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Thinking Palestine

Thinking Palestine

Ronit Lentin

Buy Now Hardback: £60.00 ISBN: 9781842779064
Buy Now Paperback: £18.99 ISBN: 9781842779071

Publication date: 15/04/2008
Features:
Format: 216mm x 135mm

About the Book


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

Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Thinking Palestine - Ronit Lentin
Part I: The Palestinianization of Race
1.Racial Palestinianization - David Theo Goldberg
2. Globalizing racism and myths of the other in the war on terror - Gargi Bhattacharyya
Part II: Palestine: Biopolitics and States of Exception
3. Thanatopolitics: The case of the colonial occupation in Palestine - Honaida Ghanim
4. Palestinian Refugee Camps in Lebanon: Laboratories of state-in-the-making, discipline and Islamist radicalism - Sari Hanafi
5. Incarceration and the state of exception: al-Ansar mass detention camp in Lebanon - Laleh Khalili
6. The ghettoization of the Palestinians - Alina Korn
7. The persistence of the exception: some remarks on the story of Israeli constitutionalism - Raef Zreik
8. The Mukhabarat State of Israel: a state of oppression is not a state of exception - Ilan Pappe
Part III: Palestine: Contested Representations
9. Palestinian ‘Munadelat’: Between Western representation and lived reality - Nahla Abdo
10. Authenticity and political agency on study trips to Palestine - David Landy
11. The contested memory of dispossession: commemorizing the Palestinian Nakba in Israel - Ronit Lentin
12. The state, the text and the critic in a globalized world: the case of Edward Said - Conor McCarthy
13. Understanding the present through the past: between British and Israeli discourses on Palestine - Anaheed Al-Hardan

About the Author

Dr Ronit Lentin, senior lecturer in Sociology, is the director of the MPhil in Ethnic and Racial Studies, and the coordinator of the Global Networks project at the Institute of International Integration Studies, Trinity College Dublin. She has published numerous articles on racism and immigration in Ireland, gender, the Holocaust, and Israel-Palestine. Her books include Conversations with Palestinian Women (1982), Gender and Catastrophe (1997), Israel and the Daughters of the Shoah: Reoccupying the Territories of Silence (2000), Racism and Anti-racism in Ireland (with Robbie McVeigh, 2002), Women and the Politics of Military Confrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Gendered Narratives of Dislocation (with Nahla Abdo 2002), Re-presenting the Shoah for the 21st Century (2004), After Optimism? Ireland, Globalisation and Racism (with Robbie McVeigh, 2006), Race and State (with Alana Lentin, 2006), and Performing Global Networks (with Karen Fricker, 2007).