“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. <i>The Time beneath the Concrete</i> 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 <i>about</i> Palestine but a work that <i>is</i> 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)
Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction. Camp/Colony: In the Open Time of Dispossession 1
1. The Camp, Inevitable: Technomorality and Racialization in the Prehistory of the Camp Regime 33
2. The Camp, Formalized: Authority and the Built in the Management of the Interim 63
3. The Camp, Overcome: Revolution and Movement in the Impossible Present 93
4. The Camp, Undone: Negation and Return in the Vanishing Horizon of Settler Permanence 126
Coda. The Politics of Inhabitation 164
Notes 183
References 207
Index 223