The Psychology of Anti-Colonial Resistance: Praxis from the Flesh
Genocidal violence in Gaza, the colonized scattered and shredded body parts bring into focus the violent enmeshment of Palestinian ashlaa’/flesh within the geo-politics of psychology. The violent dismemberment of bodies testifies to state terror and its psychological warfare. By understanding how people of Gaza make sense of scenes of brutal dismemberment and death in their everyday lives, amidst a genocide, I offer an anticolonial resistance psychology and praxis from the flesh. My talk is a call to read the inscriptions of dismembered, wounded and dying flesh/body/land in their racial command. I will conclude by insisting that an anti-colonial resistance psychology invests in life and liveability against the permanence of otherness, in which racialized people are turned into the exploded, shattered, decomposed, unidentified no-bodies. It is a psychology that insists on re-assembling the wholeness of life, a psycho-political effort to rebuild new spaces of love in a struggle for a dignified humane life.
Prof. Nadera Shalhoub-Kervokian
Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is the Global Chair in Law – Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on trauma, violence, state crimes and criminology, surveillance, gender violence, law and society. As a resident of the old city of Jerusalem, Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a prominent local activist. She engages in direct actions and critical dialogue to end the inscription of power over Palestinian children’s lives, spaces of death, and women’s birthing bodies and lives.