« Resisting multiple attacks: Kent G. Lightfoot, Peter A. Nelson, Michael A. Grone, Alec Apodaca, ‘Pathways to Persistence: Divergent Native engagements with sustained colonial permutations in North America’, in Lee M. Panich, Sara L. Gonzalez (eds), The Routledge Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous-Colonial Interaction in the Americas, Routledge, 2021
Whose apocalypse? A settler apocalypse! Natalie Koch, ‘Whose apocalypse? Biosphere 2 and the spectacle of settler science in the desert’, Geoforum, 124, 2021, 36-45 »

Settler colonialism’s scopic regime: Jakub Zahora, ‘Occupation, Sight, Landscape: Visibility and the Normalization of Israeli Settlements’, International Political Sociology, 2021

04Jun21

Abstract: This article contributes toward the understanding of social and political mechanisms that work to normalize and naturalize contested political conditions on the part of privileged segments of the public. I engage these issues via an ethnographic study of Israel’s so-called non-ideological settlements in the occupied West Bank, which attract Israelis due to socioeconomic advantages rather than a nationalistic and/or religious appeal. Nonetheless, the settlers’ suburban experiences are in stark contrast to the geopolitical status of their communities as well as the local and international resistance they generate. I draw empirically on interviews and observations conducted in the settlement of Ariel to make sense of this dynamic. Utilizing insights from critical investigations of visuality and landscape, I argue that the normalization of everyday life in the settlements is achieved through the operation of a particular scopic regime linked to the landscape formations in the West Bank. Employing these concepts to investigate the everyday politics of seeing, I show how they channel the settlers’ sight in a way that makes the Israeli rule seem uncontested, naturalized, and even aesthetic in three registers: the depth of visual field, the surroundings, and the people who inhabit the settlements’ landscape.


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