Cairo Papers Talk Series | Palestine: Confronting Genocide — Fragmented Wholeness: Ashlaa’ and the Theorization of Palestinian Overkill

In the face of the ongoing genocidal onslaught against Palestinians, Nadera Shalhoub of Princeton University centers ashlaa’—the dismembered body—as an analytic for theorizing Palestinian life, death, and resistance amidst genocide. Reading the settler-colonial project through the corpo-economy of the perpetually uncounted body—flesh smashed and scattered, sealed in plastic, decaying in shipping containers, delivered as nameless remains—reveals the colonizer’s imperative to destroy the wholeness of body, flesh, and land. The bloodied ashlaa’ thus becomes a critical lens for apprehending affective economies in a time of genocide, linking past and present, the living and the dead, the fragmented and the whole, and unsettling the settler-colonial ordering of history.

As both figure and condition, ashlaa’ registers the struggle for psycho-affective survival and the assertion of agency amid relentless assault. Centering ashlaa’ to examine its “overkillability” constitutes a refusal of ontological erasure and deprivation of wholeness, reclaiming the dismembered as a site of resistance to the Israeli state’s racial, geopolitical, and aesthetic investment in destruction. The ashlaa’ also exposes the complicity of global colonial and neoliberal economies in Palestinians’ dismemberment, disposability, and the routinization of death.
 

About the series: 
Palestine: Confronting Genocide
Cairo Papers in Social Science, The American University in Cairo

More than two years since the onset of the most recent genocide in Palestine, suffering, destruction, starvation and massive displacement have remained an everyday reality in Palestine. The vast numbers of the dead, the wounded and the missing continue to rise, along with the ruination of all aspects of living, from buildings, infrastructure, to food, water, health, educational and religious institutions. What does it mean to live and to witness a genocide? What does it mean to describe an everyday of genocide? How can the current genocide be situated in the global political cartography of power? Have previously recognized categories and paradigms, such as international law, humanitarian law, democratic rule, morality and ethical responsibility, among others, been emptied out of meaning? How do we read the current moment in the long durée of settler colonialism in Palestine, imperial desires and resistance? Is this genocidal moment unprecedented or an intensification of a long process of extermination and subjugation that has been unfolding for decades? How to understand what is happening in Palestine next to what is happening in Syria, in Sudan, in Yemen, in Libya, in Lebanon and Iraq, and so on? What have been new registers of resistance, as they have been unfolding throughout the years? How do the social sciences and humanities confront the possibilities and limits of knowledge in the face of the horrible and the unfathomable of genocide?

Make sure to catch our upcoming talks on the following dates:

• Saturday, November 15, 2025 | 7–9 PM – By: Mezna Qato

• Saturday, November 22, 2025 | 7–9 PM – By: Yasmeen Qadan

• Saturday, November 29, 2025 | 7–9 PM – By: Raef Zreik

• Saturday, December 6, 2025 | 7–9 PM – By: Sherene Seikaly