Sovereign Intimacy: Private Media and the Traces of Colonial Violence

Israeli television dedicated Memorial Day airtime to videos produced by grieving families of soldiers killed in the line of duty, challenging the state's militaristic memory culture. However, these videos avoid a fundamental critique of Israeli militarism and exploit bonds of kinship and reshape larger relationships between the state and its citizens, enabling a collective disavowal of colonial violence.

Format: Hardback
Length: 312 pages
Publication date: 28 February 2023
Publisher: University of California Press

In the early 1990s, Israeli television took a significant step by dedicating airtime during Memorial Day to videos produced by the grieving families of soldiers who had fallen in the line of duty. These videos emerged at a time when Israeli society was increasingly dissatisfied with the occupation of southern Lebanon, and they were perceived as a direct challenge to the state's militaristic memory culture. By shifting the focus of remembrance from the military sphere to intimate domestic contexts, these videos sought to reclaim the dead from Israel's militaristic narrative and place them within the realm of personal and familial grief.

To explore this phenomenon, Laliv Melamed delves into an emerging media system that includes freelance filmmaking, privatized television, state institutes of care, and grassroots campaigns. Through her analysis, Melamed reveals how these videos manage to avoid a fundamental critique of Israeli militarism, instead inviting it into the familiar space of the home. These intimate connections between memory and media exploit bonds of kinship and reshape larger relationships between the state and its citizens, enabling a collective disavowal of colonial violence.

In her book, Sovereign Intimacy, Melamed offers a poignant and critical perspective on the weaponization of home media and mourning in service of the neoliberal settler state. She explores how the emotional dynamics of mourning are harnessed to reinforce the settler-colonial project and normalize the occupation of Palestinian territories. Melamed's work sheds light on the ways in which the state and media manipulate public sentiment and shape collective memory, ultimately contributing to the ongoing injustice and violence in the region.

Through her meticulous research and thoughtful analysis, Melamed provides a valuable contribution to the study of media, memory, and the politics of violence. Sovereign Intimacy offers a powerful indictment of the ways in which the state and media perpetuate colonialism and undermine the possibility of a just and peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Weight: 590g
Dimension: 229 x 152 x 23 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780520390287