Book Review: The Colonizing Self: Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine, by Hagar Kotef

• Published date: 01 April 2022
• Date: 01 April 2022
• DOI: 10.1177/00905917211031523
• Author: Derek S. Denman
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Book Reviews 367

Exchanges normatively exclude force, and so liberals can reply that, insofar

as the history of conquest has given rise to concentrations of economic power,

these should be attenuated by means of more exchange and more trade.

Finally, constitution is not exhaustion. Even if liberals were to grant that

commerce is constituted by dispossession, they can still fall back on their

consequentialist argument that free exchange fosters the division of labor, the

improvement of the technology of production, and the rising standard of

living that is to the benefit of all—including the dispossessed.

For all these reasons, I think that Ince’s focus on colonial capitalism does

far more to illuminate the thought of Locke, Burke, and Wakefield—“the

ideologues of the new order” (163)—than it does to diagnose an internal

limit or contradiction at the heart of liberalism as such. The most significant

contribution of Ince’s book is its appreciation of the precise ways liberalism

has functioned and can function as an ideology of the powerful. Liberalism’s

multiple commitments, as Ince shows, allow it to be deployed in defense of

predation, expropriation, and especially “civilizing” missions, abroad and

at home. This warning is more valuable than another critique of liberalism

as such.

The Colonizing Self: Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine, by Hagar Kotef.

Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020, 320 pp.

Reviewed by: Derek S. Denman, Department of Political Science, University of

Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

DOI: 10.1177/00905917211031523

The Colonizing Self is an incisive book about the dispossessor. In lyrical

prose and through wide-ranging source material, Hagar Kotef traces the con-

stitutive violence of settler colonialism. In doing so, Kotef reveals the con-

tours of making a self through attachments to land acquired by force, theft,

and founding acts of displacement. What knots are tied at the center of ethics

by claiming a home through colonization, by building political life on occu-

pied territory, and by cultivating belonging through elimination? In answer-

ing these questions, Kotef reveals how the identity of the settler may prove

disturbingly obdurate and infuriatingly durable. When the violence of dis-

placement provides the formative condition of political subjectivity, the work

of decolonization requires both material and affective transformation. Kotef’s

book alerts us to the task of uprooting desires that secure settler colonialism.

Home is the keyword of the book and the concept that defines the relation

between political violence and belonging. While attuned to the diverse