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CO-MEMORY AND MELANCHOLIA:
Israelis Memorialising the Palestinian Nakba
Ronit Lentin
ISBN hb 9780719081705
The 1948 war that led to the creation of the State of Israel also resulted in the destruction of Palestinian society when some 80 per cent of the Palestinians who lived in the major part of Palestine upon which Israel was established became refugees. Israelis call the 1948 war their ‘War of Independence’ and the Palestinians their ‘Nakba’, or catastrophe. After many years of Nakba denial, land appropriation, political discrimination against the Palestinians within Israel and the denial of rights to Palestinian refugees, in recent years the Nakba is beginning to penetrate Israeli public discourse.
This book explores the construction of collective memory in Israeli society, where the memory of the trauma of the Holocaust and of Israel’s war dead competes with the memory claims of the dispossessed Palestinians. Taking an auto-ethnographic approach, Ronit Lentin makes a contribution to social memory studies through a critical evaluation of the co-memoration of the Palestinian Nakba by Israeli Jews.
Against a background of the Israeli resistance movement, Lentin’s central argument is that co-memorating the Nakba by Israeli Jews is motivated by an unresolved melancholia about the disappearance of Palestine and the dispossession of the Palestinians, a melancholia that shifts mourning from the lost object to the grieving subject. Lentin theorises Nakba co-memory as a politics of resistance, counterpoising co-memorative practices by internally displaced Israeli Palestinians with Israeli Jewish discourses of the Palestinian right of return, and questions whether return narratives by Israeli Jews, courageous as they may seem, are ultimately about Israeli Jewish self-healing rather than justice for Palestine.
THINKING PALESTINE
Ed. Ronit Lentin
Hardback: £60.00 ISBN: 9781842779064 -
Paperback: £18.99 ISBN: 9781842779071 -
This book brings together an inter-disciplinary group of Palestinian, Israeli, American, British and Irish scholars who theorise ‘the question of Palestine’. Critically committed to supporting the Palestinian quest for self determination, they present new theoretical ways of thinking about Palestine. These include the ‘Palestinization’ of ethnic and racial conflicts, the theorization of Palestine as camp, ghetto and prison, the tourist/activist gaze, the role of gendered resistance, the centrality of the memory of the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe) to the contemporary understanding of the conflict, and the historic roots of the contemporary discourse on Palestine. The book offers a novel examination of how the Palestinian experience of being governed under what Giorgio Agamben names a ’state of exception’ may be theorised as paradigmatic for new forms of global governance. An indispensable read for any serious scholar.
What People Have Said About the Book
‘This book presents us with sharp critical thinking about everything from the applicability of Agamben’s concept of the “state of exception” or Foucault’s theory of modern “biopower” to Israel’s control over Palestinians in prisons, camps, and ghettos, to the specific dynamics of racialization, colonial violence against, and appropriation of Palestinians, even by the well-meaning. Both theorizing and chronicling the varied forms of Israeli power, these provocative essays are grounded in details that can still shock.’ - Lila Abu-Lughod, Columbia University
‘This timely volume provides a fresh epistemological framework to think Palestine in the context of the Israeli colonial occupation of its territories as well as of its dispersed populations. It shifts the center of gravity from the temporal dimension of ’state of exception’ to its spatial as well as its racializing features. The book makes an important critical contribution to political theory and deserves to be read by anyone concerned with the question of Palestine.’ - Yehouda Shenhav, Tel-Aviv University
Reviews:
Because its contributors — sociologists, historians, legal experts and cultural critics — work from within an activist perspective, Thinking Palestine escapes the trap of “scholastic reason” (Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase), whereby the content of theory reflects the walled-off condition of the theorist comfortably ensconced in her/his “schola.” The book should be read closely by serious pro-Palestinian activists wishing to sharpen their conceptual tools in the ceaseless battle against Zionist propaganda.
Raymond Deane, Electronic Intifada- http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9743.shtml
The authors analyze the Israeli-Palestinian state of exception on different realms. Some discuss the racial basis of the state of exception; others exhibit how problematic practices are adopted by the Israeli army or the Israeli security forces; and yet others deal more directly with the representation of Palestine in different discourses: political or academic. This broad scope provides the lay reader with an interesting introduction to the Palestinian perspective, and it provides the well-versed reader with some interesting case studies which broaden the scope of present analyses of the Palestinians (e.g. management of the moment of death in a chapter on ‘Thanatopolitics’)… Overall, it is an important book for students of Palestine, but ipso facto of those interested in Israel too. The two political entities are exceptionally entwined, and the book provides an original conceptual discussion for framing this state of exception.
Gad Yair, Hebrew University Jerusalem, Sociological Research Online, http://www.socresonline.org.uk/14/1/reviews/yair.html
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JUST RELEASED IN PAPERBACK!
RACE AND STATE By Alana Lentin & Ronit Lentin (eds.)
Including articles by David Theo Goldberg, Les Back & Gargi Bhattacharyya.
Speaking about racism in the western political climate of the first decade of the twenty-first century is more difficult than ever before.
There is a feeling in post-colonial and post-immigration societies that the blatant overt racism of the past is no longer as pressing. Admitting racism elicits discomfort because common wisdom tells us that racism opposes everything that we believe in as citizens of democratic, “civilised” modern states. Yet state racism appears to be here to stay and, in many ways, is more acceptable than ever before. Immigration detention centres, the deportation of “failed” asylum seekers and “illegal” immigrants, racial profiling and the rolling back of liberties won by the civil rights movement are all examples of how state racism impacts on our daily lives. Race and State contributes to breaking the taboo of discussing the links between “race” and state. The papers collected in this book highlight the interconnections between “race” and state, from historical, theoretical or contemporary sociological perspectives. “This book has caused me to reconsider my perception of racism as not something that is simply felt by individuals or groups of individuals about other groups of individuals, but as something that is regulated and controlled by the state.” Ruth Ní Fhionnáin, Translocations Alana Lentin is a political sociologist at the Department of Sociology, University of Sussex. She is the author of Racism: A beginner’s guide (2008) and Racism and Anti-Racism in Europe (2004). Ronit Lentin is a political sociologist and Director of the MPhil in Ethnic and Racial Studies at Trinity College Dublin. Her latest books are Thinking Palestine (2008) and, with Robbie McVeigh, After Optimism? Ireland, Globalisation and Racism (2006).
To order a copy click here
For a review copy, contact Amanda Millar at amillar@c-s-p.org