Colonizing Self

Hagar Kotef is Associate Professor in Political Theory and Comparative Political Thought at SOAS University of London and author of Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility, also published by Duke University Press.

“Hagar Kotef has written a fierce, rigorous, intimate, unrelenting, account of settler colonialism. We who make our homes on stolen land live in the crevices of all-too-concrete structures of oppression. We turn our faces to the wall. Kotef faces what we too often ignore. This may be harshest in Israel where Kotef's book is set, but the import of the work goes beyond that site. Perhaps all homes are built on cruel exclusions and indefensible claims. Perhaps all homes shelter cruelties. Hagar Kotef's ability to raise these unsettling questions is admirable for its intellectual clarity and its courage.” - Anne Norton, author of (On the Muslim Question) “An incredibly detailed and engaging study that illustrates Palestinian erasure from within the settler consciousness, the book brings forth an understanding from within that does much to bring the Palestinian trauma to the fore.”(Middle East Monitor) “The Colonizing Self is an incisive book about the dispossessor. In lyrical prose and through wide-ranging source material, Hagar Kotef traces the constitutive violence of settler colonialism.... Kotef’s book alerts us to the task of uprooting desires that secure settler colonialism.” - Derek S. Denman (Political Theory) “Two intuitions inform this book about the Israeli ‘colonizing self ‘: one is about home, the other about violence. Taken together, these two intuitions converge on the understanding of the specific ways in which the settler’s identity consolidates, which is a crucial question and has been overlooked by scholars so far.” - Lorenzo Veracini (Journal of Palestine Studies) “The ongoing challenge of decolonization . . . will inevitably require an unsettling of the very notion that the colonizer possesses a single self. Kotef ’s book is a critical milestone in this endeavor.” - Noam Leshem (American Historical Review)

• Preface  ixAcknowledgments  xiiiIntroduction: Home  1Theoretical Overview: Violent Attachments  29Part I. HomesInterlude. Home/Homelessness: A Reading in Arendt  551. The Consuming Self: On Locke, Aristotle, Feminist Theory, and Domestic Violences  73Epilogue. Unsettlement  109Part II. RelicsInterlude. A Brief Reflection on Death and Decolonization  1272. Home (and the Ruins That Remain)  137Epilogue. A Phenomenology of Violence: Ruins  185Part III. SettlementInterlude. A Moment of Popular Culture: The Home of MasterChef  2033. On Eggs and Dispossession: Organic Agriculture and the New Settlement Movement  215Epilogue. An Ethic of Violence: Organic Washing  251Conclusion  261Bibliography  267Index  293