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Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
November 2021
Print publication year:
2021
Online ISBN:
9781009072854
Creative Commons:
Creative Common License - CC Creative Common License - BY Creative Common License - NC Creative Common License - ND
This content is Open Access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/creativelicenses

Book description

Bringing together a vivid array of analog and non-traditional sources, including colonial archives, newspaper reports, literature, oral histories, and interviews, Buried in the Red Dirt tells a story of life, death, reproduction and missing bodies and experiences during and since the British colonial period in Palestine. Using transnational feminist reading practices of existing and new archives, the book moves beyond authorized frames of collective pain and heroism. Looking at their day-to-day lives, where Palestinians suffered most from poverty, illness, and high rates of infant and child mortality, Frances Hasso's book shows how ideologically and practically, racism and eugenics shaped British colonialism and Zionist settler-colonialism in Palestine in different ways, especially informing health policies. She examines Palestinian anti-reproductive desires and practices, before and after 1948, critically engaging with demographic scholarship that has seen Zionist commitments to Jewish reproduction projected onto Palestinians. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Awards

Winner, 2023 Interdisciplinary Studies Section Best Book Award, International Studies Association

Winner, 2023 ISA-IDSS Book Award, International Studies Association

Reviews

'In this highly original book filled with riveting detail and sophisticated theoretical engagement, Frances Hasso leads us down new paths, raising questions about missing bodies, gendered subjectivities, racial policies, and the nature of politics in Palestine. Drawing on unique oral histories of women who faced childbirth and loss, Buried in the Red Dirt shows how intimate stories of sexuality and reproduction are central to understanding the lived experience of the mandate period and after. Her ethnographic approach to archives brings a fresh sensibility, as she convincingly demonstrates that women’s reproductive choices have been based on the futures envisioned or feared for their unborn offspring rather than on nationalist discourses.’

Beth Baron - City University of New York

‘Exploring the connections between race, reproduction and death in modern Palestine, Frances Hasso sheds new light on the relations between settler colonialism, politics of public health and hygiene, trauma, forced exile, race, migration, birth and death. Her analysis of who is encouraged to give birth and who is not in a colonial situation and of Zionist and Western anxieties around birth rates ends with an illuminating exploration of death and futurity in Palestinian literature and film. This book is indispensable for all those interested in anti-reproductive desire as resistance in settler-colonial situations.’

Françoise Vergès - author of A Decolonial Feminism

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Contents

Full book PDF
  • Buried in the Red Dirt
    pp i-ii
  • Buried in the Red Dirt - Title page
    pp iii-iii
  • Race, Reproduction, and Death in Modern Palestine
  • Copyright page
    pp iv-iv
  • Dedication
    pp v-vi
  • Contents
    pp vii-vii
  • Figures
    pp viii-viii
  • Tables
    pp ix-ix
  • Acknowledgments
    pp x-xiv
  • Introduction
    pp 1-46
  • Historiography and History of Missing Palestinian Bodies
  • 1 - “We Are Far More Advanced”
    pp 47-77
  • The Politics of Ill and Healthy Babies in Colonial Palestine
  • 2 - “Making the Country Pay for Itself”
    pp 78-114
  • Health, Hunger, and Midwives
  • 3 - “Children Are the Treasure and Property of the Nation”
    pp 115-151
  • Demography, Eugenics, and Mothercraft
  • 4 - “Technically Illegal”
    pp 152-181
  • Birth Control in Religious, Colonial, and State Legal Traditions
  • 5 - “I Did Not Want Children”
    pp 182-209
  • Birth Control in Discourse and Practice
  • 6 - “The Art of Death in Life”
    pp 210-243
  • Palestinian Futurism and Reproduction after 1948
  • CODA: Life, Death, Regeneration
    pp 244-251
  • Bibliography
    pp 252-272
  • Index
    pp 273-288

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