Sovereign Intimacy

Private Media and the Traces of Colonial Violence

Laliv Melamed

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• ISBN:
  9780520390317
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In the early 1990s, Israeli television began dedicating Memorial Day airtime to videos produced by the grieving families of soldiers killed in the line of duty. When these videos first appeared, during a period of growing Israeli discontent with the occupation of southern Lebanon, they were widely perceived as a challenge to the state, reclaiming the dead from Israel's militaristic memory culture by resituating them in intimate domestic contexts via mediated commemorations. By tracing an emerging media system of freelance filmmaking, privatized television, state institutes of care, and grassroots campaigns, Laliv Melamed reveals how these videos nevertheless avoid a fundamental critique of Israeli militarism, which is instead invited into the familiar space of the home. These intimate connections of memory and media exploit bonds of kinship and reshape larger relationships between the state and its citizens, enabling a collective disavowal of colonial violence. In Sovereign Intimacy, Melamed offers a poignant and critical view of the weaponization of home media and mourning in service of the neoliberal settler state.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue. “Our Sons
• A Note on Sources
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One. Sovereignty
• Part Two. Intimacy
• Epilogue. Answering a Call
• Notes
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index