Traces of Racial Exception: Racializing Israeli Settler Colonialism (Suspensions: Contemporary Middle Eastern and Islamicate Thought) - Hardcover

Ronit Lentin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1350032069 ISBN 13: 9781350032064

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018

Synopsis

Positioning race front and centre, this book theorizes that political violence, in the form of a socio-political process that differentiates between human and less-than-human populations, is used by the state of Israel in racializing and ruling the citizens of occupied Palestine. Lentin argues that Israels rule over Palestine is an example of Agambens state of exception, Goldbergs racial state and Wolfes settler colony; the Israeli racial settler colony employs its laws to rule besieged Palestine, while excluding itself and its Jewish citizen-colonists from legal instruments and governmental technologies. Governing through emergency legislation and through practices of exception, emergency, necessity and security, Israel positions itself outside domestic and international law. Deconstructing Agambens Eurocentric theoretical position Lentin shows that it occludes colonialism, settler colonialism and anti-colonialism and fails to specifically foreground race; instead she combines the work of Wolfe, who proposes race as a trace of settler colonialism, and Weheliye, who argues that Agambens western-centric understanding of exception fail to speak from explicitly racialized and gendered standpoints. Employing existing media, activist, and academic accounts of racialization this book deliberately breaks from white, Western theorizations of biopolitics, exception, and bare life, and instead foregrounds race and gender in analysing settler colonial conditions in Israel.

About this title

About the Author

Ronit Lentin is former associate professor of sociology, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. She has published extensively on Palestine-Israel, racism and immigration in Ireland. Her books include: Conversations with Palestinian Women (1980), Israel and the Daughters of the Shoah: Reoccupying the Territories of Silence (2000), Women and the Politics of Military Confrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Womens Narratives of Dislocation (2002), Racism and Antiracism in Ireland (with Robbie McVeigh, 2002), Race and State (with Alana Lentin, 2006/8), After Optimism: Ireland, Racism and Globalisation (with Robbie McVeigh, 2006), Thinking Palestine (2008), Post-Memory and Melancholia: Israelis Memorialising the Palestinian Nakba (2010) and Migrant Activism and Integration from Below in Ireland (2012).

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1350032069
• ISBN 13: 9781350032064
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224