The Time beneath the Concrete: Palestine between Camp and Colony

The Time beneath the Concrete: Palestine between Camp and Colony

In The Time beneath the Concrete , Nasser Abourahme argues that settler colonialism is always as much an attempt to conquer time as it is to conquer land. Taking as his primary object  Palestinian refugee camps, created in the fallout of the eliminatory violence of Israel’s founding, Abourahme shows how these camps become the primary place where settler colonial attempts to dominate space and time encounter Indigenous refusal. Seen from the camps, Israel becomes a settler colonial project defined by its inability to move past the past—a project stuck at its foundational moment of conquest. At the same time, the Palestinian insistence on return is a refusal to abide by the closure of the past into settler futurity. Palestinian struggle does not just happen in the open time of dispossession; it happens over this time. That struggle, Abourahme demonstrates, is a form of anticolonial refusal that draws its power not from any decisive finality, but precisely from irresolution and keeping time open. “Nasser Abourahme’s brilliant and unique study provides a vital political grammar to understand the making of Palestinian refugee camps and to contend with the most pressing aspects of dispossession and displacement in contemporary capitalism’s racial colonial order. In this thematically wide-ranging and impeccably researched book, Abourahme urges us to think beyond the sovereign and propertied logics of the plot, border, and settlement, and instead to consider a politics of ‘inhabitation’ as a counterpolitical force—so evident in Palestinians’ cultures of resistance—and as a concept and praxis for the global dispossessed.”― Brenna Bhandar, author of , Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership “It is rare to read a book that is so commanding, politically urgent, theoretically precise, and historically rich. The Time beneath the Concrete is historic in that nothing like it on the topic has been written. It is also conscious of its own historical time. The book is not only about Palestine but a work that is the Question of Palestine. For scholars of Palestine and the global condition, settler colonialism and anticolonialism, geography and political theory, this is a pathbreaking, timely, much-needed contribution.”― Samera Esmeir, author of , Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History Nasser Abourahme is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at Bowdoin College.