HOMInG’s seminar 47_20, next December 10 at 10am (CET), will be with Ariel Handel (Tel Aviv University). Ariel is the author, among other recent pieces, of What’s in a home? Toward a critical theory of housing/dwelling . 

See the abstract of his seminar presentation below. All welcome, upon registration (bernardo.armanni@unitn.it)

Between Homing And Ruination: Making And Unmaking Homes In The Occupied Palestinian Territories

Ariel Handel (Tel Aviv University)

Settler colonialism presents a specific type of relation between migration and home. As a voluntary mass migration, its purpose is not only to create a new home for the settlers but to do so while unmaking the colonized population’s existing homes. These are made by combining a discursive dimension (which sees inhabited territories as Terra Nullius) with a practical dimension (from the appropriation of vast areas for construction for the settlers, through the destruction of local inhabited houses to living inside forcefully abandoned natives’ homes). Thus, from the basic logic of the ‘elimination of the native’ (as famously put by Patrick Wolfe) to the complex configurations in which the settlers seek to ‘self-indigenize’ themselves, the home plays a key role both in the physical aspects of the struggle over space and in the symbolic and effective aspects of attachment. The lecture will deal with the Occupied Palestinian Territories as a distinct space of settler colonialism. Its purpose will be to show how homes are built, lived, demolished, and rebuilt in a situation of military occupation and settlement expansion. The analysis will consider the multiple facets of homes and their destruction: as a top-down manufactured object, an ideal representation of ontological security, and a site of everyday lives and complex social relations. Combining a theoretical discussion with empirical findings from ongoing research on ruins and ruination in Israel/Palestine, I will seek to show how the home is a political site of control but also of personal and collective resistance.

Photo: Daniel Monterescu and Ariel Handel, 2017