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 S. 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.

Friday, October 8, at 1 pm: Frances Hasso will discuss her Buried in the Red Dirt: Race, Reproduction, and Death in Modern Palestine with Jennifer Johnson

Frances Hasso is a Professor in the Program in Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University with secondary appointments in the Department of History and Department of Sociology. She was an Editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies(2015-2018). Her scholarship includes the books: Freedom without Permission: Bodies and Space in the Arab Revolutions, co-authored with Zakia Salime (Duke University Press, 2016); Consuming Desires: Family Crisis and the State in the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2011); and Resistance, Repression and Gender Politics in Occupied Palestine and Jordan (Syracuse University Press, 2005).

Jennifer Johnson is a historian of Africa, and a specialitist in twentieth-century North Africa at Brown University. Her research explores questions of nationalism, decolonization, human rights, medicine, and international organizations.

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