Table of Contents

Introduction: 'Buried in the red dirt': Historiography and history of missing Palestinian bodies; 1. 'We are far more advanced': The politics of ill and healthy babies in colonial Palestine; 2. 'Making the country pay for itself': Health, hunger, and midwives; 3. 'Children are the treasure and property of the nation': Demography, eugenics, and mothercraft; 4. 'Technically illegal': Birth control in religious, colonial and state legal traditions; 5. 'I did not want children': Birth control in discourse and practice; 6. 'The art of death in life': Palestinian futurism and reproduction after 1948; Bibliography.

Promotional Information

A vivid account of Palestinian life, death, and reproduction during and since the British colonial period in Palestine.

About the Author

Frances S. Hasso is a Professor in the Program in Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies, Department of History and Department of Sociology at Duke University. She is the author of Resistance, Repression, and Gender Politics in Occupied Palestine and Jordan (2005) and Consuming Desires: Family Crisis and the State in the Middle East (2011), and co-editor of Freedom without Permission: Bodies and Space in the Arab Revolutions (2016). She has been awarded multiple fellowships, including from the National Humanities Center, ACOR – the American Center of Research (Amman), the Rockefeller Foundation, the Palestinian American Research Center, and the Social Science Research Council/American Council of Learned Societies. She is an Editor Emerita of the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies.

Reviews

'In this highly original book filled with riveting detail and sophisticated theoretical engagement, Frances Hasso leads us down new paths, raising questions about missing bodies, gendered subjectivities, racial policies, and the nature of politics in Palestine. Drawing on unique oral histories of women who faced childbirth and loss, Buried in the Red Dirt shows how intimate stories of sexuality and reproduction are central to understanding the lived experience of the mandate period and after. Her ethnographic approach to archives brings a fresh sensibility, as she convincingly demonstrates that women's reproductive choices have been based on the futures envisioned or feared for their unborn offspring rather than on nationalist discourses.' Beth Baron, City University of New York

'Exploring the connections between race, reproduction and death in modern Palestine, Frances Hasso sheds new light on the relations between settler colonialism, politics of public health and hygiene, trauma, forced exile, race, migration, birth and death. Her analysis of who is encouraged to give birth and who is not in a colonial situation and of Zionist and Western anxieties around birth rates ends with an illuminating exploration of death and futurity in Palestinian literature and film. This book is indispensable for all those interested in anti-reproductive desire as resistance in settler-colonial situations.' Françoise Vergès, author of A Decolonial Feminism