The Time beneath the Concrete

Palestine between Camp and Colony

Nasser Abourahme

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781478031444, 9781478028239
• eBook ISBN: 9781478060512
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism

In The Time beneath the Concrete, Nasser Abourahme argues that settler colonialism is always as much an attempt to conquer time as it is to conquer land. Taking as his primary object  Palestinian refugee camps, created in the fallout of the eliminatory violence of Israel's founding, Abourahme shows how these camps become the primary place where settler colonial attempts to dominate space and time encounter Indigenous refusal. Seen from the camps, Israel becomes a settler colonial project defined by its inability to move past the past—a project stuck at its foundational moment of conquest. At the same time, the Palestinian insistence on return is a refusal to abide by the closure of the past into settler futurity. Palestinian struggle does not just happen in the open time of dispossession; it happens over this time. That struggle, Abourahme demonstrates, is a form of anticolonial refusal that draws its power not from any decisive finality, but precisely from irresolution and keeping time open.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Camp / Colony: In the Open Time of Dispossession
• 1. The Camp, Inevitable: Technomorality and Racialization in the Prehistory of the Camp Regime
• 2. The Camp, Formalized: Authority and the Built in the Management of the Interim
• 3. The Camp, Overcome: Revolution and Movement in the Impossible Present
• 4. The Camp, Undone: Negation and Return in the Vanishing Horizon of Settler Permanence
• Coda. The Politics of Inhabitation
• Notes
• References
• Index