Description
Book SynopsisIn the early 1990s, Israeli television began dedicating Memorial Day airtime to videos produced by the grieving families of soldiers killed in the line of duty. When these videos first appeared, during a period of growing Israeli discontent with the occupation of southern Lebanon, they were widely perceived as a challenge to the state, reclaiming the dead from Israel's militaristic memory culture by resituating them in intimate domestic contexts via mediated commemorations. By tracing an emerging media system of freelance filmmaking, privatized television, state institutes of care, and grassroots campaigns, Laliv Melamed reveals how these videos nevertheless avoid a fundamental critique of Israeli militarism, which is instead invited into the familiar space of the home. These intimate connections of memory and media exploit bonds of kinship and reshape larger relationships between the state and its citizens, enabling a collective disavowal of colonial violence. InSovereign Intimacy, Melamed offers a poignant and critical view of the weaponization of home media and mourning in service of the neoliberal settler state.
Trade Review"A much-welcome intervention. . . . Melamed’s work earnestly reckons with the urgent need to account for the haunting presence of Palestine in Israeli media practices to interrogate the visuality of Israel’s ever-growing colonial violence." * Film Quarterly *
Table of ContentsContents
Prologue. “OUR SONS”
A Note on Sources
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART ONE. SOVEREIGNTY
1. To Keep in Touch
2. Intimate Proxies
3. Scheduled Memories, Programmed Mourning
PART TWO. INTIMACY
4. Figures of Speech
5. At Face Value
Epilogue. Answering a Call
Notes
Filmography
Bibliography
Index
