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.
Laliv Melamed is Assistant Professor of Film and Media at the University of Groningen.
"Sovereign Intimacy is a beautifully written and politically astute analysis of the project of Zionist memory making. Incisively demystifying the relations between affect and statecraft that work to sanitize settler-colonial violence, Laliv Melamed illuminates how media has always been social, even in its most private and anecdotal manifestations."—Jasbir K. Puar, author of The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability
"Sovereign Intimacy is a thrilling contribution: methodologically impressive, philosophically rich, and politically committed. Melamed sifts through familial and bureaucratic ephemera to build an impressive media history of the weaponization of love and loss as settler feelings. This is first-rate work, vividly written, with exquisite attention to the difficulty—and necessity—of doing decolonial research in and with Israeli media archives."—Pooja Rangan, author of Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary
"With both theoretical and empirical richness, Melamed's book navigates the ways that private media practices are entangled with technologies of state power in Israel, thereby sustaining militarism as an intimate structure of feeling. Sovereign Intimacy provides a powerful example of what media studies brings to the study of settler colonialism."—Rebecca L. Stein, author of Screen Shots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine
"In conversation with an impressive array of key texts and thinkers, Laliv Melamed radically recasts the notion of intimacy as a form of invasive statecraft. Through close readings of homemade memorial tapes for fallen IDF soldiers, an object generally overlooked by media scholars and cultural analysts, Melamed reveals the operations whereby the Israeli state seeps insidiously into the psyches of its Jewish-Israeli citizens. Sovereign Intimacy tracks the mechanisms by which the power of the state is rerouted through a very personal form of governmentality, one that almost eludes detection. At the same time the author resists succumbing to the sentimental demands of the objects under scrutiny, deftly identifying the collusion with the state and the military that these acts of mediated public mourning represent."—Alisa Lebow, creator of Filming Revolution
312 pp.6 x 9Illus: 26 b/w illustrations
9780520390294$34.95|£30.00Paper
Feb 2023