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Sewage’s Living-Dead Discourse in Necropolitical Palestine
Abstract
Examining the crisis that left residents of Gaza with less than six hours of electricity per day during the summer of 2017, this paper suggests that the sewage that flooded the Mediterranean Sea as a result of the power shortages is a discourse in itself. Utilizing rhetorical and cultural criticism of media, infrastructure, and political context surrounding the crisis, I argue that--by circumventing the contested, colonial borders that limit Gazans--sewage becomes a living dead discourse which revives and reconfigures various imaginations of the collective life of Palestine and Israel. Sewage and its attendant infrastructures at once evidence the Israeli state’s near-total management over Palestinian life and death while, at the same time, leaking out of rhetorical bounds in a way that cannot neatly be contained by blaming Palestinians for their suffering in the way that official Israeli communication on the crisis did. Wastewater’s sensory communication invokes the ambiguity of the distinction between life and death, as well as between animate and inanimate, in ways that draw attention to the hierarchies of the human that value certain lives over others.
Discipline
Communications
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
Cultural Studies