Hagar Kotef
Duke University Press, 2020 Paper: 978-1-4780-1133-0 | eISBN: 978-1-4780-1286-3 | Cloth: 978-1-4780-1028-9 Library of Congress Classification DS110.W47K684 2020
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK 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 BIOGRAPHY 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.
REVIEWS
“This sophisticated, beautifully written, and harrowing book upends a great many comfortable myths. Hagar Kotef theorizes the violent process through which homes, relics and ruins, organic farming, and even convivial hospitality become not just the milieu of struggle, but the very sites through which the settler colonial force of the Israeli state expands and consolidates its power.”
-- Laleh Khalili, Professor of International Politics, Queen Mary University of London
“Hagar Kotef has written a fierce, rigorous, intimate, unrelenting, account of settler colonialism. We who make our homes on stolen land live in the crevices of all-too-concrete structures of oppression. We turn our faces to the wall. Kotef faces what we too often ignore. This may be harshest in Israel where Kotef's book is set, but the import of the work goes beyond that site. Perhaps all homes are built on cruel exclusions and indefensible claims. Perhaps all homes shelter cruelties. Hagar Kotef's ability to raise these unsettling questions is admirable for its intellectual clarity and its courage.”
-- Anne Norton, author of On the Muslim Question
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Home Theoretical Overview: Violent Attachments Part I. Homes Interlude. Home/Homelessness: A Reading in Arendt 1. The Consuming Self: On Locke, Aristotle, Feminist Theory, and Domestic Violences Epilogue. Unsettlement Part II. Relics Interlude. A Brief Reflection on Death and Decolonization 2. Home (and the Ruins That Remain) Epilogue. A Phenomenology of Violence: Ruins Part III. Settlement Interlude. A Moment of Popular Culture: The Home of MasterChef 3. On Eggs and Dispossession: Organic Agriculture and the New Settlement Movement Epilogue. An Ethic of Violence: Organic Washing Conclusion Bibliography Index
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The Colonizing Self: Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine
by Hagar Kotef
Duke University Press, 2020 Paper: 978-1-4780-1133-0 eISBN: 978-1-4780-1286-3 Cloth: 978-1-4780-1028-9
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 BIOGRAPHY 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.
REVIEWS
“This sophisticated, beautifully written, and harrowing book upends a great many comfortable myths. Hagar Kotef theorizes the violent process through which homes, relics and ruins, organic farming, and even convivial hospitality become not just the milieu of struggle, but the very sites through which the settler colonial force of the Israeli state expands and consolidates its power.”
-- Laleh Khalili, Professor of International Politics, Queen Mary University of London
“Hagar Kotef has written a fierce, rigorous, intimate, unrelenting, account of settler colonialism. We who make our homes on stolen land live in the crevices of all-too-concrete structures of oppression. We turn our faces to the wall. Kotef faces what we too often ignore. This may be harshest in Israel where Kotef's book is set, but the import of the work goes beyond that site. Perhaps all homes are built on cruel exclusions and indefensible claims. Perhaps all homes shelter cruelties. Hagar Kotef's ability to raise these unsettling questions is admirable for its intellectual clarity and its courage.”
-- Anne Norton, author of On the Muslim Question
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Home Theoretical Overview: Violent Attachments Part I. Homes Interlude. Home/Homelessness: A Reading in Arendt 1. The Consuming Self: On Locke, Aristotle, Feminist Theory, and Domestic Violences Epilogue. Unsettlement Part II. Relics Interlude. A Brief Reflection on Death and Decolonization 2. Home (and the Ruins That Remain) Epilogue. A Phenomenology of Violence: Ruins Part III. Settlement Interlude. A Moment of Popular Culture: The Home of MasterChef 3. On Eggs and Dispossession: Organic Agriculture and the New Settlement Movement Epilogue. An Ethic of Violence: Organic Washing Conclusion Bibliography Index
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE