Description

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Encountering Palestine: Un/making Spaces of Colonial Violence, edited by Mark Griffiths and Mikko Joronen, sits at the intersection of cultural and political geographies and offers innovative reflections on power, colonialism, and anti-colonialism in contemporary Palestine and Israel. Organized around the theme of encountering and focusing on the ways violence and struggle are un/made in the encounter between the colonizer and colonized, the essays focus on power relations as they manifest in cultural practices and everyday lives in anti/colonial Palestine.

Covering numerous sites in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Israel, Encountering Palestine addresses a range of empirical topics—from marriage and queer aesthetics to policing, demolition, armament failure, and violence. The contributors utilize diverse theoretical frameworks, such as hyperreality, settler capitalism, intimate biopolitics, and politics of vulnerability, to help us better understand the cultural making and unmaking of colonial and anti-colonial space in Palestine. Encountering Palestine asks us to rethink how colonialism and power operate in Palestine, the ways Palestinians struggle, and the lifeways that constantly encounter, un/make, and counter the spaces of colonial violence.
 

About the Author

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Mark Griffiths is an academic track fellow at Newcastle University. Mikko Joronen is a Finnish Academy research fellow at Tampere University.

Praise For…

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“As Encountering Palestine argues and makes clear ‘the question of Palestine is an inherently geographical one.’ In this collective volume we have a comprehensive account of the geographies of Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine—its contours of violence, spatial politics, frictions, intimacies, and resistances. Situating contemporary Palestinian colonial geographies in the past, present, and future, the chapters speak to ongoing struggles for liberation in Palestine and beyond, showing in the process how Palestinian life and, with it, resistance are both local and global.”—Polly Pallister-Wilkins, author of Humanitarian Borders: Unequal Mobility and Saving Lives

“Few works have explored the geographies of encounters. Encountering Palestine adds to the expansive scholarly work on the destructive consequences of settler-colonial spatial politics by formulating encounters as a productive site of meaning-making where Palestinian lives interact with various forms, techniques, and apparatuses of settler-colonial power.”—Somdeep Sen, author of Decolonizing Palestine: Hamas between the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial

“Encountering Palestine offers a new set of arguments about how to understand and frame colonial power and colonial encounters in Israel/Palestine. While the ongoing violence of Israeli colonialism and what the editors refer to as Palestinian woundedness slips in and out of the mainstream media, many chapters bring to the fore why this situation remains urgent even as so much of the violence described is slow or quiet. This collection makes a clear contribution to studies of Palestine/Israel and colonial studies more broadly.”—Christopher Harker, author of Spacing Debt: Obligations, Violence, and Endurance in Ramallah, Palestine