Author Meets Critics: Hagar Kotef's "The Colonizing Self"

Session Submission Type: In-Person Author meet critics

Session Description

The panel is on Hagar Kotef's new book, The Colonizing Self: Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine which was published by Duke University Press in December 2020.

The book explores the cultural, political, and theoretical apparatuses that enable people and nations to construct a home on the ruins of other people’s homes or to feel that they belong to spaces of dispossession. Through these questions, Kotef examines the affectual conditions of settler colonialism, moving seamlessly from readings of Locke and contemporary TV shows to theorizations of violence and the settler. She works here counter to dominant assumptions about identity and violence, according to which violence must be imagined away from national narratives if political identity is to be established within ethical frameworks. Such assumptions therefore tend to explain ongoing mass violence through collective forms of blindness and denial. But hinging on the concept “home”—as a site and symbol of selfhood—she highlights, instead, the array of attachments that render violence formative of identity.

The panel consists of Cristina Beltrán (NYU; author of Cruelty as Citizenship), Murad Idris (UVa; author of War for Peace), Nancy Luxon (Minnesota; author of Crisis of Authority), Robyn Marasco (CUNY-Hunter; author of Highway of Despair), George Shulman (NYU; author of American Prophecy), and Max Tomba (UC Santa Cruz; author of Insurgent Universality). Hagar Kotef (SOAS) will reply and James Martel (SFSU; author of Unburied Bodies) will serve as Chair. This panel’s composition works both to de-exceptionalize the conversations surrounding settler colonial societies and to open up the book’s critical interventions about narrative, violence, racialization, popular culture, and property to a wide political theory audience. It is with this double aim in mind that the panel includes a diverse set of commentators. All of the commentators are theorists of violence, in its relationship to decolonization, the possibilities of emancipation, or its situatedness in relation to regimes of power. At the same time, they bring different regional and historical archives to the conversation, from decolonization in the Maghreb to indigenous and Black thought in the US, and from critical theory on violence to its paradigmatic instantiations for the discipline.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Chair

• James R. Martel San Francisco State University

Presenters

• Cristina Beltran New York University

• Nancy Luxon University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

• Robyn Marasco CUNY, Hunter College

• George M. Shulman New York University

• Massimiliano Tomba University of California

• Hagar Kotef SOAS, University of London