Explosive legacies: Gaza and colonial aphasia

Israel’s deadly 2023 military assault on Gaza – recognised as genocide by humanitarian organisations – is at the heart of this article. We now know much more about the political economy of Israel’s settler colonialism, in which leading institutions in North America and Europe, including universities, are embedded. And yet our anticolonial solidarity remains at best glitchy and unreliable. Rather than defaulting to complicity as an explanation, I turn to the lasting effects of colonial explosive violence on the discipline and on the falling short of some of our foundational late twentieth-century critical concepts and methods. As well as advocating for an involved public sociology, including an academic boycott of Israel, I call for a reckoning with Sociology’s colonial aphasia and the legacies of its historically ambivalent solidarity with anticolonial struggles.