Abstract
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. In doing so, Kotef reveals the contours of making a self through attachments to land acquired by force, theft, and founding acts of displacement. What knots are tied at the center of ethics by claiming a home through colonization, by building political life on occupied territory, and by cultivating belonging through elimination? In answering these questions, Kotef reveals how the identity of the settler may prove disturbingly obdurate and infuriatingly durable. When the violence of displacement provides the formative condition of political subjectivity, the work of decolonization requires both material and affective transformation. Kotef’s book alerts us to the task of uprooting desires that secure settler colonialism.
Home is the keyword of the book and the concept that defines the relation between political violence and belonging. While attuned to the diverse meanings of terms used for home—“home, household, house, domestic, domos and oikos”—Kotef finds the slippage between these terms productive (2–3). The power relations of home are not entirely unfamiliar terrain for political theory. Home is a place of hierarchies and paternalistic power. Furthermore, the politics of homes and homelands suggest the policing of borders and the exclusion of those who dwell beyond the home’s walls and fences (80–82). In addition to these dimensions of home, Kotef emphasizes the role of home as a technology of territory. Home is spatial—it is located on a site and it exists within and reproduces geographies of power. Racialized and imperial orders depend upon a “global distribution of homeland-ness,” and these larger constellations of nation and empire take hold in attachments to particular homes (64). Moreover, homes become both real estate and ruins, sites of exploitation and destruction. Yet throughout these processes, home never becomes depersonalized or divested of attachments. Consequently, Kotef’s political theory of the home lends attention to “the intimacies of public wrongs” (9, emphasis in original). Home is a vital relay between kinship and ethnonationalism, private desire and geopolitical domination.
By exploring this aporetics of home, the book aims to intervene in three bodies of scholarship: theories of violence, broadly conceived; settler colonialism; and the colonization of Palestine by the Israeli state and settler communities. With regard to the first intervention, Kotef questions the explanatory potential of theories of violence that emphasize “compliance, cruelty, and dissociation” (32). While command and sadism undoubtedly appear in violence, they prove insufficient to explain its pervasiveness and durability. Dissociation merits more sustained engagement, and Kotef takes seriously the extent to which a visible and sensible field works to reproduce systems of oppression and domination (38–41). However, within theories of dissociation, the violent act appears as a threat to the integrity of the self rather than the condition of its realization. Such emphasis on denial and deflection insists, “there is some tension, if not contradiction, between violence and the self” (42). In contrast to this dissociative account, the violence of settler colonialism entails affirmative investments that generate identity. The attachments forged through placemaking are cultivated on stolen land and in built environments transformed by occupation. In such a milieu, the evidence of violence is abundant, and its visibility alone is insufficient to propel resistance to colonial order. Making violence visible is important, but a critique of violence requires fully interrogating the “affectual politics” to places and peoples and the “schemes of justification” offered when violence is in plain sight (133, 262).
The book is organized around an introduction (which establishes the critique of home as a political concept); a theoretical overview (that addresses the conceptualization of violence); and three parts, each with an introductory interlude, a longer chapter, and a brief epilogue. The sudden and brief interruptions of the interludes and epilogues produce a rhythm of writing directed at an affective register. Interspersed images capture scenes of destroyed and rebuilt urban environments and dwelling in the aftermath of colonial warfare. Appeals to cartographic reason through maps and photography of demolition document the spatial transformation of Palestine at the hands of the Israeli state and settlers. Moving between these diverse methods of argument and sources of evidence produces a text that strives to function beyond logos alone, operating on the structures of sense and intelligibility foregrounded in its analysis.
“Home” (part I) develops the initial critique of this key concept, elaborating upon the argument made in the introduction through close readings of Hannah Arendt and John Locke. The reading of Arendt is a cautious one, attuned to recent scholarship that reveals the limits of thinking with Arendt about race and colonialism (62–65). Nonetheless, Kotef finds in Arendt a vital resource for delinking notions of home (and even perhaps homeland and nation) from the logic of sovereign territoriality. Arendt is treated not as an authoritative voice, but as a point of departure for a more thoroughgoing and expansive critique of Zionism and settler colonial politics. A consideration of Lockean property centered on the household instead of the individual forms the heart of this part of the book (83). Brief detours through Aristotle on the oikos and feminist critiques of the household, ranging from appeals to politicize the private sphere to feminists of color opposed to violent state intervention into private life, provide the interpretive strategy for engaging with processes of enclosure and property making in Locke. With the theoretical scaffolding of the project in place, the epilogue turns its attention to the destruction of Palestinian homes and an account of “entrenchment,” the process by which a political project of elimination produces a sense of self (115). The focus on Locke, while engaging and thorough, is somewhat out of balance with the brief considerations of Aristotle and feminist theory. In particular, feminist critiques of the household receive a highly condensed treatment and remain underutilized in theorizing attachments to home.
Although varied in its concerns, “Relics” (part II) aims to elicit the enduring settler colonial commitments of liberal Zionism. It draws on literature, film, and journalism to map the limits and contradictions of an ethical subject whose condition of possibility is the possession of another’s home. Les Blancs, the play by Lorraine Hansberry, provides a source of reflection on decolonization in the interlude. While finding the play instructive of the affective work necessary to undo ties to a colonized place, the interlude ends in an impasse. Kotef offers an admission of uncertainty, unable to conclude an analogy that, for the colonizer, involves “dead ends” and instructions for “how one writes themselves out of history” (134). The 2008 movie Salt of this Sea, directed by Palestinian filmmaker Annemarie Jacir, affords the necessary theoretical room to continue the examination of the conflictual terrain of encounters between dispossessed and dispossessor (138–141). The film provides fertile ground to consider the ambivalences of hospitality and the prior acts of hostility that found one’s claim to the position of host.
“Relics” foregrounds material, visual, and spatial processes, reflecting on landscapes of ruination as the medium through which contradictory relations to past violence take hold. Drawing extensively on the work of Ann Laura Stoler, Kotef argues for an understanding of ruins not as vestiges of a past that has been fully left behind but as artifacts of imperial destruction that continue to impinge upon the present (189). Ruins disclose violence “of a different temporality—not one of unfolding, but one of lurking long after the event” (194). This emphasis on ruins clarifies the earlier analysis of violence and the need to move beyond an insistence on “rendering visible” as a decolonial strategy. Where landscapes of ruin are readily evident, “erasure” and “blindness” are not the primary operations that sustain violence. Rather, it is “an affirmative relation to destruction that must be contended with” (173). Liberal critiques of violence fail to come to terms with the role that the dispossession of the other plays in the making of liberal settler subjectivity and its circumscribed notions of justice, freedom, and equality. This critique of visibility as a strategy of confronting violence is where the book succeeds most clearly in its intended aim.
Where “Relics” takes issue with the contradictions of the liberal settler, “Settlement” (part III) shifts focus to unrepentantly predatory and ethnonationalist dimensions of settler colonialism. Kotef is particularly interested in the extent to which settlers incorporate the practice of organic agriculture into “a story of settlement supported by a certain vision in which sustainability is essentially and necessarily violent” (216). Sustainability here refers not only to the management of natural resources but also to a fortified position of enduring violent order. The claim is not one of “green washing,” whereby sustainability merely obfuscates land theft. Such a critique would rely on a principle of visibility in which revealing violence enables resistance. Instead, Kotef challenges us to see the ethos of organic agriculture as a formative part of settler identity, whereby “an ethics of care for animals . . . generates constant harm to people” (256). Infrastructures of organic agriculture entail the consumption of Palestinian land. One’s relation to food arises within tangled notions of family, kinship, nation, sacrifice, and cruelty inseparable from the constitution of the settler self.
Although the book succeeds in complicating the terms of ethics, its lessons for decolonial politics and solidarity are at times less clear. This is due in part to its admitted reluctance to proceed when doing so involves shunting aside uncomfortable conclusions, as in the case of the instructive reading of Les Blancs on the inability to break with the colonial desire for home. However, the closing appeal relies on a metaphor in tension with the book’s critique when it calls for “concrete acts of opening the door rather than shutting doors” (266). It is difficult to read this line without wondering whose door that may have been and whether soldiers, police, or vigilantes have dragged prior residents through that door by force. Doors and furnishings serve throughout the book as objects of intense attachment and testify to a colonial past that endures in the present. The loss of furniture and other items that adorn a house index a loss of belonging (138n1). Moreover, connection to the Palestinian diaspora “materializes within practices such as holding onto keys of doors that no longer exist” (111). Appeals to “opening the door” undo some of the careful work of showing that the door may have never fully been one’s own to open, that hospitality is extended from a fraught position as host. As the book so cogently argues throughout, new politics will require uprooting metaphors that make implicit claims of ownership to stolen objects and land. The conclusion seems mildly frustrated by its inability to arrive at a decolonial politics from the position of the colonizer. Yet, that would seem to be precisely the overall argument, that settlers have not only material interests vested in the colonial act but deep-seated affective ties to the foundational violence of settlement.
With this made evident, the task of articulating solidarity requires carefully acknowledging the extent to which decolonial politics involves a transformation of the colonizer, materially and affectively. To go from colonizer to opponent of colonial power involves a process of becoming otherwise than oneself. At a certain point, however, a theory of the colonizer proves limited in its insights into decolonial politics. If the aim is “a new conversation” intent on ending colonial violence, that conversation should not be premised on the position of the colonizer, even one who adopts a critical orientation (265). Rather than theorize through the lens of the colonizer, the task that remains is a return to the political thought of the colonized and a consideration of how to advance the aims of anticolonial struggles. Carrying the work of The Colonizing Self further will involve placing its insights more closely in conversation with anticolonial thought and indigenous studies that envision liberation through the aspirations and desires of the colonized. An analysis of the settler’s attachments can offer an important sense of the obstinacy of settler colonialism, but the position of the settler faces serious limits when attempting to envision decolonial politics.
The challenge of fostering decolonial solidarity is a difficult one, and in thinking through it, The Colonizing Self contains important lessons regarding the durability of settler colonialism and the micropolitical work necessary to unravel violent attachments. The focused and developed theory of the colonizer sheds light on the material structures and affective politics that preserve Israeli policies of forced displacement and make possible the ongoing occupation of Palestinian homes by settlers. Although it may not offer a starting point to envision a politics beyond colonialism, it foregrounds many of the challenges to such a task. As such, the book shows that the task of critique will not only be a matter of revealing. It will also need to be unsettling.