Abstract
The texts of Walid Daka, a Palestinian political prisoner incarcerated since 1986, challenge the notion that colonial power ends with decolonization and expose the shortcomings of examining colonial prisons solely through the eliminatory prism of death and deprivation. Studying Daka’s texts, the article presents how the Israeli carceral system has managed to utilize prisoners’ hopes and longings – in their relations with one another, their political actions such as hunger strikes or their building of internal leadership hierarchies, and their affective worlds – to further its own goals. Rather than a pessimistic account, this article critically analyzes Daka’s writings to demonstrate how a first-person study of carceral subjectification can unfold within an activist framework. Daka uses these observations to develop an alternative articulation of decolonization that I term ‘abolitionist decolonization’ as a collective and continued insistence on setting the terms of getting free. By ‘abolitionist decolonization,’ I conjure a difficult conversation between a Fanonian project of never-ending decolonization and a Foucauldian project of never-ending abolition. As such, this critical attitude aims to counter settler-colonial carcerality in ways that will foil the administration’s attempts to reproduce the dangers that the prisoners seek to elude, through the very means they deploy to elude them.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to give my thanks to the team at Contemporary Political Theory, in particular Jemima Repo, the editorial staff, and the two anonymous reviewers. Their comments and suggestions have improved this article immensely. I am indebted to Nancy Luxon, Joan Tronto, Bernard Harcourt, Robert Nichols, Bud Duvall, Heidi Grunebaum, Andrew Dilts, Elena Gambino, Garrett Johnson, Michal Givoni, and Noga Rotem for their valuable advice. I am especially grateful to Sana Salame Daka, As’ad Daka, and Anat Matar for their continued support. Most of all, I thank Walid Daka for allowing me the opportunity to engage his thought and for generously providing feedback on a previous draft. The support of the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) for the project ‘Torture as a Political Technology’ is gratefully acknowledged.
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Gortler, S. The sumud within: Walid Daka’s abolitionist decolonization. Contemp Polit Theory 21, 499–521 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-021-00537-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-021-00537-2