Temporalities of 'Return': Race, Representation and Decolonial Imaginings of Palestinian Refugee Life

dc.contributor.advisorMurdocca, Carmela
dc.creatorVadasaria, Shaira
dc.date.accessioned2018-08-27T16:41:32Z
dc.date.available2018-08-27T16:41:32Z
dc.date.copyright2018-05-04
dc.date.issued2018-08-27
dc.date.updated2018-08-27T16:41:32Z
dc.degree.disciplineSociology
dc.degree.levelDoctoral
dc.degree.namePhD - Doctor of Philosophy
dc.description.abstractThis dissertation examines the representational life of return and asks: how has Israeli settler-colonialism and international rights discourse come to bear on political imaginings of return for third-generation Palestinian refugees residing in the occupied West Bank? Examining this question as a genealogical inquiry, I consider what legal and aesthetic imaginings of return tell us about the historical and on-going project of race in Palestine/Israel as it coalesces under settler-colonialism, law and protracted humanitarianism. I begin by tracing the work of race across modern political Zionist thought, appeals to Israeli nationhood and the expulsion policies used to evict Palestinians during early Israeli settlement. Next, I develop a legal history of the right of return as a land-based reparative justice imperative and consider how it became instituted through a system of protracted humanitarian governance. In so doing, I delineate the racial grammar and juridical grounds through which Palestinian personhood came to be constituted and made legible under international governance and against settler-colonial orderings of expulsion. Against this context, chapters four and five attend to some of the ways that third-generation Palestinian refugees negotiate claims to return through decolonizing cultural production. Methodologically, I draw from six-months of research in the Southern West Bank region where I worked closely with two experimental social action projects: DAAR (Decolonizing Architectural Art Residency) and Campus in Camps. I examine their architectural and story-based imaginings of return as a history of the present but also consider what these imaginings suggest about return in its afterlife. I analyze this using a range of materials including open-ended interviews with Palestinian refugees and participants in the collectives, visual, media and narrative texts, and public speeches and published works by the collectives involved. Theoretically, I draw from theories of race, settler-colonialism, affect and psychoanalysis to analyze these texts and rely on theories of representation, genealogy and discourse analysis to interpret the material. Through this work, I treat representations of return as both a racial index of Palestinian refugee subjectivity formed across settler-colonial expulsion, legal redress and humanitarian governance and a methodological directive for thinking about ontological claims to Palestinian futurity.
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10315/35014
dc.language.isoen
dc.rightsAuthor owns copyright, except where explicitly noted. Please contact the author directly with licensing requests.
dc.subjectLaw
dc.subject.keywordsPalestine
dc.subject.keywordsIsrael
dc.subject.keywordsRace
dc.subject.keywordsRepresentation
dc.subject.keywordsReturn
dc.subject.keywordsDecolonialism
dc.subject.keywordsAesthetics
dc.subject.keywordsCultural Production
dc.titleTemporalities of 'Return': Race, Representation and Decolonial Imaginings of Palestinian Refugee Life
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation

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