MESA Book Awards
Hagar Kotef
SOAS, University of London
2021 Fatema Mernissi Book Award Honorable Mention
Hagar Kotef
The Colonizing Self: Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine
Duke University Press
Kotef’s brutally challenging intervention in the study of Israel/Palestine offers a gripping application of ideas from the intimate sphere—home, settlement, desire—to the problems of settler colonialism. She draws together startlingly eclectic source material, both in ethnography and in theory. The author’s vivid personal voice universalizes certain dilemmas of the Israeli settler and demands that the non-Israeli reader account for his or her own positionality, dissolving a pretense of detached observation that readers might not even know they hold. It is difficult to imagine anyone reading this book and being unchanged by the experience.