Abstract:
Dr. Hasso will provide an overview of her latest book, Buried in the Red Dirt, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022 and is available open access. She will also hold a conversation about the book with Dr. Nadim Bawalsa and audience members. The book tells a story about Palestinian life and death, and missing bodies and experiences, that exceed authorized frames of collective pain and heroism. It asks questions at scales less examined, mobilizes sources that include oral interviews, literature and film, and relies on interdisciplinary reading and analytical skills to tell a slantwise story about race, reproduction and death during and since the British colonial period in Palestine. British colonial authorities certainly imposed the most brutal direct violence they could get away with on Palestinian subjects when they rebelled, but in their day-to-day lives, Palestinians suffered most as a result of poverty, illness, and high levels of infant and child mortality resulting from colonial and imperial rule. The book shows how racism and eugenics shaped British colonialism and Zionist settler-colonialism in Palestine in different ways, informing health policies, investments, and discourses. Buried in the Red Dirt also takes seriously Palestinian anti-reproductive desires and practices, before and after 1948, including abortion, and critically engages with demographic scholarship on Palestine.
More about author Dr. Frances Hasso:
Frances S. Hasso is Professor in the Program in Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University. She holds secondary appointments in the Department of Sociology and the Department of History. She was a 2018-2019 Fellow at the National Humanities Center. She is an Editor Emerita of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (2015-2018). Her scholarship focuses on gender and sexuality in the Arab world.
More about discussant Dr. Nadim Bawalsa:
Nadim Bawalsa is a historian of modern Palestine and author of Transnational Palestine: Migration and the Right of Return before 1948 (Stanford University Press, 2022). His other work has appeared in the Jerusalem Quarterly, the Journal of Palestine Studies, NACLA Report on the Americas, and as well as in two edited volumes. He earned a joint doctorate in History and Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies from New York University in 2017, and a Master’s in Arab Studies from Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies in 2010. Currently, he is the commissioning editor at Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network.