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.
Reviews
“An incredibly detailed and engaging study that illustrates Palestinian erasure from within the settler consciousness, the book brings forth an understanding from within that does much to bring the Palestinian trauma to the fore.” ― Middle East Monitor
“The Colonizing Self is an incisive book about the dispossessor. In lyrical prose and through wide-ranging source material, Hagar Kotef traces the constitutive violence of settler colonialism.... Kotef’s book alerts us to the task of uprooting desires that secure settler colonialism.” ― Derek S. Denman, Political Theory
“Two intuitions inform this book about the Israeli ‘colonizing self ‘: one is about home, the other about violence. Taken together, these two intuitions converge on the understanding of the specific ways in which the settler’s identity consolidates, which is a crucial question and has been overlooked by scholars so far.” ― Lorenzo Veracini, Journal of Palestine Studies
“The ongoing challenge of decolonization . . . will inevitably require an unsettling of the very notion that the colonizer possesses a single self. Kotef ’s book is a critical milestone in this endeavor.” ―Noam Leshem, American Historical Review
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.
