19 January 2022

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, and 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, Frances Hasso 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, 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 available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

About the speaker:

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.