2022 C.B. Macpherson Prize

Winner: Hagar Kotef

The Colonizing Self: Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine (Duke University Press, 2020)

Excerpt from jury report: A beautifully written book, Hagar Kotef’s The Colonizing Self: Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine is a courageous, thoughtful, and well researched examination of settler colonialism. Its analysis of home as a violent mechanism of dispossession and destruction deployed in processes of possession, construction, and domination is not only compelling but deeply moving. Home – or homelessness – plays a defining role in our existence as human beings and, tapping into this universality, Dr. Kotef skillfully surfaces the violence that is destructive as it becomes generative of this particular claim to property in colonial contexts. Profoundly provocative but carefully nuanced and substantiated, the arguments in The Colonizing Self will have far-reaching theoretical and political implications for generations to come.