Considering liberation beyond statehood (deferred)

Abstract

Complicating linear narratives of liberation, the Gaza Strip under Hamas rule, Somdeep Sen argues in Decolonizing Palestine, constitutes a microcosm of the Palestinian ‘long moment of liberation’ with Hamas assuming the dual role of an anticolonial force and postcolonial government. It is in this mix of the colonial and putatively postcolonial that this book treads. In so doing, Sen offers an important accounting of the messy temporalities of liberation that work against the grain of linear time. In this review, I think alongside Sen’s important provocation that we unbracket liberation from a unitary or single event to consider instead the punctuated, overlapping, and decisively non-linear temporalities that constitute decolonization. Equally, this review asks what dangers might inhere in tethering liberation to a governing authority? Bringing Sen’s work into conversation with contemporary Palestinian politics, movements, and revolutionary moments that cannot be contained within Hamas, this review asks how we might think with Sen about decolonisation as temporally unbounded but also as constituting heterogenous visions, forces, actors and practices that extend beyond formal structures and institutions. What might we gain, it asks, if we expand Sen’s invaluable ‘long moment of liberation’ to include this panoply of forces, visions, and instantiations of decoloniality in practice? It is here, in bridging the messy temporalities of liberation with the heterogenous forces and myriad of ways that Palestine’s decolonial futures are actively being made beyond formal parties and structures, that Sen’s thesis, it suggests, finds its liberatory potential.