Buried in the Red Dirt Race, Reproduction, and Death in Modern Palestine

Bringing together a vivid array of analog and non-traditional sources, including colonial archives, newspaper reports, literature, oral histories, and interviews, Buried in the Red Dirt tells a story of life, death, reproduction and missing bodies and experiences during and since the British colonial period in Palestine. Using transnational feminist reading practices of existing and new archives, the book moves beyond authorized frames of collective pain and heroism. Looking at their day-to-day lives, where Palestinians suffered most from poverty, illness, and high rates of infant and child mortality, Frances Hasso's book shows how ideologically and practically, racism and eugenics shaped British colonialism and Zionist settler-colonialism in Palestine in different ways, especially informing health policies. She examines Palestinian anti-reproductive desires and practices, before and after 1948, critically engaging with demographic scholarship that has seen Zionist commitments to Jewish reproduction projected onto Palestinians. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

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.

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.