Carceral domesticities: An introduction

Abstract

We write this introduction at a grave moment in 2023, in which Israel is engaging in what has been widely described as genocide in Gaza (OHCHR, 2023), justified in geopolitical discourse as retribution for a Hamas attack that took many civilian Israeli lives. Palestinians’ relationship with futurity is – as a rich scholarship has argued – one of rupture, and of temporal curtailment: the Nakba is, in this experience, continuous and ongoing (Abu Hatoum, 2021; El Shakry, 2021). For everyday life in Palestine, this means that the domestic is a site of perpetual anticipation – waiting for the next round of settler violence, which renders the home in the present unhomely (Griffiths and Joronen, 2021). Home, that is, becomes inextricable from the carceral condition of settler colonialism. The images that have emerged from Gaza’s present bombardment are instructive of the terms on which the domestic is a powerful site of resistance to settler colonial temporality. In the midst of genocide in Gaza, mothers teach children how to read by writing on the walls of buildings where they shelter. Young people fetch water from the sea as supplies are cut off. Fathers queue for bread, flour, and gas cannisters to sustain their families. Refusing elimination, that is, hinges here on the rituals of domesticity that act as signs of life in the barest of carceral conditions. Daily acts of making home rupture settler time, positing plausible indigenous futures beyond assimilation and elimination. In this special issue, we draw together the ways in which geographies of coloniality and anticolonial resistance undergird and knit together the domestic and the carceral. Geographies of home, and those