2025 Workshop
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian
Global South Visiting Scholar in the department of Anthropology at Princeton University
Ashlaa' and the Genocide in Gaza
Ashlaa’ live in the colonized, scattered, burned, and shredded body/flesh parts. They appear to have no place, “woven out of thousand details, anecdotes, stories’ (Fanon 1961, 111). They appear to be outside of identity and the international order (Agathangelou 2015). Yet ashlaa’ as a concept resonates with the term geocorpographies, coined by Joseph Pugliese (2007, 1), in that it “brings into focus the violent enmeshment of the flesh and blood of the body within the geopolitics of race, war and empire.”
Focusing on the Gazan insistence on speaking about ashlaa’ helps us apprehend how the violent dismemberment of bodies testifies to colonized life and love as they bear witness to state terror. In centering ashlaa’, I listen attentively to the words people use. I have collected social media images and narrations (Instagram, X/Twitter, Facebook), in a time of genocide, to engage a form of digital ethnography that helps me understand how people make sense of scenes of brutal dismemberment and death in their everyday lives amidst a genocide.
The ashlaa’ defy settler colonialism by reflecting back its racialized violence and the ossified structures and relations that accompany and foster it. The evidence of body parts and wounded flesh in the ongoing genocide in Gaza forces the question, “What is the political function of the colonized dead body?”
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is currently a Global South Visiting Scholar in the department of Anthropology at Princeton University. Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a Palestinian Jerusalemite feminist whose scholarship on the settler colonial state’s brutality, unchilding, securitized and sacralized politics, state crime, law and society, and global feminist politics, challenges epistemic violence. She is the author of numerous books, including Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear (Cambridge University Press 2015); “Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding” (Cambridge University Press 2019); and The Cunning of Gender Violence (Duke University Press 2023).