Nyhet

To Exist as a Problem

Being Black, Being Palestinian

AvZahi Zalloua

Inbunden, Engelska, 2026

824 kr

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Beskrivning

In the first pages of The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois meditates on the question, “How does it feel to be a problem?”In this profound response to that question, Zahi Zalloua endeavours to think through the shared Black and Palestinian experience of being racialized as a problem. Zalloua argues that today’s anti-Blackness is not a lingering feature of a regrettable past that only occasionally manifests its ugly face. Rather, anti-Blackness permeates white civil society. Black being stands for the anti-human, its being is barred and degraded. And while Black being denotes criminality, Palestinian being denotes terrorism – a problematic being produced by Orientalism and used to legitimize oppression. Both the Black and Palestinian are framed as existential threats that undermine the very structures of white and Zionist dominance.To Exist as a Problem provides a searing critique of such assumptions, arguing that Blacks and Palestinians do exist as a problem, but a different problem than the one dictated by the petrifying white and settler gaze. They exist as a threat because the mechanisms of structural racism make them so. In order for racism to thrive, they must be othered in the profoundest sense. In asking how a politics can be constructed in the face of this hegemony, Zalloua constructs a model of solidarity that places Black lives and Palestinian liberation at the forefront of the anti-racist struggle.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2026-06-11
Mått:156 x 234 x 18 mm
Vikt:531 g
Format:Inbunden
Språk:Engelska
Antal sidor:240
Förlag:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
ISBN:9781350559011

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Mer om författaren

Zahi Zalloua is the Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature at Whitman College, USA and Editor of The Comparatist. He is the co-author, with Ilan Kapoor, of Universal Politics (2021), and the author of Fanon, Žižek and the Violence of Resistance (Bloomsbury 2025), The Politics of the Wretched: Race, Reason, and Ressentiment (Bloomsbury, 2024); Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Promise of Universality, Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future (Bloomsbury, 2021), Žižek on Race: Toward an Anti-Racist Future ( Bloomsbury, 2020), Theory’s Autoimmunity: Skepticism, Literature, and Philosophy (2018), Continental Philosophy and the Palestinian Question: Beyond the Jew and the Greek (2017), Reading Unruly: Interpretation and Its Ethical Demands (2014), and Montaigne and the Ethics of Skepticism (2005).

Recensioner i media

Zahi Zalloua’s extraordinary and unflinching text dares to flip the ontological script and refuses obfuscatory narratives and mythopoetic tropes of white/colonial “innocence.” There is no “Black problem” or “Palestinian problem.” The problem is the existence of an anti-Black/anti-Palestinian racist episteme, a twisted racist libidinal economy, and a white supremacist/colonial monster whose insatiability for lynched, raped, broken, decimated, and genocided bodies of Black and Palestinian peoples knows no end. In the loving and prophetic spirit of James Baldwin, Zalloua ethically demands that the white supremacist/colonial monster faces itself, daring to ask itself: Who/what is the real problem? To truly face that question is to un-suture, and to confront a regime of one’s own making whose existence, whose very identity, means the ontological erasure of Black/Palestinian peoples. That being the case, Black death and Palestinian death are necessary for white supremacist/colonial life. Without problematic conflation or unnecessary incommensurability, Zalloua envisions Black/Palestinian existence, a standing forth, a collective ontological resistance, despite the world-making machinations of white supremacist/colonial logics.

Innehållsförteckning

Introduction: A Problem of Being 1. Anatomy of the Human2. The Gift of Being (a Problem)3. Becoming ObjectConclusion: Pessimism and RepetitionBibliographyNotes