Description
Book SynopsisEncountering Palestine: Un/making Spaces of Colonial Violence, edited by Mark Griffiths and Mikko Joronen, sits at the intersection of cultural and political geographies and offers innovative reflections on power, colonialism, and anti-colonialism in contemporary Palestine and Israel. Organized around the theme of encountering and focusing on the ways violence and struggle are un/made in the encounter between the colonizer and colonized, the essays focus on power relations as they manifest in cultural practices and everyday lives in anti/colonial Palestine.
Covering numerous sites in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Israel,
Encountering Palestine addresses a range of empirical topics—from marriage and queer aesthetics to policing, demolition, armament failure, and violence. The contributors utilize diverse theoretical frameworks, such as hyperreality, settler capitalism, intimate biopolitics, and politics of vulnerability, to help us better under
Trade Review“As
Encountering Palestine argues and makes clear ‘the question of Palestine is an inherently geographical one.’ In this collective volume we have a comprehensive account of the geographies of Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine—its contours of violence, spatial politics, frictions, intimacies, and resistances. Situating contemporary Palestinian colonial geographies in the past, present, and future, the chapters speak to ongoing struggles for liberation in Palestine and beyond, showing in the process how Palestinian life and, with it, resistance are both local and global.”—Polly Pallister-Wilkins, author of
Humanitarian Borders: Unequal Mobility and Saving Lives“Few works have explored the geographies of encounters.
Encountering Palestine adds to the expansive scholarly work on the destructive consequences of settler-colonial spatial politics by formulating encounters as a productive site of meaning-making where Palestinian lives interact with various forms, techniques, and apparatuses of settler-colonial power.”—Somdeep Sen, author of
Decolonizing Palestine: Hamas between the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial“
Encountering Palestine offers a new set of arguments about how to understand and frame colonial power and colonial encounters in Israel/Palestine. While the ongoing violence of Israeli colonialism and what the editors refer to as Palestinian woundedness slips in and out of the mainstream media, many chapters bring to the fore why this situation remains urgent even as so much of the violence described is slow or quiet. This collection makes a clear contribution to studies of Palestine/Israel and colonial studies more broadly.”—Christopher Harker, author of
Spacing Debt: Obligations, Violence, and Endurance in Ramallah, PalestineTable of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Encountering Palestine, Un/doing Power
Mark Griffiths and Mikko Joronen
1. An Intimate Occupation: Governing Love in Occupied Palestine
Kathryn Medien
2. Settler Capitalism and Its Witches: Palestinian Bedouin Women Struggling for Space and the Commons in the Naqab
Sophie Richter-Devroe
3. Encountering the Israeli War Machine: Imminent (In)security, Vortical Violence, Rhizomatic Sumud
Wassim Ghantous
4. The Regavim Show: Settler Colonialism, Simulacra, and Mirroring
Mark Griffiths
5. Staying with the Failures: Iron Dome and Zionist Security “Innovation”
Rhys Machold
6. Neo-Apartheid Jerusalem: Palestine/Israel and the Question of Urban Apartheid
Haim Yacobi and Moriel Ram
7. Expectations to Fulfill: Anticipating the Familial Future in Palestinian Refugee Camps
Tiina Järvi
8. Surreal Resistance in Elia Suleiman’s
Divine Intervention Arun Saldanha
9. Queering Esthesis: Unsettling the Zionist Sensual Regime
Walaa Alqaisiya
10. Life of the Wounded: Rethinking Settler Colonial Power in Palestine
Mikko Joronen
Elegy for Return
Zena Agha
Contributors
Index
