Settler colonialism is about unchilding: Mazhar Ahmad Al Zo’by, Imed Ben Labidi, ‘”Unchilding’ Palestine: media representation and the limits of civilizational discourse’, Cultural Studies, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonialism is about unchilding: Mazhar Ahmad Al Zo’by, Imed Ben Labidi, ‘”Unchilding’ Palestine: media representation and the limits of civilizational discourse’, Cultural Studies, 2025

30Aug25

Abstract: Within the global neo-orientalist colonial imagination, contemporary Arab and Muslim societies provide crucial ideological representations for the constitutive otherness of western civilizational politics. So profoundly imbued are negative views of the oriental Arab societies that even their children are inadequate to meet basic standards for innate civilizational virtues to warrant human rights consideration. This article explores how besieged Palestinian children living under settler-colonialism have been portrayed and excluded from the Western Enlightenment discourse on children’s rights. Using discourse analysis to examine a variety of visual and textual media configurations and to identify their ideological sources, the article explains how Palestinian children have been constituted as an extension of their forefathers presumed pre-modern, backward oriental savage societies. Hence, to ‘unchild’ Palestinians by subjecting them to incarceration, starvation or death, even though undesirable, the article further argues, becomes necessary measures to contain the child’s contamination by the same cultural irrationality of his/her oriental parents.

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