'Race and the Question of Palestine' Book Cover

Race and the Question of Palestine

Edited by Lana Tatour and Ronit Lentin
Hardcover ISBN: 9781503642133
Paperback ISBN: 9781503642973

This book develops from the position that the colonization of Palestine—like other imperial and settler colonial projects—cannot be understood outside the grammar of race. Race and the Question of Palestine explores how race operates as a technology of power and colonial rule, a political and economic structure, a set of legal and discursive practices, and a classificatory system.

Offering a wide-ranging set of essays by historians, legal scholars, political scientists, sociologists, literary scholars, and race critical theorists, this collection illuminates how race should be understood in terms of its political work, and not as an identity category interchangeable with ethnicity, culture, or nationalism. Essays build on a long-standing tradition of theorizing race in Palestine studies and speak to four interconnected themes—the politics of racialization and regimes of race, racism and antiracism, race and capital accumulation, and Black–Palestinian solidarity. These engagements challenge the exceptionalism of the Palestinian case, and stress the importance of locating Palestine within global histories and present politics of imperialism, settler colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy.

Contributors: Yasmeen Abu-Laban, Seraj Assi, Abigail B. Bakan, Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, Yinon Cohen, Noura Erakat, Michael R. Fischbach, Neve Gordon, Alana Lentin, David Palumbo-Liu, John Reynolds, Kieron Turner

"This profound, empirically grounded, insightful volume breaks fresh ground on Palestine as a site to make, learn from, and dismantle racial logics. Centering Palestine and expanding global history, this masterful road map both addresses the urgencies of the moment and will become a canonical anchor on race and the question of Palestine."
—Sherene Seikaly, University of California, Santa Barbara

"The claim that the Zionist project always was and remains a racial regime has long been politically fraught, the heuristic of 'race' dismissed as a political polemic rather than a much-needed analytic category. This book puts such arguments to bed once and for all. A timely and unique intervention."
—Nadia Abu El-Haj, Columbia University

Lana Tatour is a Senior Lecturer in Global Development at the University of New South Wales. Ronit Lentin is Associate Professor of Sociology (retired) at Trinity College Dublin.