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

Lentin, Ronit

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1350150940 ISBN 13: 9781350150942

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019

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 Israel's rule over Palestine is an example of Agamben's state of exception, Goldberg's racial state and Wolfe's 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 Agamben's 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 Agamben's 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 Authors

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 Women's 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).

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).

Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh is a philosopher, literary theorist, and professor of comparative literature at Babson College. His work tracks movements of radical thought across the so-called East and the West, with particular attention to concepts of chaos, violence, illusion, silence, extremism, mania, disappearance, night, evil, secrecy, and apocalyptic writing. He has published nine books to date, including two volumes titled Omnicide I and Omnicide II on madness, and two volumes on night titled Night: A Philosophy of the After-Dark and Night II: A Philosophy of the Last World. He is also the founding director of the Future Studies Program, Programmer of Transdisciplinary Studies for The New Centre for Research & Practice, and co-editor of the Future's Theory and Suspensions book series for Bloomsbury Press.

Lucian Stone is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion, The University of North Dakota, USA.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1350150940
• ISBN 13: 9781350150942
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 280