Sovereign Intimacy : Private Media and the Traces of Colonial Violence

In the early 1990s, Israeli television began dedicating Memorial Day airtime to videos produced by the grieving families of soldiers killed in the line of duty. When these videos first appeared, during a period of growing Israeli discontent with the occupation of southern Lebanon, they were widely perceived as a challenge to the state, reclaiming the dead from Israel’s militaristic memory culture by resituating them in intimate domestic contexts via mediated commemorations. By tracing an emerging media system of freelance filmmaking, privatized television, state institutes of care, and grassroots campaigns, Laliv Melamed reveals how these videos nevertheless avoid a fundamental critique of Israeli militarism, which is instead invited into the familiar space of the home. These intimate connections of 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 __Sovereign Intimacy__, Melamed offers a poignant and critical view of the weaponization of home media and mourning in service of the neoliberal settler state. "Sovereign Intimacy investigates the relationship between the settler-colonial state and its citizens through the intimating work of media and memory. Using Israel-Palestine as a case study, it tracks how personal family commemoration was channeled and shaped by an emerging private media complex--family videos, freelance filmmaking, grassroots campaigns, and privatized television--enabling a disavowal of the state project of colonial violence through mundane and affective kinship. To the sovereign constitutive rights--the right to life, the right to kill--the book adds another right: the right to love, a right for private life, in the name of which other lives are denied"-- Provided by publisher Contents Prologue. “OUR SONS” A Note on Sources Acknowledgments Introduction Part One. Sovereignty Part Two. Intimacy Epilogue. Answering a Call Notes Filmography Bibliography Index